Seed Money, No Soil

Source: “Getting Hired Is Too Hard, So They’re Starting Companies Instead”

By Jo Constantz

Bloomberg Businessweek, April 14, 2026

That’s the argument: Colleges, employers, and venture funds have formed an accidental coalition—each withdrawing from formation in their own way—and together they are producing a generation that skips the very developmental stages that make founders, employees, and citizens worth investing in. They are not launching entrepreneurs. They are extracting children.

An 18-year-old raises $2 million before finishing his first semester at Carnegie Mellon. He joined a fraternity. He enjoyed campus life. Then investors started committing 10 minutes into calls, and he took a leave of absence in January. Bloomberg reports this as resourcefulness. I read it as a system cannibalizing its own seed corn.

It gets worse. Two Stanford undergraduates take an AI healthcare idea—hatched as a class project—to Y Combinator and begin testing it in hospitals before they reach legal drinking age. Zero years of clinical experience. Zero years of medical training. Zero years of understanding what happens when a system fails and a patient pays the price. And we handed them accelerator backing and hospital access. In what universe is this responsible? In a universe that has stopped asking whether founders have been formed before they are funded.

I know what formed founders look like. I am a venture advisor at Maniv Mobility, and one of our portfolio companies—Harbinger Motors—is what happens when formation precedes funding. CEO John Harris spent years at Boeing as a structures engineer, then moved through Faraday Future’s battery systems, then Xos Trucks where he invented low-cost battery architecture and held multiple patents, then Anduril where he took a product from prototype to volume production in under three years. His co-founder and CTO Phillip Weicker brought 20 years of battery and drivetrain development from QuantumScape, Coda Automotive, and Canoo. Their COO Will Eberts designed control surfaces and landing gear systems on airplanes still flying today. Their VP of Business Development spent 30 years in chassis and commercial truck bodies, growing Spartan Motors from $10 million in sales to more than $500 million.

These founders did not hatch a class project and pitch Y Combinator. They spent years inside the systems they are now transforming—long enough to understand not just what was broken, but why previous attempts to fix it had failed. The result? $363 million raised. A $500 million valuation. FedEx ordering trucks. They are building components in-house for $1,500 that tier-one suppliers used to quote at multiples of that. That is not the confidence of youth. That is the authority of formation. And it is the difference between a company that will still exist in 10 years and one that will be a line item in a VC’s write-off column.

But formation is not what we celebrate. We celebrate the dropout. The Bloomberg article invokes Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Michael Dell, and Mark Zuckerberg as proof that skipping formation works. Consider what that mythology actually produced. Zuckerberg built a platform so indifferent to its consequences that it destabilized elections across multiple democracies, amplified genocide in Myanmar, and turned adolescent mental health into a cost of doing business—and he could not bring himself to take responsibility until Congress physically seated him in a chair. Gates built a monopoly so ruthless the Department of Justice dismantled it. Jobs denied his own daughter and humiliated subordinates as management philosophy. Musk has mass-fired workforces by email, mocked employees publicly, and treated human beings as firmware to be updated or deleted.

These are not formation success stories. These are formation absence stories—brilliant minds that were never finished, never formed into the kind of leaders who understand that capability includes how you treat people. And now we are telling 18-year-olds to follow that playbook. We are not just skipping professional formation. We are skipping human formation. And then we celebrate the wreckage as genius.

The Bloomberg article frames student entrepreneurship as a rational response to a broken entry-level job market. That framing is exactly backwards. Why is the entry-level market broken? Because the same companies these students admire—and the same AI tools they are building on—have been systematically hollowing out the starter roles that once formed people. The kids are not escaping a broken system. They are being recycled through it. And here is the cruel irony: some of these AI startups will, by design, further eliminate the very entry-level positions that their founders’ classmates are struggling to find. The ouroboros eats faster.

The colleges are abetting every step of this withdrawal. Entrepreneurship classes once considered niche are now packed with waitlists. On-campus accelerators are at capacity. Johns Hopkins drew more than 860 incubator applications this year, up from 50 five years ago. Rice’s entrepreneurship enrollment more than doubled in three years. Stanford’s engineering professors describe students going from classroom to $4 million in three months. This is not education. This is acceleration without foundation. The university’s job is to form minds—to teach a student how to think across disciplines, how to tolerate ambiguity, how to distinguish between a clever idea and a durable one. When a university turns its campus into a pitch competition, it is outsourcing its formative mission to the market. And the market does not form people. The market prices them.

The venture capitalists are the most honest actors in this story, and that should terrify everyone. One founder in the article says it plainly: investors come in at low valuations because the student does not kno