Roblox's Peter Yang wants his kids to skip college and corporate life to bootstrap businesses

• AI is lowering entry barriers for entrepreneurship and changing career paths.
• Roblox product lead Peter Yang said he wants his kids to skip corporate life and start businesses.
• Tech layoffs and AI advances are prompting new entrepreneurial opportunities, Yang said.

Artificial intelligence is lowering the barrier to entrepreneurship, and one Roblox product lead says it could upend the traditional path of corporate work.

Roblox product lead and content creator Peter Yang recently spoke on venture capital firm a16z's podcast about the future of work in the era of AI. Yang said he wants his own kids, who are 4 and 7 years old, to bypass college and corporations in favor of entrepreneurship.

"I want them to build bootstrap businesses in high school, and they can skip the whole college and corporate life," Yang said.

AI has enabled platforms that let users build entire businesses on a single app, offering services such as storefront creation and marketing. These "business-in-a-box" services are helping people quickly spin up businesses with exponential growth potential, podcast host Anish Acharya said. It's an alternative to becoming a number at a big company. Postly, for example, is an AI-powered platform that helps manage all of your social media accounts in one place.

These AI-built businesses could operate with teams as small as a single person, making it work with the help of agents.

As companies become larger, Yang said, they can become worse places to work. He recalled long meetings at a previous employer that were "wasting my life."

Today, there are pathways to help more people become founders and run small businesses the way they want. He said you could have a product team of two or three people supported by AI agents, rather than a 10-person team. Yang said the younger generation is picking up on that.

"I hope more companies will stay small, and I think the founders of this generation realize that they want to stay as small as possible," Yang told Acharya.

The poor tech job market is also opening up opportunities for people to dream big, Yang said.

US tech layoffs in the first quarter were at their worst level since 2023, and AI is a big reason.

"Maybe you lost your job, but now you can actually do your own thing," he said.