Y Combinator's median founder age has dropped from 30 in 2022 to 24 today. Over 50% of their founders are now under 25, and the number of accepted applicants aged 18-22 is up 110% year-over-year. This is the future of tech — and it's happening in San Francisco, not Europe.
This isn’t because American founders are smarter or more reckless. It’s because their system gives talented young builders permission to start earlier — and Europe doesn’t.
The UK’s university dropout rate is just 6.2%, compared to 22% in the US. At Cambridge and Oxford, it’s closer to 1%. That sounds like success — until you realise it also signals how few credible off-ramps exist for people who want to build early. Peter Thiel launched his Fellowship in 2011, offering $200k to young people who wanted to build rather than finish their degrees. Europe's equivalent, Project Europe, launched in 2025. That's a 14-year gap. It's not surprising when you consider that 54% of Europeans associate business failure with personal shame, compared to 27% of Americans. We've built a system that stigmatises risk. America has built one that rewards it.
That needs to change, ASAP.
Building as learning
Why? Europe's problem isn't a lack of talent or ambition. It's structural. Nobel Prize-winning economist Joel Mokyr describes economic progress as the collaboration between propositional knowledge — the "why," largely from academia — and prescriptive knowledge — the "how," which comes from practical application. Europe excels at the former: our universities rival America's best. Where we fail is the latter: turning research into products, and turning students into builders while they're at their most productive. Y Combinator’s age curve isn’t an accident. It’s what happens when a system rewards prescriptive knowledge early — when building is treated as learning, not a deviation from it.
For too long in the UK, the very best talent has been going from university into jobs in banking, consulting and law. They're good jobs, don't get me wrong. But too few are taking risks to found companies. And their potential impact on the economy is outsized.
This matters now more than ever. The barriers to building have never been lower. A 20-year-old who’s been working hands-on with modern AI systems for two years may have more relevant experience than someone who spent decades in a pre-AI paradigm. Brendan Foody dropped out of Georgetown and built Mercor into a $10bn company by age 22. Alexandr Wang left MIT at 19 and became a billionaire at 24 with Scale AI. New technology creates new paradigms, and new paradigms favour fresh thinking over accumulated credentials. The window for Europe to build the next generation of transformative companies is open — and we certainly have people just as capable (speak to Lovable’s Anton Osika and Legora’s Max Junestrand) — but it won't stay open indefinitely.
This isn't about fetishising dropouts. It's about opportunity cost. For ambitious technical builders who are already shipping products, university has become three years spent acquiring a credential that matters less than what they can build. The badge still carries weight in European hiring culture, even when the learning itself has become less relevant. For someone who's ready to build, that's a £150k+ sunk cost and three prime years spent on signalling rather than doing.
I did Computer Science at Cambridge. I regret not dropping out. By my second year, I was already building products that taught me more than my lectures did. I didn’t stay because it was optimal. I stayed because leaving felt irresponsible. That’s the problem.
We offered £240k salaries to two university students to take a year out from their studies and join the Jack and Jill team. Neither accepted. One went to start his own company. The other went back to university to continue his research. Both are incredibly talented. In the US, this wouldn’t be remarkable. In Europe, it was treated as borderline reckless.
So what needs to change?
Three lessons for Europe
Companies must hire for capability, not credentials. Hire for what someone can build, how fast they learn and how much agency they have — not where they went to school or whether they finished. The CV is a poor signal. What someone has shipped is much better.
Society should treat company-building as a first-class educational outcome, not a retention failure. Stepping out to build for a year — or three — and then returning shouldn't carry stigma or penalty. Make a year-in-startups normal, even celebrated.
Policy needs to support risk taking. The UK government recently expanded Enterprise Management Incentives, making it easier for startups to attract talent through equity. But we need much more: coordinated public-private efforts to close Mokyr's gap — turning academic excellence into commercial success — and create real pathways for young builders to take risk without permanently opting out of education, visas, or financial stability.
I was the only one in my Computer Science class at Cambridge in my year to go to YC. In contrast, 60% of the Stanford class applied. Something’s off.
We can no longer afford to make our most capable technical minds wait three years before they start.
The window is open. Europe has the talent, the universities and, increasingly, the capital. What we lack is permission to start early. The AI race won't wait for us to figure that out.
