Paradigm CEO Matt Huang feels he “runs X-Men Academy.” Other leaders complain about Gen Z New Hires, but the $12 billion crypto company chief is opposed to grain and has been promoted to C-Suite.
Gen Z often gets late for work, job interviews, refuses to wear overtime for free, and refuses to actually win a senior title and work-life balance.
Some bosses are tired. Fire months of fresh Gen Z alumni and brand the entire cohort as “non-experts.”
Even Gen Z workers describe themselves as the most difficult generation to work together.
“They sometimes create an absurd amount of confusion and you want to pull out your hair,” says Matt Juan, co-founder of the $12 billion crypto investment company paradigm.
“But you see what they can do and it’s like sacred crap,” he told the Colossus review. “No one else in the world could do that.”
Case in point: Charlie Noyes, the first employment in the paradigm, was a 19-year-old MIT dropout, who stepped into his first 10am meeting five hours later. Fast forward to today, Noese is the general partner of Crypto Company, only 25 years old.
He identified MEV as a key blockchain issue in 2020 and became a major investor in Flashbots. Its infrastructure now touches on almost every Ethereum transaction and establishes key market rules for the $450 billion ecosystem.
In 2020, Noyes saw MEV as a key blockchain issue and led the paradigm into a major investor in flashbots. This is a company whose infrastructure touches almost every transaction in Ethereum and has established key market rules in its $450 billion ecosystem.
And the only bright young mind that makes waves in paradigms is not Noyes.
The company’s CTO Georgios Konstantopoulos joined the company just two years after graduating from university in 2018, and has since become one of Crypto’s most prolific engineers. Then there is a developer known only by his mismatch handle, Transmissions11.
“I feel like I run an X-Men Academy from time to time,” Huang jokes, referring to the quirky mind of his team.
Fortune reached out to the fans for a comment.
As most generations did before them, millennials remember being labelled as snowflakes like work before climbing corporate ranks into management.
A survey of more than 960 employers from Intelligent found that one in six companies hesitates to hire a Gen Z worker.
But the same research that describes the youngest workers as the most difficult tasks points out that they should learn a lot from them, perhaps the corporate world will be shaken for a long time.
“They bring a unique blend of talent and bold ideas that can rejuvenate any workforce,” writes Geoffrey Scott, senior recruitment manager at Resume Genius. “Gen Zers may have bad reps, but they have the power to change the workplace for the better.”
If the company does not adapt, there is a risk of being left behind.
Tobba Vigfusdottir, a psychologist and CEO of Kara Connect, a workplace wellbeing platform, recently told Fortune that employers need to bend over Gen Z’s desires (flexible work policy, sustainability pledge, purpose-driven work).
“Companies really need to wake up and smell coffee,” warned Vigfusdottir. “The surviving companies are listening and putting them in because they’re changing things.”
Huang is not the only future-thinking leader betting on Z’s destructive energy. Heavy-dollar rapper and songwriter Will.i.am and Thrive Capital founder Josh Kushner are also betting on the bright young minds of tomorrow.
In fact, Kushner previously told Fortune he particularly likes to hire people with less than four years of industry experience.
When he launched a venture capital firm at just 26, he faced pressure to bring about older and more skilled recruitment. But as he said, “Nobody with talented experience wants to work with a 26-year-old.” So instead, he recruited “the smartest people we knew we were our age.”
And the bet paid off. His company invested early in billions of dollars worth of startups, including Openai, which was recently valued at $300 billion.
Recently, Kushner was able to easily hire veterans in the industry with a sparkling resume, but he still “found a young, hungry man trying to run through the wall like he did a decade ago.”
Will.i.am has come to a similar conclusion. The Grammy-winning Black Eyed Peas frontman may be best known for his chart-topping hits, but behind the scenes he is also a serious investor. He supported Tesla, Open and Pinterest before they became common names. And now he is betting on Gen Z for his next investment.
why? He believes the next big breakthrough in technology will come from young innovators at MIT and Stanford. “They are young children, and they are indigenous to this,” Will. I.Am told Fortune. “So you want to hunt it. That’s the only thing I’m focusing on.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.
