Young people are AI's winners

The oldest hire at Perch was 35.

Maybe we should have hired some older people :) But the employees who had the most impact at Perch were almost always the youngest, the least experienced, and the most unformed. They didn't know how things were supposed to be done. They asked questions that more experienced people had stopped asking. They jumped into problems without waiting to be handed a playbook. They were coachable in a way that's hard to manufacture.

That's a "high slope" employee. Not where you are, but how fast you're moving.

I know a lot of young people are scared right now. The narrative is brutal: AI is eating entry-level jobs, companies are investing in tools instead of headcount, the on-ramp that previous generations used to build careers is narrowing. That fear is legitimate. I'm not going to tell you it isn't.

At Perch, no day was the same. The job was never fully defined. The market shifted, the product changed, the priorities reshuffled constantly. The people who thrived weren't the ones with the most experience. They were the ones who could figure out the how when they only knew the what. They learned fast, adapted faster, and brought zero assumptions about how things were supposed to work. They operated from first principles, and they were very skeptical.

An AI environment demands exactly this. That is exactly what AI rewards.

The experienced employee has a real opportunity here too. The right tools, in the right hands, can make a great operator 10x more effective. But it comes with a cost: unlearning, going back to first principles, staying on top of a world that keeps moving when there's already a full plate in front of you. That's genuinely hard. That doesn't mean they can't get there.

The young person doesn't carry that weight yet.

Every job is now a startup. The old path is gone. Learn a process, execute it reliably, get promoted. That playbook doesn't exist anymore. What replaces it is messier and scarier and also genuinely more open. The skills that matter now are the ones you already have: curiosity, coachability, the ability to learn faster than the environment changes.

The path isn't laid out for anyone anymore. You just have less to unlearn before you start walking.

This pictures is some of us circa 2019. Most of us had never had a real job. We built something extraordinary.