Tech
Silicon Valley loves young founders. Until it doesn’t.
For Arlan Rakhmetzhanov, 19, there is no middle ground. Either he builds a company as valuable as Google, he says, or he fails and ends up on the streets. He started coding at 15 in his native Kazakhstan, completed a couple of summer programs in San Francisco, and cold-DM’ed every Y Combinator founder he could find on LinkedIn until one gave him an angel check for his first company at age 17.
That company, now the YC-backed Nozomio, is an API index for AI agents — a tool that helps AI agents find and use software services — and has raised more than $6 million in funding to date. “I either win or lose, and a lot of young founders have the same mindset,” he told TechCrunch. “They just want to win.”
Young founders like Rakhmetzhanov are building under a new set of pressures. Investors are throwing more capital at them, yet the expectation to hit that “north star” milestone — the one big number investors are chasing — hasn’t relaxed, and every misstep along the way is now publicly dissected on social media.
While Silicon Valley VCs have always famously loved backing young college dropout founders, they preferred to see them paired with technical founders, or at least to have some experience — ideally with a FAANG company (Meta, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google) — on their résumés. In many ways, that is still very true. But AI tools have democratized the opportunity to build, shortening the timelines of success and enabling more young people to start successful companies without stepping foot inside a Big Tech company.
Pranjali Awasthi, 19, is an example of that. She dropped out of high school to launch an AI startup, then attended Georgia Tech before dropping out of that, too, to launch Slashy, a YC-backed startup that bills itself as the “Cursor for emails” and helps consumers manage their email inboxes. After more than a year running that company, she recently announced she’s now building yet a new startup currently in stealth.
When she was younger, around 14 or 15, she recalled, investors whom she would pitch often asked why she was looking to build a company. “It’s gotten more normal now,” she said, “post-18.”
It seems more than ever, investors look to founders like Awasthi, whose experiences can be traced through “GitHub activity, open-source contributions, communities they’ve already built, and familiarity with all the latest tools in AI,” Ashley Smith, a general partner at the early-stage firm Vermilion, told TechCrunch. “A lot of young developers learn how to build software through contributing to open-source projects or toying around with the latest AI tooling,” she explained. “They have more time to do that while in college or younger than someone with a full-time job and a mortgage.”
Smith said a “meaningful” share of her portfolio consists of companies founded by those under 30, with a handful even younger than 21, she said, adding that she’s “clearly not skeptical of youth.”
“What they lack in experience, they make up for in excitement to experiment and lack of fear,” she continued.
But she admits the market has become more merciless. “It doesn’t give you room to learn slowly anymore,” she said. There are more funding opportunities than ever, regardless of age — accelerators, incubators, pre-seed funds. But that money comes with strings attached: Founders like Rakhmetzhanov and Awasthi, flush with millions in cash, are expected to deliver growth in months, not years.
“The forgiveness that used to exist at an early stage and the assumption you’d iterate your way to product-market fit doesn’t exist right now,” Smith continued. “Everyone is looking for the next Cursor, even though that growth trajectory is an outlier, not the norm.”
For many founders — especially those building in public — the relentless strain to succeed can lead to murky ethical territory, or even predatory deal terms, since younger founders are often too new to the game to know what’s standard, yet ambitious enough to chase growth at all costs. To keep up, revenue numbers start to look inflated, while content creation for social media starts to crowd out writing good code. The excessive posturing is perhaps inevitable, since getting attention is now harder than ever in a crowded AI market.
It’s all about who can convince “the most people [they] are smarter than everyone else in the space,” Smith said, “and make the most noise about it.”
“In 2004, you could quietly iterate for years without anyone watching,” Awasthi added. “Now there is this constant ambient pressure from LinkedIn and Twitter where every raise, every milestone, every pivot is public.”
That means some young founders aren’t just worried about hitting competitive revenue marks or funding valuations — they’re also under pressure to perform the appearance of being a successful founder. That pressure has always existed in startup culture, but founders say it’s grown more extreme. “If you’re a startup and you’re competing in a market, usually you worry about incumbents,” Timothy Chen, an investor at Essence Ventures, told TechCrunch. “Now you worry about your neighbors.”
For example, “everybody’s doing shiny, good-looking launch videos,” he noted. “It wasn’t even a thing three years ago.” The trend was popularized by Cluely founder Roy Lee, now around age 22, whose startup initially promised to help students cheat on exams — a premise that dazzled investors like Andreessen Horowitz and helped the company raise $20 million.
Though Cluely is now more of a note-taking tool, Lee became a face of young Silicon Valley talent. “The pressure is coming from, ‘I need to show off much better, quick,’” Chen continued.
