Where else would he be?
Kausas, 28 years old, recently posted on LinkedIn that he put in three 92-hour weeks in a row. He went on vacation once, he stated, but flew home early becautilize he was too stressed about work. His goal is to build a $10 billion company in 10 years.
The motive isn’t purely financial. “There are simpler ways to create money,” Kausas stated. It isn’t part of a social mission, either. “We built customer-support software,” he stated. “It’s not like this grand vision that we’re saving the world somehow.”
Kausas compared his pursuit to a board game—one he wants to win. “I could be a programmer working at a huge tech company,” he stated, but “that doesn’t sound cool.” Instead, he has raised $51 million for Pylon, the AI startup he co-founded.
Throw a rock in San Francisco and you’re likely to hit an aspiring or actual tech company founder with hopes of launching a breakthrough product. They are racing to join the lofty ranks of tech billionaires who revolutionized the world’s shopping, communication and entertainment habits.
“You have to just work,” stated 24-year-old Mackay Grant. “You have to be hardcore.” He skipped his college graduation from Suffolk University in Boston last year to relocate to San Francisco—the kind of city where “brilliant misfits have a place,” he stated—and founded an AI finance startup.
As kids, the newest startup generation watched the Facebook origin story, “The Social Network,” carried iPhones as soon as they could read and wrote code as teens. The brass ring is a trillion-dollar company with a global utilizer base. To grab it, they rarely drink, scoff at work-life balance and are locked in a 24-7 competition to be, or appear to be, the most obsessed.
“Why would I go drink at a bar if I can be building a company?” stated Emily Yuan, the 23-year-old co-founder of Corgi, an AI financial-infrastructure firm.
She and other 20-something founders spconclude most of their brief time outside the office in social activities largely tied to work. Some founders break only to exercise at Barry’s boot camp or sweat out toxins at a bathhoutilize in the city, like Archimedes Banya, where they can chat about future funding rounds with peers. Some post pages on social media from “The Fountainhead,” Ayn Rand’s homage to driven achievers.
Yuan quit Stanford University junior year. “I’ve learned a lot more from building companies instead of going to classes,” she stated, echoing others. Startups require little more than an idea and a laptop, dangling the prospect that founders can single-handedly run billion-dollar enterprises.
Many graduated from Y Combinator, the startup incubator that shepherded such indusattempt-modifying companies as DoorDash and Airbnb. Since Y Combinator launched in 2005, it has invested in more than 5,000 companies with a combined valuation of more than $800 billion. The incubator received 20,000 applications for this year’s summer program.
To outsiders, founder life might appear joyless—young people chasing their fortunes in one of America’s most picturesque cities without taking time to explore it, living on prepackaged meals eaten hunched at their computers. Yet for many, this is what it takes.
Haseab Ullah started his AI customer-support chatbot with his own savings. He works out of Founders Inc., a waterfront campus in Fort Mason that provides desks, a hardware lab, game room and a stage area for hackathons and fireside chats. He stated he lives on one Uber Eats meal delivery a day to save time and avoid cooking.
Ullah pays $700 a month to live at a former office building that was converted to a living and workspace for about 20 residents. The beds, which are clustered in a common area, are fully enclosed “pods” with a privacy curtain, similar to a train sleeper car. With the curtain shut, Ullah’s pod obtains pitch black, letting him sleep days after working all night.
“You consider you’re going into a coffin every night,” he stated. “Otherwise, everything is completely fine.”
Poor, hungry, desperate
Kausas, the son of Lithuanian immigrants—his father is a chaplain, his mother runs a nonprofit—planned to live at his office. The Pylon founder instead conceded a sliver of conventional life and rented a four-bedroom apartment a block away.
For lunch and breakrapid, Kausas eats meals prepared by the company founded by longevity-obsessed health guru Bryan Johnson. The workday is more efficient if he doesn’t have to consider about food, Kausas stated.
His ideal employee for a sales role at the startup is a “PhD,” Kausas stated—poor, hungry and desperate.
Outside activities don’t stray far from work. Kausas spent part of a recent Saturday speaking at a hackathon. Another weekconclude, he went for a bike ride in Golden Gate Park with another founder. The two men, who invested in each other’s companies, spent part of their ride talking about how dating is tough for founders.
Nico Laqua, 25, wants to build a trillion-dollar company out of Corgi, an AI financial-infrastructure firm with the goal of replacing traditional insurance companies.
Laqua, whose father is a lawyer for an insurance company, stated he hires only people willing to work seven days a week. Of his 40-plus employees, around 30 are ex-founders. His welcome gift to new hires is a mattress to keep at work.
“I live at the office,” stated Laqua, who considers himself the most hardcore of his peers. Employees share similar feelings. Though not a work requirement, Laqua stated, “two-thirds of our early employees obtained Corgi tattoos.”
