Founders "are as zealous and as smart as they were 20 years ago," said Jerry Neumann, a venture capitalist and adjunct professor at Columbia University. It's the tech industry itself that isn't evolving as rapidly as it once did. When millennials were young, the internet was new, nearly lawless, and ripe not necessarily for disruption but for defining. Then came the iPhone, a technological advance that changed society, making ideas like Uber, Instagram, and Bumble possible.
In reality, zoomers aren't to blame for their lack of progress in Silicon Valley. Gen Z founders and would-be founders are stepping into a vastly different tech world from that of their predecessors - a world where launching a unicorn is far more difficult, and publicly scrutinized, than it was for the garage-band generation of Jobs and Gates.
Millennials give off girlboss vibes; Gen Zers tout "lazy girl jobs." Move fast and break things? No cap, that's sus. And that has prompted many Gen Zers to question whether they even want to strive for that level of world-conquering superstardom.
Now the oldest members of Gen Z are 27 - yet there's no Zoomer Zuck in sight. Their generation has been billed as coddled, complacent, and uninterested in the grind, intent on drawing hard lines in work-life balance.
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