I Raised $25 Million at 23. Here’s My Advice to Gen Z Entrepreneurs

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, the 23-year-old CEO of Artisan. It’s been edited for length and clarity.

When I was 7, I had a candy shop in my bedroom. It wasn’t really a company, but we technically made revenue. When I was 13, I started buying and reselling domains.

I didn’t even apply to any universities. I knew in high school I wasn’t going to go.

I started an app for booking cleaners after finishing high school in London. It turned out to be a terrible, tarpit idea, but I learned a lot about how to build a company and how not to build a company.

I founded Artisan when I was 21

At the beginning of 2023, I came up with Artisan. In January 2023, I spent a couple of months trying to find a cofounder and building the company. It was like a failed engine. I interviewed 100 cofounders, and didn’t find anyone particularly good.

In August 2023, I got another wave of motivation. It moved pretty fast then, and I got very lucky early on. Within the first month, we had a very basic prototype. We managed to raise $1.75 million just from a LinkedIn message.

People are always like, “How did you raise money so early on?” That’s complete luck.

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We got into Y Combinator a week after that. We launched V0 of Artisan in 2024, but the product barely worked. In June of last year, we launched V0.1, and that’s when we started to see some growth. Our $12 million seed round was wrapped up in August, when I was 22.

We raised a Series A that we closed in Q1 of this year at $25 million, which has enabled us to build out the team and hire a lot of really great talent and to double down on product again. We now have $6 million in annual recurring revenue.

My advice for Gen Z tech entrepreneurs

There’s a relatively built-out playbook you can follow.

First of all, educate yourself on the space and understand the type of company that you’re building, how to build it, but then more broadly, what the startup ecosystem looks like.

Do everything you can to be in the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem, rather than whatever town or city you’re from. If I tried to raise that first round of funding in London, I probably would’ve gotten $100,000 or $200,000, a terrible valuation. We were able to raise a $15 million valuation with no products and just an idea because we went down the SF route, rather than the European route.

You really need to have a strong founding team. I don’t have a degree, and I’ve never had a job. Finding someone who can help with whatever you’re weak at is super important.

Reading high-quality books and watching Y Combinator videos helped me early on. “Zero to One” by Peter Thiel — he has some questionable opinions beyond the book, but that’s a really good one. “Principles” by Ray Dalio and “The Lean Startup” by Eric Ries are really strong.

People also don’t go all in. They’ll dip their toe in. Especially when you’re early on, you need to make the company your life. You should be working 80+ hours a week and moving to San Francisco.

That’s what I didn’t do in January 2023, and it’s the reason I had the false start. I was doing it for 30-40 hours a week, and it never got the momentum it needed. I did it differently in August.

Raising funding is really difficult if you don’t have experience. You have to put yourself in positions to get lucky. Meet the right people, network. Build a credible story and look like you’re going to succeed.

The most important thing is building a product that people want. If you do that, you don’t even need to fundraise or have a great team.

Here’s how Gen Z founders are different from their predecessors

There’s more of an approach of doing whatever you need to do to get attention with younger founders. We were part of it with our controversial billboard campaign.

Young people are just more willing to do what they need to get eyeballs.

The biggest AI companies now are foundation models. You couldn’t really do that well as a Gen Zer, because you don’t have the experience. I think we’re going to see that shift pretty dramatically over the years, as product layer becomes more relevant and the foundation models mature.

You’ve already seen it with Cursor. They’re above $500 million ARR now. There’s a bunch of other stories like that emerging. This is where younger founders will start to shine more, when the app layer pushes through.