Every empire of money eventually meets the people who will inherit it, and the meeting usually happens before anyone is ready. In venture capital it is happening now. The generation demographers call Alpha was born between 2010 and 2024. Its oldest members are 16, which is the age at which Stripe’s John Collison cofounded his first company and Mike Kittredge set the stage for what became Yankee Candle. They cannot vote. They are already pitching.

Many investors have already sat across from them; the rest soon will. Henry Chandonnet of Business Insider asked five venture capitalists what they would say to these founders, and the answers say as much about the investors as about the children.

“What I’ve noticed about Gen Alpha is they seem to have a ton of hustle,” said Sarah Catanzaro, a general partner at Amplify. “They tend to have an advantage in markets where execution may be more important than experience.”

The oracle for twenty dollars

Consider the chronology. When ChatGPT arrived in 2022, the oldest of this generation were 12. They have had artificial intelligence since middle school, some of them earlier. They have used it to write essays and to cheat on tests. They have also used it to build things.

Catanzaro is uneasy. She has watched the same pattern in Gen Z, who grew up with the internet and could look up an answer instead of thinking a problem through. “I worry a little bit about that type of cognitive offloading for Gen Alpha,” she said. Nobody yet knows how, or whether, AI will change the way people think, though researchers who studied people solving math equations and writing essays told Business Insider they had seen alarming patterns.

Yet Catanzaro allows the opposite possibility: that a generation raised alongside these tools may handle them better than anyone. Jake Jolis, a partner at Zano’s namesake firm Zeno, agrees. The barriers to entry, he argues, have never been lower, and these founders will know how to get over them.

“You don’t have to raise a trillion dollars to build your own superintelligence. You can rent it for 20 bucks a month.”

There is an irony here worth sitting with, offered as reflection rather than reporting. The same industry that now pours its capital into a handful of giant laboratories, leaving ordinary startups to ask friends and family for money, tells its youngest supplicants that the fruit of all that spending can be had for the price of a pizza. The kingdom is expensive to build. Its subjects lease it by the month.

The question of the diploma

Jolis knows the temptation of leaving school, because he gave in to it. Before he became an investor he dropped out of Stanford to found his first company, having built the product while still a student. That, he says, is the right reason for a young founder to skip higher education: a clear plan and some customers. Short of that, he believes graduates end up happier. “I would encourage people to think of their life as a whole, more than just this particular startup,” he said.

His caution runs against a current in Silicon Valley. Andreessen Horowitz has backed an alternative to college. Palantir launched a fellowship for high school graduates in April 2025 with ads urging applicants to “skip the debt” and the “indoctrination” of campus life; its first class, Fortune reported, was 22 fellows picked from more than 500 applicants.

Mo Shaikh, cofounder of Maximum Frequency Ventures, listened to Gen Alpha pitches at the Alpha School, an AI-focused network of schools. Founded in 2014 by MacKenzie Price and Joe Liemandt, it compresses core academics into roughly two hours a day of adaptive software, with adults acting as guides rather than teachers, a model that has drawn both enthusiasm and scrutiny. Shaikh left impressed. “Some of these kids have six-figure businesses already,” he said.

And still he defends the degree, particularly one from a place like Stanford. College, in his word, is for “cross-pollination”: founders meet people who see the world differently and can later recognise those views in their customers.

So the pattern holds. The dropout counsels patience. The investor who admires the teenage millionaires recommends the old university. Those who reached the top by the side door are careful, when asked directly, not to tell the young to tear down the front one.

Followers are not a product

How, then, should a 16-year-old begin? Shaikh’s answer is simple: go online. Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat are where investors are “looking for signals,” he said, and these are the platforms this generation grew up inside.

Kristina Simmons, founder of Overwater Ventures, has watched influencers turn into founders and finds the phenomenon interesting; such founders may understand their audience in ways others cannot. But she adds a warning. “It’s not just having followers,” she said. “They’ll come.”

Claire Zau, a partner at Lightspeed, goes further. For young founders, she said, fame on social media can become a “trap.” Fifteen-year-olds chase clout and sometimes neglect the plain mechanics of building something. They came of age watching smash successes such as MrBeast and Alix Earle, and Zau thinks those careers do hold a lesson for them, only not the obvious one.

“The lesson there is not necessarily the ‘get famous’ part,” Zau said. “It’s that there’s so much importance in obsessing over product.”