“Cambridge, Mass. -- Andrew Castellano had tough news for
his parents over the winter break: He was taking a leave of absence from
Harvard University halfway through his sophomore year to work full-time on his
AI startup.
His mother cried. His venture capital backers saw an
opportunity.
Castellano and his co-founder, Nebiyu Demie, who met working
campus jobs as freshman computer science students, moved out of the dorms and
straight into an apartment complex owned by their investors, Cambridge-based
Link Ventures. Their next-door neighbors are three Delta Kappa Epsilon
fraternity brothers developing AI that helps insurance companies sell more
policies.
During this
blisteringly fast phase of AI development, it's no longer enough for
venture-capital firms to invest in companies. They're buying apartments and
workplaces, IKEA furniture and dishes, and providing housekeeping for their
teenage and 20-something founders. The logic: fewer responsibilities mean more
waking hours for working.
Starting a
company has never been easier or required fewer people. New AI tools like
Claude Code help write and debug software faster, and spin up a website or a
marketing plan.
Venture capital money is abundant, and every minute feels
precious. Many founders say there is a short window of opportunity to build
something new before AI systems become smarter than humans. And they see a
chance to make a fortune.
"If you wait until after you graduate," said
Castellano, a first-generation college student whose parents immigrated to the
U.S. from Ecuador and Venezuela, "all the good ideas are going to be
already taken."
Many students take breaks from school with no real intention
of returning. Universities -- and parents -- often prefer to call them leaves
rather than acknowledge that the students are dropping out. Leave policies vary
by school. MIT, for example, allows undergraduates to take up to four semesters
off.
While young
founders have long dropped out of college to chase startup dreams during past
technological booms, this time, their financial backers are funding housing for
them and ensuring their daily needs, from changing sheets, taking out the trash
and booking travel, are met.
Competition to invest in the best talent is intense, and
that talent is getting younger. The average age of founders of so-called AI
unicorns -- companies worth more than $1 billion -- has fallen from 40 in 2020
to 29 in 2024, according to investment firm Antler.
Link Ventures founder Dave Blundin spent $5.4 million of his
own money last year to buy a six-unit, 10,000-square-foot apartment building
near MIT to house some of the founders the firm has backed.
He and his staff talk about the prospect of AI riches,
sharing stories of teenagers who got into elite universities, but barely stayed
through orientation.
"I'm first trying to convince them that there's nothing
else you can do in life right now," said Blundin, who graduated from MIT
in 1988 and went on to found several companies, including insurance marketplace
EverQuote. "If it were me, would I even vaguely think about going back to
class? Not even close."
After buying the building, Blundin spent another $500,000 on
renovations, redoing floors, painting cabinets and gutting rust-stained ceramic
tubs, to "make it a little more techie looking," said Karen Green,
Link's office manager whose staff jokingly refer to as the "den
mother." She furnished the apartments, keeps them tidy and looks after the
young residents.
Green outfitted the apartments with IKEA furniture, a snake
plant and Martha Stewart kitchenware. There are telltale signs of the age of
the apartments' residents: a happy birthday sign from months earlier still
hangs on the wall of the fraternity brothers' apartment and a leftover keg
lingers in the building basement.
Life in the apartments revolves around work -- and the fuel
required to keep going. The fraternity brothers, whose startup is called
Vocara, are former varsity football and baseball players. They added only one
notable appliance to their kitchen: a giant pot for rice, large enough to meal-prep
a week's worth of carbs in one batch.
The Vocara founders graduated from MIT last spring. Other
founders who drop out say their schools aren't moving fast enough to adapt
coursework to the AI era. Some question whether four years in the classroom is
still worth the time, especially as the unemployment rate for graduates rises
and they scramble to AI-proof their careers.
"I don't think you necessarily need college
anymore," said Shraman Kar, 19, who left Stanford after completing his
freshman year last spring, then raised $4.5 million for his AI video startup,
Golpo. Kar lives in Palo Alto, Calif., with his older brother, who dropped out
of Stanford at the same time to work on the startup.
A torrent of money is pouring into AI startups. Global venture
capital investment hit a record in the first quarter this year, according to
Crunchbase data, pulling in a new group of founders eager to raise capital
before interest wanes.
"It's a modern gold rush," said Christine Zhang,
who took leave from Harvard last spring after her freshman year to build an AI
platform that helps healthcare providers predict how patients will respond
during a clinical trial or treatment, raising $1.3 million. At 19, she said
there is little risk to giving it a shot.
"My worst-case scenario is going back to Harvard, which
isn't a worse-case scenario at all," said Zhang, who lives in San
Francisco.
Ben Rhodes-Kropf grew up dreaming of a spot at MIT, where
his father, Matt Rhodes-Kropf, is a professor in the finance department. But
when his acceptance letter arrived in 2024, the AI boom was under way, and an
offer from Y Combinator to join its accelerator program in the winter won out.
After finishing the accelerator program, which counts OpenAI
chief Sam Altman among its graduates, Rhodes-Kropf, 21, raised $5 million for
his defense tech startup, SalesPatriot.
He now lives in a house with 10 of his employees in San
Francisco, where investor money pays the rent, for a personal chef, a house
cleaner and someone to make sure the trash gets taken out and the fridge is
stocked with LaCroix. It also paid for them to convert the garage into a gym
and add a cold plunge pool to the deck, changes that help ensure they can work
15 hours per day, seven days per week, and to rarely leave the house.
SalesPatriot is growing fast, but regardless of how it
fares, Rhodes-Kropf says working on a startup looks good on a resume. "You
become very employable because you learn all this crazy stuff, even if your
company blows up," he said.
For many parents, that gamble can be hard to stomach. But
the AI boom has made their old advice of picking a safe major and pursuing a
stable career feel a lot less certain.
The unemployment rate for recent grads was 5.6% as of
December, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, compared with 4.2%
for all workers. The unemployment rate for computer science majors climbed to
7%.
Matt Rhodes-Kropf, who is also a managing partner at
Tectonic Ventures, helps his students figure out how to tell their parents
they're taking a job at a startup. When his son decided to defer college to
start a company, he wholeheartedly supported it, but admitted he was sad Ben
would miss the experience of being a college freshman and hopes he'll study at
MIT at some point.
"They're kids, so they think they might never come
back. But who knows," he said.” [1]
1. EXCHANGE --- We'll Back Your AI Idea, Buy You an
Apartment And IKEA Furniture, Too --- Venture capital ups its offers to college
dropouts. Clark, Kate. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y..
04 Apr 2026: B1.
