People in their thirties and forties, "the old folks of the middle generation," wake up! Please get used to reporting work to the post-00 generation.

In the era of AI and Web3, many young post-00s are rapidly rising, creating multi-billion dollar companies and subverting traditional workplace ethics, and middle-aged people must get used to reporting the new normal of work to the younger generation. (Synopsis: Taiwan's big brother Lin Zhichen "born as a Taiwanese, died as a Taiwanese ghost" shocked NTU graduates: young people look for the destiny of heaven) (Background supplement: young people use ChatGPT as a life strategy!) OpenAI CEO Sam Altman: Over 35 years old can't keep up at all In the AI era, post-00s will be the protagonist. What were you doing in your early twenties? Do you study hard in the library, or stay up late in the lab to catch up with reports? Is it to change your resume in a coffee shop and look forward to an internship in a big factory, or is it urged by your parents to apply for public office and pursue a "stable" life? In the eyes of most people, twenty-year-olds should be humble, confused, listen to experience and arrangements, and get used to bowing to 40-year-olds. But at the other end, some post-00s are rewriting the script: someone dropped out of school in the dormitory to start a business, and the company was valued at $2 billion in two years; Someone built the world's largest Meme distribution platform, with a valuation of $4 billion and more than $700 million in revenue; Someone just graduated and became the head of marketing at a top exchange. They did not survive the "ten years of miscellaneous", but walked directly to the center of the stage when they were at their youngest. This is not an accident of genius, AI and Web3 are reshaping young people's relationship with power, wealth, and voice. In the old order, seniority was the moat and age was the threshold, but in the new world, these are rapidly failing. The wave of technology is once again giving young people the opportunity to wait without waiting. AI and Crypto changed their lives, which belongs to the golden age of the 00s. Brendan Foody, the 2 billion unicorn born in the dorm, is 21 years old, but he no longer worries about finding an internship. AI recruitment firm Mercor is valued at $2 billion in two years, with clients including OpenAI, Anthropic and Founders Fund, and annual revenue of $75 million. And Foody is the CEO of this company. In 2021, while most sophomores were still struggling with professional courses, three 19-year-olds, Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath and Surya Midha, were orchestrating a "revolution" in their dorm rooms at Harvard and Georgetown. Their acquaintance was quite dramatic, meeting on a high school debate team, and the trio teamed up to compete in the U.S. Policy Debate Tournament and won the championship. Coincidentally, they were debating injustices in the job market, particularly employment discrimination in developing countries. Perhaps by fate, this debate became a source of inspiration for their future entrepreneurship. Initially, they wanted to do a small side hustle to quickly learn how to develop software and then help startups, but when hiring remote programmers in India, they saw a huge opportunity: the global distribution of talent was very uneven, and there were huge arbitrage opportunities. For example, places like India have a lot of good, low-paying but buried tech talent, while Silicon Valley talent is concentrated but competitive and expensive. They quickly realized that what really matters to startups is people, not software. At the same time, ChatGPT came out, and a new idea began to emerge: simulating senior interviewers with large language models, automatically assessing talent, and helping employers find the best talent across geographical barriers. In 2023, all three dropped out at the same time, and Mercor was officially founded. In the early days, they were simple recruitment agents, manually connecting AI startups with Indian remote engineers, but within a few months they generated $1 million in revenue and $80,000 in profit. It wasn't long before Mercor evolved into a full-fledged, AI-powered recruitment service. After candidates upload their resumes, they are asked to conduct a 20-minute video interview with an AI system that creates a profile and automatically matches them to suitable positions. Companies simply submit job descriptions and AI can recommend the best candidates. In 2024, all three founders were selected for the Thiel Fellowship, a funding program set up by legendary Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel specifically for young people who dropped out of school to start a business, and they also became the first entrepreneurial team in history to be selected collectively, not only providing them with financial support, but more importantly, opening the door to Silicon Valley's top investment circle. The next financing journey was like riding a rocket. September 2023, $3.6 million seed round; At the beginning of 2024, $32 million Series A with a valuation of $250 million; In February 2025, a $100 million Series B with a valuation of $2 billion has increased by 8 times in less than two years. What's even more shocking is that in order to grab Mercor's Series A investment, the top venture capital Benchmark even sent a special plane to transport the three founders to participate in the negotiations. This kind of "superstar"-like treatment is almost unimaginable in traditional industries. Today, Mercor has $75 million in annual revenue, with a monthly growth rate of 51%. The world's top AI labs, including OpenAI, are their customers. Three youngsters, with an average age of 21, became the youngest members of the billion-dollar club. Mercor also has a unique entrepreneurial culture, recruiting talented dropouts of the same age, with an average employee age of only 22, creating a young, motivated team. Brendan believes that the threshold for starting a business is much lower than before, and more and more young people are no longer wasting time completing college step by step, but are directly engaged in innovative practice. Mercor's dorm startup story is just the tip of the iceberg of post-00s AI entrepreneurship. Jessica Wu, a 22-year-old Chinese girl, dropped out of MIT to start Sola Solutions, an AI agency, with a cumulative $21 million investment, including a16z; Born in 2002, Dang Jiacheng dropped out of Berkeley sophomore year to found FlowGPT, creating the world's largest AI prompt community, attracting more than 4 million monthly active users; Born in 2000, Eric Steinberger began AI research at the age of 14, collaborated with Meta researchers in high school, and later founded Magic.dev and received $465 million in financing at a valuation of $1.5 billion; There is also Dr. Hong Letong, a post-00 Stanford doctor who focuses on "AI mathematics + quantitative finance", and the company is estimated to be estimated at 300-500 million US dollars before the product; and Chi Guangyao, who has switched from a liberal arts student to an AI Agent enterprise service, with an annual revenue of nearly 10 million, and its customers include large enterprises such as China Aerospace Science and Technology Group. A clear picture is sketched: in the era of AI, the post-00s will be the protagonists. 21 years old to build a $4 billion market cap crypto platform If Mercor's success is a "serious narrative" trained by the system, then the rise of pump.fun is more like a wild experiment directed by a group of post-00s. Noah Twee...