Teen fintech
Teen banking apps buy future customers
Teen banking apps teach money management barely better than financial education ever has, and their real product is a customer who stays past 18.
Section
Youth
What the young are actually building, trading and buying, as opposed to what their elders say they are doing.
AI side hustles
Selling the shovels
The surest earner in the AI-business boom is the person selling the course, and young would-be founders should price the pitch by the regulators’ record, not by the screenshots.
Prediction markets
Kalshi’s age limit misses the point
Raising Kalshi’s minimum age to 21 would be tidy but beside the point, because the product is a federally licensed sportsbook and its youngest customers are its smallest problem.
Anysphere and Cursor
Cursor’s moat was thin
Four MIT students built one of the fastest-growing software firms on record, then sold it to a buyer with its own models, which shows how thin the moat was.
Teens and chatbots
Chatbot homework is not a cheating epidemic
More than half of American teenagers now use chatbots for schoolwork, and schools that treat this as a cheating epidemic are measuring the wrong thing.
Teenage app builders
AI apps build habits, not businesses
Students building apps with AI are acquiring a useful habit and a modest line on a university application, and almost none of them are acquiring a business.
Meme coins and the young
Meme-coin platforms win, launchers lose
Anyone with a phone can launch a meme coin, but only the platform reliably profits, while nearly everyone else, launchers included, is left with a token nobody wants.
Roy Lee and Cluely
Blame the technical interview, not the student
A 21-year-old suspended by Columbia for cheating has raised $15m on the strength of an advertisement, and the more interesting defendant is the technical interview, not the student.
Young Americans and crypto
Crypto is a young man’s hobby
Crypto is not a youth movement but a young man’s hobby, and the best evidence says it has been shrinking since 2021.
Pranjali Awasthi
Delv.AI has a story, not yet a business
A $450,000 raise by a 16-year-old founder shows that investors will bet on a story; it does not yet show that Delv.AI has a business.
Finfluencers
Pursue the firms that pay finfluencers
Regulators are right to pursue finfluencers, but the better target is the firm that pays them, because the young investor’s trust is real and will outlast any single prosecution.
Teen spending
Teenage tastes barely change
Piper Sandler’s teen survey shows a generation whose tastes are remarkably stable, and investors who read every wobble in it as a trend should be more sceptical of the headline numbers.
Alexandr Wang
Scale AI runs on human labour
Scale AI’s founder built a billion-dollar firm on the unglamorous fact that machine intelligence needs human labour, and its next test is whether that remains true.
Young retail traders
Look at the app, not the teenager
The GameStop frenzy is told as a morality play about reckless youth, but young traders are neither a mob nor sages, and regulators should look at the app before the user.
Gitanjali Rao
Gitanjali Rao’s method is the lesson
The interesting thing about TIME’s first Kid of the Year is not her gadgets but the method behind them, which any adult with a budget could copy and few do.