Sierra cofounder says some of his best employees are AI-savvy 22-year-olds

AI-native graduates can have a key edge in the workplace, one startup founder says.

Clay Bavor, who cofounded Sierra in 2023, said some of the company’s most effective employees are in their early 20s because they’re more comfortable using AI than many experienced workers. “I can’t remember a time when a young person with no work experience, but with the right mindset and experience using some of these tools, has ever been so valued,” Bavor said during a recent interview on the “20VC” podcast.

The former Google exec said he has seen firsthand how AI is narrowing the gap between junior and senior employees. “Some of our most effective employees at the entire company are 22 or 23 years old and have been completely AI-pilled and have a comfort and facility with these tools that many of our more experienced folks don’t,” he said.

Bavor’s comments come as AI is reshaping the work recent graduates do, with some employers looking for candidates who can use AI effectively without sacrificing judgment, while also raising the bar for entry-level employees and changing what companies look for in early-career talent.

At Sierra, the shift to AI has prompted the company to overhaul its engineering interview process to be more AI-focused, Bavor said.

Instead of relying on traditional coding exercises, candidates are now asked to build an app using whichever AI coding tools they prefer. “We’re going to pay for your tokens and then build it.

Tell us how you went through building it,” Bavor said.

He expects that approach to spread across the company’s interview process. “I will be disappointed if in the next no more than two months not every one of our interviews has some strong AI native component to it,” he said.

AI has become a flashpoint for some recent graduates.

This year’s commencement season saw speakers booed for praising the technology, while some graduates told Business Insider they’ve struggled to find full-time jobs as companies increasingly cite AI when discussing layoffs and workforce changes.

But Bavor said that students who have spent years experimenting with generative AI while at university have a practical advantage over other midlevel employees. “Coming out of university as a master of these AI tools,” he said, “let me point you to a thousand companies that would love to have you infuse what you know into how they’re doing things.” Whether that optimism plays out across the broader AI industry remains an open question.

While several tech leaders have been bullish on AI native graduates’ job prospects, a recent working paper from researchers at Harvard Business School and INSEAD found that AI-native startups it examined from 2020 to 2024 hire about 15% fewer entry-level workers than their non-AI peers while hiring proportionally more senior and technical talent.