“They create an absurd amount of chaos sometimes and you want to pull your hair out,” echoes Matt Huang, the cofounder of the $12 billion crypto investment firm Paradigm.
Case in point: Paradigm’s first hire in 2018, Charlie Noyes, was a 19-year-old MIT dropout who walked into his first 10 a.m. meeting five hours late. By 2025, Noyes was general partner at the crypto company at just 25.
In 2020, Noyes was the one who saw MEV as a critical blockchain issue, leading Paradigm to become the lead investor in Flashbots—a company whose infrastructure now touches nearly every transaction on Ethereum and has established key market rules in the $450 billion ecosystem.
Noyes recently left the business, but he wasn’t the only bright young mind making waves at Paradigm.
Georgios Konstantopoulos, the firm’s CTO, joined the company just two years after graduating college in 2018 and has since become one of crypto’s most prolific engineers. Then there’s the developer known only by his Discord handle, transmissions11, whom Paradigm reportedly found while he was still in high school.
“Sometimes I feel like I’m running the X-Men Academy,” Huang jokes, referencing the eccentric minds on his team—young mutants whose exceptional skills make all the chaos worth it.
Fortune reached out to Huang for comment.
“They bring a unique blend of talent and bold ideas that can rejuvenate any workforce,” wrote Geoffrey Scott, senior hiring manager at Resume Genius. “Gen Zers might have a bad rep, but they have the power to transform workplaces for the better.”
Because if companies don’t adapt, they risk getting left behind.
“Companies really need to wake up and smell the coffee,” Vigfusdottir warned. “The companies that will survive are listening and letting them in, because they’re changing things.”
Huang’s not the only future-thinking leader betting on the disruptive energy of Gen Z. The multimillionaire rapper and songwriter Will.i.am and Thrive Capital’s founder Josh Kushner are betting on the bright young minds of tomorrow too.
When he launched the venture capital firm at just 26, he faced pressure to bring in older, more seasoned hires. But, as he put it, “anyone who has experience that is talented will never want to work with a 26-year-old.” So, instead, he recruited the “smartest people that we knew who were our ages.”
These days, Kushner could easily hire industry veterans with glowing résumés—but he’d still rather “find that young, hungry person who’s willing to run through walls like we were ten years ago.”
