Welcome to the era of vibe-coding millionaires and billionaires.
A new generation of Silicon Valley garage startups has arrived, but this time it’s the bedroom coders, some of whom are still in their teens.
In a popcorn-ceilinged event venue in Flatiron, 19-year-old Armaan Aggarwal told me how he worked on an AI-powered note-taking app that was sold to education company Quizlet and sold a grade-tracking app before that. “It was originally just built for my friends — surprisingly did pretty well. I was able to monetize it and sell it. Completely changed my life,” he said, without saying how much he sold the app for, beyond calling it “life-changing” money.
Aggarwal, who initially sparred with the event’s bouncers just to let him into the venue — he was under 21 — now works for Replit, a company which lets users build apps with AI.
The company is helping seed this next generation of vibe-coding entrepreneurs, joining the ranks of vibe-coding apps Lovable and Cursor, also made by Gen Zers. (At 29, Alexander Wang, the billionaire who sold Scale AI to Meta, sits on the cusp.)