At 21, Jai Bhatia has never had a full-time job at a tech company. But he’s building one.
Founding a business someday was long in the computer-science major’s sights—he purposely sought out internships at startups to learn the entrepreneurial ropes. A cloudy future for his field, though, helped speed up his plans.
Shaw says it cost roughly $7,000 to get Shaw’s Coffee Cart off the ground and he has about six rotating staff to cater weddings, conferences and other events. Within eight months, the cart generated more than $100,000 in revenue, though he has poured much of that back into operating costs. This spring, Katherine Mead, 28, launched Planning Partner, a platform that lets teachers customize AI-generated classroom materials, after leaving her role as a data and analytics consultant at an IT-services firm. All told, she said she has spent about $9,000 getting the platform off the ground, including $1,600 for AI tools.
Until then, he had run it as a side hustle while building apps for a payment-software company. She had agents do market research and much of the coding. AI also helped her figure out how to establish a limited liability company. That, plus getting on her fiancé’s health-insurance plan and working from her home, has kept costs down. “It feels a lot more empowering to be in control of your own employment and destiny. Write to Ray A. Smith at [email protected] and Lindsay Ellis at [email protected]
“It’s maybe even a healthy pressure, like well, what’s my thing?” said Justus Shaw, 25, who started his own coffee-cart catering business last year. “The business has to make a lot more money for me to still walk away with some money,” said Shaw, who had made about $60,000 a year in his corporate job. Mead said she would never say never to another corporate job but loves the autonomy and income potential of entrepreneurship. “I think a lot of people my age feel like they are waiting for some conglomerate somewhere to potentially pick them for a layoff,” she said.
Entrepreneurism is booming these days in America, and no demographic is starting businesses at a faster rate than 20-somethings. At least 23% of Americans between 18 and 34 were running their own businesses or side hustle last year, up from 19% in 2021, according to Babson College, which runs a yearly survey on entrepreneurial activity. Among those from ages 18 to 24, that rate has more than doubled from a decade ago. In a separate survey of more than 1,000 people who started businesses in 2025, more than 70% of Gen Z entrepreneurs said they used AI to create their businesses. Bhatia and Turnstone co-founder Aryan Vij, 24, said they had job offers but decided to turn them down a month before graduation and go all in on the app they were building. they successfully pitched and received $500,000 from the startup accelerator Y Combinator While studying for finals. There were about 8,625 first-time financing deals in the U.S. through the third quarter, already surpassing the 2021 full-year record of 8,507, according to a PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor report. Sheena Jindal, managing partner and founder of Sugar Free Capital, said she has seen situations in which it is easier to raise $2 million than get an entry-level job. Hugo Stack, 27, searched unsuccessfully for an entry-level job in finance and professional services before enrolling in law school in September 2025.
“I want to be myself. AI is disproportionately shaking up the entry-level jobs many of them once saw as solid career launchpads. At the same time, younger workers have been especially adept at deploying the technology to get enterprises off the ground. The startup now employs two engineers and a staffer for marketing, and they work out of the living room of Bhatia and Vij’s San Francisco two-bedroom apartment. A surge of venture capital flowing into new businesses is helping Gen Z founders raise money. Now, he is taking a leave of absence to build a financial startup called Mecone aimed at bringing perpetual futures trading to a wider investor base. The company recently completed an accelerator program through Andreessen Horowitz. Besides fundraising and building the product, Stack has been figuring out the basics of running a business on the fly. One of his two full-time employees recently asked him whether he could expense gas or business meals. He wasn’t exactly sure what counted. “All three of us founders of my company have not had real jobs. “The logic that you get some work experience to get a little bit of credibility before you start a business is starting to change. Some young entrepreneurs say they have been motivated by seeing so many peers earn money on their own, particularly by generating social-media content.
“It’s like, hey, I don’t want to be replaced by AI in three years,” said Bhatia, who co-founded Turnstone—an app that runs artificial-intelligence teammates that users can give work to—just before graduating last December from the University of California, Berkeley. That is more than other generations, said payroll and benefits provider Gusto, which conducted the survey. “The window is the whiteboard,” Vij said. She said it’s important that early-career entrepreneurs understand the gravitas of taking investor funding. “I have to figure this out,” he said. That is not as unusual as it once was, said Donna Kelley, a professor of entrepreneurship at Babson.
