Courage is in even shorter supply than genius. - Peter Thiel
Talent is getting younger. Across all domains, I believe this to be true.
The obvious domain is in technology and startups. Mark Zuckerberg built Facebook and became a billionaire at just 23 in 2008. Then, in 2021, Alexandr Wang of ScaleAI became a billionaire at 24.
The post-GPT startup era makes this trend even more evident. Unicorns are now being minted by people under 25, notably Mercor by Brendan, Adarsh, and Surya and Cursor by Michael, Sualeh, Arvid, and Aman.
And surprisingly, in chess, the average age of a grandmaster has dropped from 29 to 18 over the course of a century. In 2021, Abhimanyu Mishra became a GM at 12!
More and more high school students are joining university research labs as well (for example, see the 2025 issue of the high school journal I started). Some publish in Nature or neurIPS before receiving a high school diploma – that’s a better outcome than the average undergraduate or even PhD student!
And while genius seems to be increasing in supply, courage is too. More people are dropping out, more people are taking gap years before college, and more people are working on courageous moonshots.
Mining asteroids? Astroforge.
Reusable rockets? SpaceX.
Humanoid robots? Figure.
Reducing sleeptime? My friend Isaak Freeman.
I’m optimistic about what this means for society – I predict a sudden, simultaneous emergence of the Renaissance era and Industrial Revolution. Renaissance 2.0 as young talent, once again, are able to pursue scientific and artistic curiosities from generous early-stage patrons; Industrial Revolution 2.0 as talent increasingly gravitates towards company formation and commercialization (especially in the physical world), supported by the later-stage patrons.
This model has emerged from the maturation of the VC industry.
The once cottage-industry has bloomed to a billion-dollar asset class funding thousands of companies a year. With more funds being created and capital becoming a commodity, the capital barrier to highly ambitious projects is reduced.
What was once an unsurmountable financial barrier for young, ambitious tinkerers is now just a matter of applying to one of the many funds that exist to fund talent: Merge Club (from my friend Ari), LocalHost (Saurish), The Residency (Nick), Bagel Fund (Alexa), Emergent Ventures, 1517 Fund, and many, many more.
Society needs these ambitious, non-conformists to exist.
No institution encourages the talented to write a book, to start a company, to seek invention in the frontier. These acts are the antithesis to the preached, tried-and-true playbook of becoming a lawyer, doctor, or consultant.
But it is the former that improves the world.
They may be small in number, but a small group of thoughtful, committed individuals can change history.
In fact, it’s the only thing that ever has.
The history of science is the history of irrationally believing, truth seeking, contrarian thinkers – from germ theory to heliocentrism to quantum mechanics. And America was declared into existence by a small group of 56 rebels who believed in the pure idea of freedom.
I admire the confident, those who can ignore the eyes of others, those who can trust in themselves so wholly, to shout “you’re all wrong and I’m right!”
Meanwhile, I am inherently unconfident – I remain doubtful of my technical ability and my ability to lead effectively. A couple of months ago, I got really doubtful about myself and decided to just collect a “happy log” of nice things people have written about me.
Surprisingly, a non-zero number of people tell me that I am 1) cracked or 2) have great ideas… but, really?
Selfishly, I think most people don’t know what a 10x engineer or genius looks like because they’ve never met one. This makes sense, because statistically these people should be impossibly rare, maybe 1 in a million. Most people won’t even come across one in their lifetime.
And so I can say: I did not qualify for IMO nor did I become a grandmaster in chess – all things considered, I’m relatively average.
Having knowledge is not the same as having intelligence. Don’t conflate the two.
I know I read a lot and am exposed to many fields, but I also do know that that isn’t translatable to thinking 20 steps ahead in mathematics or asking the right questions in research or finding a reasonable solution path in a messy world.
Put in another way, I broadly know the principles that form the basis of LLMs and AI, along with the startups in the field and different model architectures, but I couldn’t tell you how to design a better, memory-efficient algorithm or what research question to directionally advance towards to create agentic behavior, longer chain-of-thought, or preventing context rot.
I just don’t know the important questions that a genius would know and explore.
And I’m afraid of living life as a lost soul swimming in a little fish bowl, happy with a comfortable life of fake plants and regular feeding intervals, oblivious satisfactory hardship of the deep blue sea.
A comfortable life of knowledge curation is a happy place for me, but there’s also the joy I’m missing out from pursuing hard intellectual work. I want to be intelligent! Not just a knowledge curator who happens to have a good memory!
To that end, I am grudgingly deciding to read less (from 3-4 hours a day and notetaking everything!) and trying to be more “spiky” in applied CS, biology, and mathematics. I think aiming to reach top 5% in those areas is the correct direction for me to take to gain confidence as an engineer and researcher before I re-evaluate this whole reading splurge.
Even so, I think having this hesitation and self-doubt is, in some cases, beneficial. I’m surprised on the number of VCs who fund people with unwavering conviction on an idea vibecoded over a weekend in a hackathon. I know people who’ve raised from exactly that scenario, and surprise surprise, it dies out in a couple of months.
Good ideas are hard.
Good ideas take a long time to model through, from unit economics to commercialization path to technological scaling. One does not stumble their way into a great problem by throwing ideas on a whiteboard, surface-evaluating its potential, and going out to raise. A common denominator among the companies I’ve analyzed at Contrary Research (SpaceX, Cerebras, Varda, Lightmatter, PsiQuantum) is that great ideas are a function of integrating fragmented knowledge and experience, and not so much a spontaneous phenomena.
You should only build a company with the intention to win. That means using all tools necessary to validate your idea, which importantly includes attempting to earnestly invalidate your own ideas.
But rarely does anyone do this.
Is indexing on conviction that important? Why is caution not valued as much? The potential lesson here is that VCs, amidst this AI hype, are confusing funding conviction with funding rash stupidity.
We may be systematically rewarding the wrong psychological profiles.
Anyways, back to the notion of unconfidence, I have been pleasantly surprised on the number of people who have commented on reading my blog – I now get a couple emails a month regarding the stuff I put out here.
But if I may be arrogant here, the most important, yet implicit compliment I’ve consistently received is my (positive) influence on people. And that’s not because I’m intelligent or knowledgeable or anything else, but because that I generously help. To date, I’ve inspired a good number of people to start writing and to pursue good, hard quests.
Frankly, I’ll rather be a good mentor than to be a technical, introverted genius. There is immense joy in cultivating amazing individuals, even if all you did was provide an hour to listen to give a sentence of advice.
Maybe capital flow has opened opportunities for younger talent to take advantage of.
But maybe it’s not the $1,000 capital infusion to some teenager’s bank account that changes a life.
It’s the epistemic confidence, that someone older and wiser and maybe powerful, sees you and your half-baked idea scribbled on paper, and looks beyond your age but at your intensity, your impossible schemes, your naiveté, and says yes, and suddenly your chest swells with pride and you walk differently after, feeling like you’re a winner, because someone who knows what winning looks like thinks you might actually win.
Belief is a powerful drug.
You’ll chase this high of winning, because once you’ve experienced it, the toil of hard consistent work at 2AM that gives way to a step-function change in the world, you can’t possibly go back. You go on and on and on to the next thing, the bigger and better step-function change you can make, until one day, you’re the non-conformist winner you once admired.
Maybe, just maybe, the path towards making younger Einsteins is because we started making more Max Talmeys – the mentors who chose to lift others instead of lifting themselves.
Maybe I’m finally starting to ask the directionally right questions after all.