For Arlan Rakhmetzhanov, 19, there is no middle ground. Either he builds a company as valuable as Google, he says, or he fails and ends up on the streets. He started coding at 15 in his native Kazakhstan, completed a couple of summer programs in San Francisco, and cold-DM'ed every Y Combinator founder he could find on LinkedIn until one gave him an angel check for his first company at age 17. That company, now the YC-backed Nozomio, is an API index for AI agents ' a tool that helps AI agents find and use software services ' and has raised more than $6 million in funding to date. 'I either win or lose, and a lot of young founders have the same mindset,' he told TechCrunch. 'They just want to win.' Young founders like Rakhmetzhanov are building under a new set of pressures. Investors are throwing more capital at them, yet the expectation to hit that 'north star' milestone ' the one big number investors are chasing ' hasn't relaxed, and every misstep along the way is now publicly...
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