everyone thinks i'm older than i am

Everyone thinks I'm older than I am.

At my first real job - the AI2 Incubator in Seattle - nobody knew I was 19 until the contract came back. My boss looked at it and went "what the fuck? you're 19?" The youngest person on the team was late twenties. Most were in their thirties. Founders I was working with had kids older than my work experience.

I couldn't legally drink for a year and a half of being there. My coworkers gave me shit about it in the playful way people do when something is genuinely absurd. Happy hours, I'm sitting there with a Sprite.

At Moondream, they assumed I was the same age as my two friends on the team. At Foundations - the community of 350+ founders I work out of in Seattle - I don't think anyone has ever guessed below 23. Most guess 24, 25. Everyone there has families, companies they've been running for years. One of them recently raised $50 million. We have long conversations about product strategy and they don't seem confused by the end.

I'm 22.

And I keep trying to figure out why. Not in a "wow I'm so impressive" way. In a genuine "how did this happen and can I be honest with myself about it" way.

Because I don't think anything I did was special. I really don't. When I trace it back, what I find isn't talent or genius. What I find is four other people.

I grew up with a tight group of friends. Four of them, specifically, who I spent years alongside. They were at my house every weekend. We were at each other's houses every weekend. For years. Through high school, through college, through career pivots and existential crises and everything in between. We grew up like family.

All of us were children of immigrants. None of our parents were in tech, or medicine, or finance. They were pragmatic people who built lives in a country that wasn't theirs, and that pragmatism - the way they approached every decision with "what is the logical thing to do here, given what we have?" - it just... seeped into us. Without anyone ever naming it.

We grew up on the Eastside of Seattle. Redmond, Bellevue, Kirkland. Microsoft campus territory. A lot of our classmates had parents in big tech. Six-figure households where the emphasis was on having the full high school experience. Go to prom. Do four years. Apply to colleges the normal way. Have fun.

I get it. There's real value in that. We missed some of it.

But when we were 16, four of us looked at Running Start - the program where you take college classes during high school, for free, at Bellevue College - and the math was just obvious. Two years of college paid for. A Direct Transfer Associate degree that guaranteed every credit would transfer to any Washington state university. No ambiguity. No risk.

We didn't have a strategy session about it. We didn't weigh pros and cons in a spreadsheet. It was more like... of course we're doing this. Why wouldn't we? Our families needed the financial relief. The credits were guaranteed. The path was right there.

So we took it.

That's the thing about having friends like this. The decisions didn't feel brave or pragmatic in the moment. They felt like the obvious thing. Because when everyone around you is making the same logical choice, it stops feeling like a choice at all. It's just what you do.

Between Running Start, some APs, and summer classes, I showed up at the University of Washington with about two and a half years of credits. By the first quarter of my second year, I had nothing left but my capstone and some electives. I got to TA. Take it easy. Wait for the right thing to line up.

The right thing turned out to be the AI2 Incubator. And suddenly I was 19, working full-time in AI, while most people my age were college sophomores.

Here's the compounding:

Summer birthday: always the youngest in every class.
Running Start: 2 free years of college.
DTA: guaranteed credit transfer.
APs + summer quarters: entered UW with 2.5 years done.
Graduated summa cum laude at 19.
Full-time in AI while peers were still in school.

Every one of these decisions bought me 6-12 months. Stack them up and you get what looks like a multi-year head start. From the outside, it looks extraordinary. From the inside, each step was just... the next obvious thing.

But I can only say that because I was surrounded by people for whom the obvious thing was always the pragmatic thing. If I'd been in a different friend group - one where the default was "let's just do what everyone else is doing" - I'm honestly not sure I'd have made any of those choices. The environment was the decision-maker. I was just in it.

I wrote recently about the people who changed my career trajectory. Varun, who referred me to AI2 without being asked. Jacob, who hired a 19-year-old with no big tech credentials. Jay, who took notes on what I was saying in a conversation he had no reason to care about.

Those were the inflection points. The serendipity.

But underneath the serendipity, there were these four friends who I've barely talked about publicly. And looking backward, I think they were the foundation that made the serendipity possible.

Because the reason I was prepared when Varun's referral came was that I'd been building things and cold-emailing people and showing up. And the reason I was doing that was because my friends were doing their versions of it. We influenced each other's decisions constantly. Not through formal accountability or masterminds or any of that LinkedIn stuff. Through proximity. Through the daily texture of spending years alongside people who just... moved.

One of them is the same age as me. Got into Y Combinator. Raised $500k. Building a company. Ultra pragmatic in the exact same way.