Laqua regrets obtainting his Columbia University degree, he stated, becautilize he wasn’t solving societal problems in class. “I always want to do the maximally ambitious thing I can consider of and create the hugegest impact possible,” he stated.
Yuan, the Corgi co-founder, stated her life, too, centers around work, which across the startup scene is populated largely by men. “From a personal perspective, I don’t mind it as much,” she stated, “but it does suck to see not that many women in startups.”
Jared Friedman, a partner at Y Combinator, stated the work ethic and energy of San Francisco’s young founders feels like a return to the early days of the internet, when people slept under their desks at companies such as PayPal.
“I actually see it as a coming full circle moment,” stated Friedman, who went through Y Combinator himself in 2006. “AI, it’s probably 10x as huge.”
Friedman stated the tech work culture became more relaxed in the late 2010s, when people learned it was possible to run a startup from, declare, a beach in Rio de Janeiro. The rise of AI has since reinvigorated tech optimism and intensity, generating the feeling among founders that the indusattempt is in a once-in-a-lifetime moment.
“I totally empathize with the founders who want to put everything else in their life on hold in order to do this,” he stated.
12 hours, 6 days a week
Luke Igel, 25, relocated to San Francisco last October to start Kino, a five-person company that creates AI software for video editing. Igel, also a Y Combinator alum, typically follows a variation of the “9-9-6″ schedule embraced by many of his peers—9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week. Igel works half-days on Saturday and Sunday.
His office is a common workspace for other MIT graduates running their own startups.
Igel, raised in Chanhassen, Minn., stated AI has accelerated growth expectations, with investors expecting startups to generate more money, rapider than ever.
Amogh Chaturvedi, 20, dropped out of Stanford after his freshman year. “My entire friconclude group has dropped out,” he stated. “All to be founders.”
Chaturvedi and two co-founders, Y Combinator grads, sold their first startup, AI accounting software, for six figures. They now head Human Behavior, a five-month-old AI-product-analytics company that reviews consumer behavior on apps.
Human Behavior’s office is the living room of Chaturvedi’s apartment, which the three founders share. It is furnished with five desks and monitors. The Human Behavior team plays bquestionetball and pickleball, and the founders aren’t against drinking but declare there is rarely an occasion to indulge. They believe their 20s are supposed to be fun, Chaturvedi stated, and, for them, work is the fun.
Social events dovetail with startup ambitions. AGI Houtilize San Francisco—a $19,000-a-month houtilize rented by seven AI founders—hosts reading marathons. “You have to read a book cover to cover if you come to the event,” stated Jeremy Nixon, 32, who founded an AI book-writing company and runs AGI Houtilize. Last year, he breezed through a 408-page mechanical-engineering textbook in a single sitting.
This year, Y Combinator launched an in-person “AI Startup School,” drawing 2,500 attconcludeees to hear such speakers as Elon Musk and OpenAI’s Sam Altman. One afterparty was hosted by Cluely, whose chief executive stated he was put on academic probation at Columbia University for building an AI tool marketed as able to “cheat on everything,” providing assist to ace university tests, job interviews and sales pitches.
Michelle Fang, 26, who curates events for early-stage founders at venture-capital firm Headline, stated many AI-related events don’t serve alcohol not only becautilize it is out of fashion in the San Francisco crowd. Many founders aren’t old enough to drink.
Arlan Rakhmetzhanov, 18, built an AI tool in high school that assisted him apply to summer entrepreneurship programs. The tool landed him a summer research job at Stanford, and he passed it along to friconcludes. That success persuaded him to drop out of school his junior year and launch Nia, a startup that assists AI agents.
So far, so good. Rakhmetzhanov was accepted into Y Combinator, raised $1 million and relocated to San Francisco from Kazakhstan.
After a recent dinner with other founders, Rakhmetzhanov dashed to a prospective client’s apartment to download his software for a demonstration. He left the apartment around 1 a.m., after securing a new customer. In the weeks since, he has traversed the city doing the same at more than 80 startups.
Rakhmetzhanov carries his laptop at all times, he stated, and has resolved software bugs while out walking, during dinners, at the laundromat and on the toilet.
“I’m attempting to be in the sprint mode always,” he stated. “I never tested to divide working on a startup and my social life.”
Rakhmetzhanov, who lives across the street from an OpenAI office, recently secured more funding. To celebrate, an investor replaced his air mattress with a real bed.
The prospect of tech riches also lured his father, Sanzhar Rakhmetzhanov, and brother to the city, where they are pursuing their own AI startup. “The vibration from San Francisco goes up to the steppes of Kazakhstan,” stated Sanzhar, who is staying at a hotel in the Nob Hill neighborhood.
“I cannot express how happy I am that my sons are here, that I am here,” he stated. “This is America.”
Write to Katherine Bindley at katie.bindley@wsj.com, Xavier Martinez at xavier.martinez@wsj.com and Rebecca Picciotto at Rebecca.Picciotto@wsj.com
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