Not hitting the bar has bred new anxiety. “When Zuck was building Facebook, there wasn’t this huge negative social ecosystem,” Aidan Guo, 20, told TechCrunch. He’s the co-founder of the AI desktop assistant startup Attention Engineering, which has raised around $1.6 million in funding to date.
Much of the strain, as he describes it, is self-imposed. “You already have a constant fear of failure on your mind. You have to steer the ship and learn all these things as you go. And everything can always go wrong at once,” he continued. “And then you have all these people piling on anything you do wrong. I think people need to be more empathetic.”
Amid all that pressure, Awasthi takes a page from the old days. “If you focus your time on what needs to get done, it’s not too hard,” she said.
“The best product that stays active and talks to customers wins,” Rakhmetzhanov added.
In the end, all the founders are describing the same thing: The fundamentals of a good startup haven’t changed — “conviction, intellectual honesty, and obsession with the customer,” as Smith put it. None of that has anything to do with age.
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Tech
Samsung expects memory shortage to worsen through 2027 and last until 2028
The ongoing shortage of RAM chips is not only expected to persist into the next year, but will likely intensify in 2027, with tight supply conditions lasting until at least 2028, according to Samsung, which manufactures and supplies roughly a third of the world’s memory chips.
Samsung said in its Q2 earnings call that frontier AI labs, desperate to obtain access to memory infrastructure, have been “sharing their medium- to long-term demand forecasts” directly with the Korean tech giant to secure future supply.
The high demand enables Samsung to prioritize customers willing to sign long-term contracts. This multi-year visibility will allow the company to install equipment and ramp up production without worrying that demand will dry up, helping it avoid the memory industry’s historical boom-and-bust cycles.
Memory shortages driven by the AI boom have also pushed up chip prices in recent months. This has been a double-edged sword for Samsung: While sales at its semiconductor unit hit an all-time high in Q2, profitability in its smartphone and TV divisions shrank, as the higher-priced chips drove up component costs.
Samsung has even started passing some of those increasing component costs on to consumers by increasing the prices of its Galaxy smartphones and tablets. However, as a result, demand for these devices has dropped.
The memory shortage, informally dubbed “the RAMaggedon,” has also forced Apple, Samsung’s archrival, to raise the prices of its MacBooks, Macs, and iPads last month. On its latest earnings call, Apple warned that revenue growth for the upcoming quarter is projected to slow to between 9% and 11% year-over-year, down from its recent 16% quarterly growth rate.
With memory manufacturers shifting production capacity toward AI data centers and away from consumer electronics, consumers are facing a new reality: higher device prices. Nvidia is expected to raise its consumer graphics card prices by 20% to 30%, which may further drive up prices of gaming devices, desktop computers, consoles, laptops, and the like.
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Tech
GM and Ford are talking less and less about EVs
Just a few short years ago, General Motors and Ford were all in on electric vehicles, spending billions of dollars on those efforts. Now the two biggest American automakers are hardly talking about EVs with their investors.
TechCrunch teamed up with Hudson Labs, a New York-based financial research firm, to analyze the last seven years of GM and Ford quarterly earnings calls and found that both companies are talking about EVs at a lower rate than they did before the pandemic.
This shouldn’t shock anyone who’s followed the news over the last two years. Both companies have altered, delayed, or outright abandoned plans for new EV models, prompting layoffs and scaled-back factory plans. And while GM and Ford still sell EVs and have new models in their product pipelines, their collective focus has shifted, and it shows in the data.
Jim Cain, a spokesperson for GM, said that “quality counts more than quantity.”
“We’ve been very clear and consistent in communicating our view that EVs are the end game, the strength of our portfolio today, the loyalty of EV customers to the technology, awards we’ve won, our growing EV market share, and our commitment to continue investing in technologies like LMR (lithium manganese-rich) to improve profitability,” he said in an emailed statement.
But, he added, “we devote time on the calls to discuss growth opportunities like software and services and autonomous technology, and address complex topics of analyst/investor interest like trade and regulatory policy impacts, operating performance, capital allocation, regional performance, headwinds and tailwinds — all while making sure at least half the call is devoted to Q&A.”
Ford spokesperson David Tovar, meanwhile, pointed to the company’s planned launch of its new “Universal Electric Vehicle” platform next year. “[W]e think the first product rolling off the line, a midsize pickup truck, will hit the sweet spot of the EV market for cost, price, and technology,” he said.
For this analysis, TechCrunch excluded the ostensible third of the Detroit Big Three, Stellantis, for a few reasons. The automaker, which emerged in 2021 from the merger of Fiat Chrysler and France’s PSA Group, traditionally lagged behind its U.S. counterparts in EV adoption. Stellantis also, until the first quarter of this year, held comprehensive earnings calls only twice a year, instead of four times annually, like most public companies.