Another landed in quant. One of the most competitive fields that exists.

Another spent six months in Central Asia in a language program that accepts maybe a dozen people. He also learned Persian just because he grew up with a couple of us and loved the culture enough to learn the whole language. That's its own kind of pragmatism - investing that deeply in the people around you.

Another is finishing medical school and will be a practicing doctor by 25. His dad works a trade. His mom works at a salon. Nobody in his family was a doctor. Sound familiar? He just ran through it. Been my friend since I was 10.

Five kids from immigrant families. None of our parents were in the industries we ended up in. We figured it out together. By 22-23, we've ended up at a YC company, a quant desk, a State Department language program, medical school, and an AI startup.

And we all attribute a lot of it to each other. That's the part I want to be really clear about. This isn't "I made great decisions." This is "I was in a group where the default was to move, and I absorbed that default."

This is where it connects to something I've been thinking about a lot.

I wrote about context transfer being dead and how the divide that's emerging isn't about intelligence or credentials. It's about whether you're proactive or reactive. Whether you initiate or respond.

And I keep seeing people frame proactivity as a personal trait. Like some people are born proactive and others aren't. "Oh, they're a self-starter." As if it's genetic.

I don't think that's right. I think proactivity is environmental. I think you absorb it from the people you spend the most time with. If your five closest friends all default to action, you default to action. If they default to comfort, you default to comfort. Not because you're weak. Because humans are social animals and we model the behavior of our tribe whether we mean to or not.

My friend group was my tribe. We played hard and we worked hard. If one of us was slacking, we all felt it. Nobody said "hey, be more accountable." The accountability was ambient. It was in the texture of the relationship.

And looking back, I think that's the real compound interest. Not the Running Start credits. Not the summer classes. Those were just the outputs. The input was the environment. The people.

I got lucky with my people. That's fate. That's serendipity. I keep coming back to the idea that serendipity doesn't scale. And this is another example. I can't replicate my friend group for someone else. I can't bottle the thing that made us push each other. It just happened because we were in the same place at the same time with the same immigrant-family pragmatism and the same refusal to default.

But here's what I CAN say, and I think this is the thing that actually matters:

Everything I just described - the compounding, the pragmatic decisions, the environmental proactivity - none of it is age-dependent.

I started at 16. But someone reading this at 28 or 35 or 42 could do the exact same thing in a compressed timeline, starting right now. The specific decisions would be different. It wouldn't be Running Start and APs. It would be joining the right community. Showing up physically somewhere that makes being proactive the default. Finding three or four people who move and spend as much time near them as possible.

You can't control fate. You can't force serendipity. But you can control your environment. And your environment controls more of your decisions than you think.

The Eastside kids with the big tech parents weren't less capable than us. They were in an environment where the default was different. And most of them just... followed the default. Not because they're lazy. Because defaults are powerful and nobody tells you you can opt out of them.

We opted out. Not because we were smarter. Because our circumstances made the default more expensive than the alternative. Immigrant math.

But you don't need immigrant math to opt out of the default. You just need to be around people who already have. The modeling does the rest.

I'm turning 23 in five months. By then, most of my peers will be in their first year out of college. Some of them don't have jobs yet. Not because they're not talented. The market is brutal right now.

And I'll have been working in AI for almost four years. Building a company with 300,000 lines of code. Writing blog posts that people in their thirties send to each other. Having conversations at Foundations that nobody thinks twice about because they assume I'm just another 25-year-old founder.

The gap looks like talent. It's not. It's five or six obvious decisions that compounded. And those decisions only happened because I was surrounded by people who made them feel obvious.

I can only connect these dots looking backward. I never could have going forward. When we enrolled in Running Start at 16, I wasn't thinking about compound interest or head starts or career timelines. I was thinking "this saves my family money and my friends are doing it."

That's it. That was the whole calculation.

So I guess what I'm really saying is: thank you. To those four people who I spent every weekend with for years. Who absorbed the same pragmatism from the same immigrant households and turned it into a shared operating system that we never named but always ran.

You made the obvious things obvious. And the obvious things compounded into everything.

I don't think success is arbitrary. But I don't think it's individual, either. It's environmental. It's the people you're near. It's the defaults you absorb. It's the fact that at 16, I happened to be surrounded by four people who said "of course we're doing Running Start, why wouldn't we?" like it was the most natural thing in the world.

The compound interest of obvious decisions is indistinguishable from talent if you give it enough time.

But the obvious decisions? Those came from the people. Not from me.

-parsa