$12 billion crypto company boss says Gen Z ‘create an absurd amount of chaos’ and make him want to pull his hair out—but he’s betting on them anyway |
$12 billion crypto company boss says Gen Z ‘create an absurd amount of chaos’ and make him want to pull his hair out—but he’s betting on them anyway
It’s no secret that Gen Z often gets flak for showing up late to work, ghosting job interviews, refusing to do put in any overtime for free, and demanding senior titles and work-life balance before they’ve really earned it. Some bosses are fed up—firing fresh-faced Gen Z grads just months in and branding the whole cohort “unprofessional.” Even Gen Z workers have described themselves as the hardest generation to work with.
“They create an absurd amount of chaos sometimes and you want to pull your hair out,” echoes Matt Huang, the cofounder of the $12 billion crypto investment firm Paradigm.
“But then you see what they can do and it’s like, holy crap,” he told Colossus Review in April 2025. “Nobody else in the world could do that.”
Case in point: Paradigm’s first hire in 2018, Charlie Noyes, was a 19-year-old MIT dropout who walked into his first 10 a.m. meeting five hours late. By 2025, Noyes was general partner at the crypto company at just 25.
In 2020, Noyes was the one who saw MEV as a critical blockchain issue, leading Paradigm to become the lead investor in Flashbots—a company whose infrastructure now touches nearly every transaction on Ethereum and has established key market rules in the $450 billion ecosystem.
Noyes recently left the business, but he wasn’t the only bright young mind making waves at Paradigm.
Georgios Konstantopoulos, the firm’s CTO, joined the company just two years after graduating college in 2018 and has since become one of crypto’s most prolific engineers. Then there’s the........