I'm a high school dropout who raised $6 million out of Y Combinator. Being a teen founder means you can take more risks.

"When I was around 11 years old, my dad told me about Y Combinator for the first time. We were on a walk by the river in my hometown of Almaty, Kazakhstan, and I didn't really understand the concept of a school for founders - but it captured my imagination. Both of my parents are entrepreneurs, and my own journey started young, helping sell clothes at my grandmother's store after school, where she gave me a small cut of each sale I helped make."

"In the years that followed, I started reading more about Silicon Valley and figures like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg. They were self-taught engineers who didn't just manage people, but knew how to build things. I took my first computer science course as a freshman and taught myself coding at my American high school in Kazakhstan. I started building my first company at 15, when ChatGPT came out."

"By junior year, I'd been ready to leave school for a while. I was bored of my classes, and I was coding at every waking moment, and I just wanted to live in that space forever. In December, I launched my current company, the product lab Nozomio, after becoming interested in code generation and experimenting with Cursor Composer and GitHub Copilot. The first tool I'm building is Nia, a context tool for coding agents. In January, I published a minimum viable product on Product Hunt, and it got "product of the day," and I started cold-calling YC founders for feedback."

Arlan Rakhmetzhanov left high school in Kazakhstan to pursue startup founding and attended Y Combinator. Both parents were entrepreneurs, and he began working at his grandmother's clothing store as a child, earning a share of sales. He discovered Y Combinator at age 11, taught himself coding in an American high school in Kazakhstan, and started his first company at 15 following ChatGPT's release. He launched Nozomio, a product lab focused on code generation, built Nia as a context tool for coding agents, posted an MVP on Product Hunt that earned product of the day, cold-called YC founders for feedback, completed YC, and raised $6.2 million.

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