Steve Jobs was a 21-year-old college dropout when he founded Apple. 20-year-old Bill Gates launched Microsoft, and Mark Zuckerberg was 19 when he first came up with the idea of Facebook. Their present-day equivalents—today’s Gen Z entrepreneurs—want the same opportunity to innovate, but keep coming up against stereotypes they can’t avoid.
Of course, the legacies built by the aforementioned trio didn’t come without decades of hard work. But had these young hopefuls not gained the respect—and financial backing—of their older peers early on, society might never have known the iPhone, Excel or the ‘like’ button.
Twenty years later and for the first time, Gen Z founders have reached the age—at the upper end of the 11-to-27-year-old spectrum—where they have the experience and ability to launch the first wave of disruptors for their own generation.
Yet in a post-pandemic world, the workforce is facing inter-generational friction. Just ask actress Jodie Foster, who said younger peers can be “annoying” to work with or the managers who say they’re “difficult.”
So it’s perhaps no wonder that the GenZ bosses Fortune spoke to said they have received something of a mixed reaction to their own forays into entrepreneurship.
The phenomenon of being dunked on by older generations isn’t new—ask the millennials accused of missing out on affordable housing because they spent all their spare cash on avocados and oat milk lattes.
But while Gen Z can wait for time to dispel the notion that they’re social media-obsessed and work-shy, investors may already have missed out on the next big thing.
‘But you look like a child?’
When Nicole Rechtszaid sits down with prospective clients for her L.A.-based social commerce company it’s a “coin toss” as to whether they’ll believe she has the experience she claims to.
The founder of Ghost Agency already has a raft of major clients under her belt, having worked with TikTok for a number of years before taking on the likes of Alo Yoga, G Fuel Energy and a wide range of content creators.
Rechtszaid’s CV is unusual—after all, she has more than a decade’s worth of experience working with streaming platforms since landing her first salaried contracts on Twitch at the age of 14.
But even with her wealth of knowledge, her meetings are often sprinkled with a dose of distrust.
She explained: “About half the time a prospective client will say to me: ‘But you look so young? I don’t believe that you actually did all this.’ Or ‘You look like a child, are you sure?’ They think it’s funny.”
“I try and make a joke out of it because I don’t want to make them uncomfortable,” the 24-year-old told Fortune. “I don’t think it’s usually done with malintent but they definitely are saying to themselves: ‘This person is less professional or less experienced than competitors that I’m meeting with.’”
Being a Gen Z boss at the moment is out of the ordinary: less than 10% of the entire U.S. workforce fell into this demographic in 2020 according to Purdue Global, but this figure is expected to rise to around 30% by 2030.
In cases where Nicole and her 37-year-old co-founder Jenny Woo need to “convince” partners of their abilities, they’ve realized it simply isn’t worth it: “There are going to be companies that get it, and companies that absolutely do not understand.”
Is youth a ‘red flag’ for investors?
On the other side of the Atlantic, Meagan Loyst has unique insight into the brightest minds of her generation courtesy of her organization, GenZ VCs, and its 28,000 members.
Loyst, a New Yorker currently studying at the University of Oxford, created the platform three years ago to bring together like-minded individuals wanting to gain advice on investing, as well as entrepreneurs looking to expand their networks.
The CEO born in 1997 said the marketplace’s preoccupation with millennial-era college hotshot founders is now giving way to investors more concerned with derisking.
“This notion of funding young, smart founders coming out of elite universities has been perpetuated for a long time,” Loyst said, citing Mark Zuckerberg and Snap’s Evan Spiegel.
Yet in the current macroeconomic environment, Loyst echoed Rechtszaid’s belief that youth is no longer seen as a guarantee for innovation—it’s a red flag.
“This is not everyone but investors are going back to repeat founders, those who have already seen success, because it helps derisk,” she said.
“It’s negatively impacting young founders who have less experience: the onus falls on them to establish their credibility early and be able to articulate that in a very serious way.
“If you’re already seeing investors pulling back… and you know that the odds are stacked against you, you have to go above and beyond.”
A generation accustomed to being highly visible
Another dynamic between Gen Z bosses and their inter-generational teams is at play: social media.
Gen Z is a group who have never known a world without Facebook, born in the era of the baby influencer with everything from their day of birth to their high school graduation snapped online.
Though battling loneliness and isolation, they’re a generation accustomed to being highly visible, with Loyst saying this can work “for you, towards you or against you.”
An influencer herself, she echoed Rechtszaid: “People can come to a conversation with preconceived notions around what you know vs what you don’t.”
At Ghost Agency, Rechtszaid said the sunnier side to the age debate is that some clients acknowledge her company simply knows more about the subject.
Whether it’s because she’s got more experience with the platform, understands the demographic her client is trying to reach, or has a team built to achieve these aims, Rechtszaid wants to make sure the reasons her clients trust her are exemplified in the make-up of her team.
With six full-time staff expected to be on the books by the end of spring, Rechtszaid said her hiring technique was centered around individual growth.
“Determination, motivation and really an understanding of the space is all that we care about,” when looking for staff, she said. “At that point, we feel people can be trained and molded into understanding how to take on a manager role or a director role.
“It’s not that challenging to understand how to shift from something you’ve done before to learning how to communicate it with other people, as long as you have the desire.”
