Teen fintech
Cards on the table
Banking apps for teenagers teach money management about as well as financial education ever has, which is to say barely, and their real product is a customer who stays until 18 and beyond.
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
Swap meet
Raising the minimum age on Kalshi to 21 would be tidy and mostly beside the point, because the product is a sportsbook with a federal licence and its youngest customers are its smallest problem.
Anysphere and Cursor
Cursor on the quad
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
Dog ate my homework
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
Hello, world, again
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
Pump and circumstance
Launching a meme coin is open to anyone with a phone, and that is the problem: the platform collects its fees whatever happens, while almost everyone else, the launchers included, ends up with a token nobody wants.
Roy Lee and Cluely
Cheat sheet
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
Coin of the realm
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
Seed money
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
Follow the leader
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
Brand loyalty card
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
Labour of data
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
Stonks go up, and down
The GameStop frenzy has been told as a morality play about the young and the reckless, but the evidence says that they are neither a mob nor a crowd of sages, and that regulators should look at the app before the user.
Gitanjali Rao
Lead role
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.