Hudson Labs sourced earnings call transcripts from S&P Market Intelligence dating back to 2019 and used its Co-Analyst — an AI research tool purpose-built for high-precision financial research — to assign topic tags to each sentence. It then counted the frequency of those topics, as well as each topic’s share of the discussion, to produce the charts below.
General Motors
GM bet on mass-market EVs before most other major automakers. It debuted the Bolt EV at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2016 and put the car on sale by the end of that year — a healthy six months or so ahead of Tesla’s first deliveries of the Model 3.
EVs really became a focus of GM’s earnings calls as its investment ramped up in 2019 and into 2020. At that point, the company was teasing new made-in-the-U.S. models and talking about transforming Cadillac into an all-electric brand. GM spent an increasing amount of time talking about its EV plans through early 2021, with more than 100 references to electric vehicles on each of its last two earnings calls in 2020. That meant EVs accounted for roughly a third of the overall discussion on those calls.
Aside from a dip in the first quarter of 2021, when companies around the world were dealing with a major chip shortage, GM spent nearly the next four years — notably while President Biden was in office — dedicating around a quarter of each earnings call to discussing EVs. (Another notable dip that came in the first quarter of 2025 was attributable to President Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, which dominated that earnings call.)
After Trump regained office, he slashed environmental regulations that incentivized zero-emissions vehicles, and his party tore up the $7,500 federal tax credit for new EVs. At the same time, GM’s talk of EVs dropped significantly, from 82 mentions on the second-quarter call in 2025, to just 21 on its most recent call covering Q2 2026.
While GM remains the second-largest seller of EVs in the U.S., the company that once made the lofty promise to go all-electric by 2035 is now talking more about how it has “align[ed] our EV capacity and manufacturing footprint with the changes in regulatory policy” — when it talks about EVs at all.
Ford
Ford’s first serious entry into the world of mass-market EVs was the Mustang Mach-E, which debuted in late 2019. As the company got closer to delivering the first models in late 2020, it started talking more and more about electric vehicles on its earnings calls.
Aside from a similar dip in mentions on the Q1 2021 call, which was bogged down by talk of the global semiconductor shortage, Ford — like GM — started spending around a third of each quarterly investor check-in talking about EVs. Those discussions were buoyed by the launch of its second major EV model, the F-150 Lightning, in 2021. And that level of focus largely held through the Biden years, as his administration freed up federal money for charging stations and EV manufacturing credits, while shaping policy around the battery material supply chain.
Ford began talking less about EVs before the 2024 election, though. By the middle of that year, the company was already backing away from some of its largest contemporary EV investments in favor of a skunkworks project that ultimately became the Universal Electric Vehicle platform. Talk of EVs dipped further after Trump took office, with CEO Jim Farley spending more time discussing support for the president’s protectionist trade policy and the company’s near-term focus on its higher-margin gas F-Series trucks.
Still, on Ford’s most recent call, Farley talked up the idea that the company “will become a major scaled competitor as we invest in affordable, versatile EVs.” But for that to happen, investors will have to wait until at least next year.
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Tech
Siri AI could come with a paywall for power users
In his final earnings call as CEO of Apple, Tim Cook said that the company’s long-awaited Siri AI upgrade could come with some paywalled limits. While Cook conceded that these plans are not set in stone, he envisions users being able to buy more compute for Siri AI via its existing iCloud+ subscriptions, which offer extended cloud storage.
“We do believe there will be people that want to use [Siri AI] a lot, and so we will have some kind of upgrade possibilities on iCloud+, where people can buy up the stack on iCloud+, and we’ll see how the pickup for that is,” Cook said on Thursday. “But we could not be more excited about where [Siri AI] is.”
Most other AI providers like Anthropic and OpenAI operate similarly, offering a limited free version to consumers with the option of upgrading to support more usage.
The new-and-improved Siri AI is available in the iOS 27 beta, and is planned to roll out more broadly this fall.
As longtime Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering John Ternus steps into Tim Cook’s shoes, he will take the helm at a critical time for the company. Apple has fallen behind in its efforts to build an advanced AI assistant, even capitulating to its direct competitor Google by licensing a custom Gemini model to augment Siri. The Siri AI overhaul was so delayed that Apple had to pay $250 million to settle a class action lawsuit over how it marketed the iPhone 16’s AI capabilities.
Apple, like every other hardware manufacturer, is staring down a rocky road for accessing the supplies it needs to meet customer demand. Due to the AI-driven RAM shortage across the industry, it’s more expensive to build hardware, which has led companies like Meta, Samsung, Microsoft, and Sony to raise prices of some devices. Apple raised the price of Macs and iPads last month, but has yet to adjust the price of its existing iPhone models.
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