Tiffany Zhong: What It Took for a High Schooler to Become the Youngest VC in the World

By Bretton Lam and Isabella Liang

Most people hear about venture capital for the first time in college. Tiffany Zhong entered the industry before she could vote. She became one of the youngest VCs ever at eighteen, built a fast-growing consumer app, and formed a career around insight, curiosity and the confidence to try things before feeling ready. Her story shows that youth is not a barrier. It can be an advantage. And in Tiffany’s case, it became the foundation of her entire career.

Her path into venture capital began without a roadmap. It started with curiosity, the kind that makes someone pay attention to small details most people overlook. “It was actually pretty random,” she said. “I was just spending a lot of time on Twitter and I was meeting a bunch of VCs and founders who were following me because I was tweeting about consumer apps and how Gen Z uses different types of apps.” What she didn’t realize at the time was that these observations were rare. Adults in tech were trying to understand Gen Z from the outside, while Tiffany was living inside the culture they were chasing. She would often send interesting apps to investors, not realizing she was already doing the work of a scout. Over time, they noticed she had something they didn’t: a real, lived understanding of Gen Z. Eventually, a firm offered her a full-time role right after high school. “They figured that I understood Gen Z much more than they did. I had friends who could use and try all these different apps and I got more signals and data from that,” she said. “I wasn’t trying to be a VC.”

Being the youngest person in the room came with challenges, but Tiffany chose to treat her age as an advantage rather than a limitation. “You’re the youngest person in the room. There are pros and cons to that,” she said. “It is really just thinking about how you can use your age to your advantage instead of letting it make you insecure.” That mindset shaped how she navigated rooms full of older founders, investors and operators. While others focused on how young she was, she focused on what she could contribute — fresh perspective, cultural fluency and an instinctive understanding of user behavior. Instead of hiding her age, she leaned into the parts of it that made her uniquely valuable.

Her interest in tech started long before she ever entered the investing world. As she put it, it began with a simple realization her dad helped her see: every product is created by a person. “My dad helped me realize that there are people behind these products that we use,” she said. “It made me realize that I could also be them. I could build anything.” For Tiffany, this was a shift in worldview, the moment she stopped seeing apps, platforms, or devices as mysterious things and started seeing them as choices made by normal people. Suddenly, building things felt possible. Suddenly, the walls of the tech world felt thinner.

As she learned more about startups, Tiffany didn’t seek out mentors in the traditional sense. Instead, she looked for people whose careers she admired and found ways to make the relationships mutually valuable. “I found people who had careers I wanted. I became friends with them and made it mutually beneficial,” she said. “I would try to teach them whatever was relevant to them. They wanted Gen Z insight. In exchange, I learned how to be a VC and how to start a company.” Her approach wasn’t about networking in a forced or transactional way. It was about being genuinely curious, genuinely helpful and genuinely open to learning. One of the people she met at seventeen became an important guide in her life. “He always jokes that he’s seen me grow up,” she said. “I’m like his fourth kid.”

These relationships became her real-world classroom. She absorbed how investors thought, how they evaluated risk, how they made decisions and how founders navigated the messy process of building something from scratch. It was an education shaped by conversations, experiences and direct exposure, bringing something far more powerful than any textbook.

Like many young founders, she entered the field with no prior training. “I had no knowledge about this stuff,” she said. “There wasn’t that much public knowledge either. I just learned along the way and found people smarter than me.” Venture capital is often seen as an exclusive or intimidating space. Tiffany breaks that idea instantly. She describes it not as a rigid profession but as a craft, one learned through observation, practice and time. She explains that every firm works differently, which makes real-world experience more important than any formal path. “It is more like an apprenticeship. You just have to go in and learn.”

Her early exposure shaped her instincts. She saw firsthand how unpredictable consumer behavior can be, how timing affects everything and how important it is to meet users where they are instead of imagining how they “should” be. These insights would eventually become the foundation for her next chapter.

Years later, Tiffany went on to build NoPlace, a fast-growing Gen Z social app, after noticing a major gap in the current social media landscape. “There is no social media for Gen Z anymore. Everything is just content,” she said. “There’s nothing social about it.” It bothered her that platforms had become entertainment machines instead of places for genuine connection. Platforms like Instagram and TikTok prioritize entertainment, not community. Tiffany wanted to bring back a space where people could meet others with similar interests. She saw the timing align with Gen Z’s interest in Y2K aesthetics and early-internet expression — a moment where people were craving something personal again. “It was the right time for a new social network,” she said. NoPlace wasn’t just a product idea. It was a response to a cultural shift she understood better than anyone else in the room.

Despite being featured in places like Forbes and TIME, Tiffany does not measure success through recognition. “It is really easy to get sucked into external validation,” she said. “I define success as being able to choose the people I work with, how I spend my time, and the projects I get to do.” For her, success is autonomy. It is the freedom to follow things that are interesting, to build with people she respects and to keep learning. Even as her profile grew, she stayed grounded in the work itself, not the attention surrounding it.

Gen Z continues to be her core specialization, but she now advises companies on product, community, growth and fundraising. To her, these areas all tie back to understanding people and how they behave. She knows what captures attention and what loses it. She understands how communities form, how platforms grow and how culture shifts. Her perspective combines intuition with experience, something that began with simple curiosity and turned into a decade of insight.

When asked what she wants young students and early founders to know, her message is clear. “You can just do things,” she said. “If you have an idea, build it. If you want to meet someone, figure out a way. Use the resources you have.” For Tiffany, taking initiative is everything. She also believes that the interests people held as kids are important, and that students shouldn’t lose sight of the things that bring them joy. As she put it, “Do not give up the things that bring you joy. If you want to find what you are truly obsessed with, look at what you did when you were a kid.”

Tiffany’s journey shows that you don’t need decades of experience to make an impact. You need curiosity, initiative and the willingness to learn alongside people who inspire you. Her path proves that taking action matters more than waiting for the perfect moment, and that sometimes, the most unexpected starts lead to the most defining stories. She built her career by following her curiosity, sharing what she knew and reaching out to people who influenced her. She stayed connected to the parts of her childhood that mattered and didn’t let age become a barrier.

Her story is a reminder to young founders that they don’t need permission to start. They only need the willingness to try, ask questions and explore the things that spark interest. Tiffany did all of that long before she realized where it would lead, and that early courage is what continues to make her journey meaningful.