When Paradigm, a $12 billion crypto investment firm in San Francisco, hired its first Gen Z employee, Charlie Noyes, a 19-year-old MIT dropout, walked into his first morning meeting five hours late. Several studies and employers have called out Gen Z to be the hardest generation to work with.
They even made Paradigm's co-founder Matt Huang want to pull his hair out in frustration. "They create an absurd amount of chaos sometimes and you want to pull your hair out," he told Colossus. "But then you see what they can do and it’s like, holy crap. Nobody else in the world could do that.”
Noyes, for example, who is 25 now, is a general partner at the crypto company.
Recollecting their first meeting, Huang told the publication, that they met in a Telegram chat discussing Bitcoin Cash forks. “From his messages, I thought he was a 40-year-old with a beard, very cynical and craggy,” he said. “When he showed up to dinner, I was really surprised he was 19.”
Noyes had been obsessed with crypto currency when he was 12 and he discovered Bitcoin through gaming circles. By 19, he was already a published researcher in crypto applications and a two-time winner of Intel's science competition. He then dropping out of school to attend MIT, and then dropping out of MIT to join Paradigm.
Huang said the Gen Z employee's initial adjustment to office life was rocky—he thought “opining on pitch decks over email and coming to the office once a week” was normal—but when Huang explained his professional expectations of Noyes, the patience paid off.
A couple of the company's impressive young minds include its CTO Georgios Konstantopoulos who joined the company two years after graduating college in 2018 and is one of crypto’s most prolific engineers. The other is a developer known only by his Discord handle, @transmissions11, whom the company reportedly discovered while he was still in school.
Comparing the eccentric young minds with exceptional skills on his team with mutants, Huang said, “Sometimes I feel like I’m running the X-Men Academy."
Paradigm is not the only workplace that has witnessed such a turnaround with Gen Z workers, Fortune noted.
Geoffrey Scott, senior hiring manager at Resume Genius, told the publication: "They bring a unique blend of talent and bold ideas that can rejuvenate any workforce. Gen Zers might have a bad rep, but they have the power to transform workplaces for the better.”
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