This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with 18-year-old Arlan Rakhmetzhanov, the founder of AI coding agents startup Nozomio, who just completed Y Combinator and raised $6.2 million in funding. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
When I was around 11 years old, my dad told me about Y Combinator for the first time. We were on a walk by the river in my hometown of Almaty, Kazakhstan, and I didn’t really understand the concept of a school for founders — but it captured my imagination.
Both of my parents are entrepreneurs, and my own journey started young, helping sell clothes at my grandmother’s store after school, where she gave me a small cut of each sale I helped make.
In the years that followed, I started reading more about Silicon Valley and figures like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg. They were self-taught engineers who didn’t just manage people, but knew how to build things.
I took my first computer science course as a freshman and taught myself coding at my American high school in Kazakhstan. I started building my first company at 15, when ChatGPT came out.
I got kicked out of math class for taking an investor call
By junior year, I’d been ready to leave school for a while. I was bored of my classes, and I was coding at every waking moment, and I just wanted to live in that space forever.
In December, I launched my current company, the product lab Nozomio, after becoming interested in code generation and experimenting with Cursor Composer and GitHub Copilot. The first tool I’m building is Nia, a context tool for coding agents.
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In January, I published a minimum viable product on Product Hunt, and it got “product of the day,” and I started cold-calling YC founders for feedback.
One wrote me a $5,000 angel check and introduced me to the VC firm LocalGlobe. I got kicked out of my math class for taking the investor call, which ultimately led to my pre-seed, but luckily, the principal let me take it in her office.
In March, I finally had a reason to leave school: to attend the Entrepreneurs First talent investor in London. But the investment wasn’t a great deal, and I’d closed my pre-seed shortly after touching down, so I ended up dropping out.
My mom was pissed, but realized she had to let go
In the back of my mind, it was still a childhood dream to get into Y Combinator. I’d applied twice unsuccessfully — and my dad’s application had also been rejected for his own AI startup, which fueled my resolve even more.
I applied in late April and got an interview invite in May for the summer batch. I was so nervous I thought my heart was going to stop. The next day, I got a call in the middle of the night in London saying I’d been accepted, and I just started to scream.
I initially told my mom I might go back to school eventually. But when I flew out to San Francisco in June, that’s when I told her I was dropping out for good. She was pissed for a solid week, worried I wouldn’t have a backup plan if things didn’t work out. But ultimately, she realized how serious I was and that she had to let go.
Being young gives you a head start
Being a young founder has definite advantages. Even though I don’t have a Stanford Ph.D., I was told my YC partner selected me because I ship so fast, which is critical in the age of AI.
And being young gives you a head start. There’s still time if you fail, which is why young people try crazy things.
In April, I closed a pre-seed for Nozomio that was less than $1 million, and I closed a seed a few weeks before YC Demo Day for a total of $6.2 million. The seed was led by CRV, BoxGroup, LocalGlobe, and Y Combinator, with participation from angels including Paul Graham and the CTO of Spotify.
I recently got my O-1 visa, and for now, I’m running the company on my own. I plan to use the funds to make my first hire once I can’t handle all of Nozomio’s customers singlehandedly. My aim is to become the leanest AI startup in terms of talent density, and to do that, I want to hire other young builders like myself.
