From Harvard to Silicon Valley: Teenage girl bets big on AI startup

Zhang, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, said her family had been overjoyed when she was accepted into Harvard a year earlier. "When I got to Harvard, it felt like I finally reached the thing I'd been fighting for," she wrote in a LinkedIn post announcing her decision to take a gap year.

But after months of attending clubs, career fairs, and following "the Harvard pathways," Zhang said she realized she had lost her motivation. "The only thing that truly drove me was building. Creating new things. Solving interesting problems in interesting ways."

Faced with what she called a defining moment, she decided to take a risk on herself. Turning down internship offers, Zhang moved to San Francisco to live in a hacker house with her college roommate and co-founder, Julia Hudson, as they went "all in" on their startup.

"When I told them [her parents] I was leaving college, they thought that was insane," Zhang told Business Insider. "I want to return to Harvard, no matter what, but I would’ve regretted not taking this opportunity."

19-year-old Christine Zhang left Harvard this summer to cofound her AI startup with her best friend. Photo courtesy of Zhang's LinkedIn

By the end of the summer, Veil had raised more than $1 million in funding, convincing the young founders to stay in the Bay Area and expand their team to six members. The company recently shifted its focus to generative optimization, an approach that applies search engine optimization principles to large language models.

Zhang said it is challenging to work closely with a co-founder who is also her best friend, especially because they are "workaholics" and live together. "To be honest, we haven’t fully figured that balance out yet."

Being a young female founder in Silicon Valley, she added, brings its own challenges. She said she often meets men who claim to be highly technical but lack the depth of expertise they project, whereas women tend to have more concrete expectations than just "vibe coding."

Some people even underestimate her and Hudson because of their age and gender. "I wouldn’t discourage females from coming into the space, but it’s definitely not the easiest."

Although she misses many aspects of college life, Zhang said she does not regret leaving Harvard. "It’s a lot of people’s dream to be in San Francisco building a company," she said. "There are things I’m missing out on, but there are also a lot of things I should be incredibly grateful for."

Her decision mirrors that of another Harvard dropout, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. Gates said in an interview for CNBC’s Make It series "The Moment" that Microsoft might not have succeeded if he had completed his university degree instead of leaving early to pursue an opportunity in the emerging software industry.

"It was good to be early," he said. "We learned a lot [about how to run a business], and we moved up to Seattle, where it was easier for us to hire [the best software engineers]."

Zhang still has up to 7 years to return to Harvard. She said whether she does so next year will depend on her company’s progress. "I would really enjoy taking a year to focus on school and become fully immersed in my classes when I return," she said.

For now, she remains committed to what she signed off in her LinkedIn post as "building, being fulfilled, and breaking bottles."