How to Spend Your 20s in the AI Era

YC partners Garry Tan, Harj Taggar, Diana Hu, and Jared Friedman argue the CS credential path is now riskier than founding a company, citing CS unemployment doubling art history majors.

• CS major unemployment hit 6.1% vs 3.0% for art history majors (NY Fed, Feb 2025), inverting the “safe” career assumption.
• YC is seeing companies go from $0 to $10-12M net revenue in 12 months; Cursor went $0→$1B in year one, $1B→$10B in year two.
• B2B SaaS is now the hypergrowth category — historically that was consumer social; AI flipped the dynamic.
• Pre-AI, domain expertise was the scarce resource; post-AI, technical expertise (squeezing model performance) is the missing piece again.
• Most college CS programs are actively banning Cursor and vibe-coding tools, training students on skills that will be obsolete.
• Garry Tan warns some campus entrepreneurship programs are teaching students to lie and manufacture credentials, comparing the pattern to SBF and Theranos.
• GPT-o3 is roughly 130 IQ — Garry says most people he has ever hired are now below that threshold, making niche proprietary data the durable moat.
• For quitting a job to start a company: minimum 6-9 months runway; never start a first startup solo; co-founder timing alignment is the single biggest practical blocker.

2025-07-08 · Watch on YouTube