Gen Z can’t catch a break. Entry-level jobs are disappearing; around 40% of bosses say they plan to hire fewer graduates because AI can do the job more cheaply, and younger workers are regularly criticized for arriving late and refusing to work overtime for free. Jeetu Patel, Cisco’s president and chief product officer, isn’t buying it: He’s just given one of the company’s most important jobs to a 27-year-old he found hidden in the organizational chart “five levels” below him.
“I gave him unlimited tokens because he’s going to refactor the code,” Patel said. Fortune during a small round table dinner. “So I’m like, you can go for it, you can go crazy.”
The “him” is Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy, or “Paddy,” as Patel affectionately calls him. He joined Cisco in 2025 after the $429 billion tech giant acquired EzDubs, the real-time translation startup that Krishnamurthy co-founded in 2023. And although he arrived as a former founder with CEO experience, he was, in Patel’s words, “buried in the organization doing something non-strategic.”
That changed when Patel visited Cisco’s San Francisco office and the two men started talking. Krishnamurthy thought he could rewrite Cisco’s existing code with a team of two people. Patel says even his own team’s most AI-advanced members didn’t think that way.
So he gave himself four weeks to prove it, with the ultimate goal of rewriting 98% of Cisco’s existing code within 24 months.
Now he’s looking for more Paddys: young recruits who will “challenge the system and the status quo” or, as he puts it, be “an energizer bunny who goes out and kind of energizes everyone.”
Cisco’s president says Gen Z should be teaching their veterans, not doing data entry, and he’s OK with the resulting tension.
In most companies, only someone with decades of experience under their belt would be assigned a project of this scale. Patel thinks that’s a problem.
“If you don’t hire (workers) early in their careers and just let your workforce continue as it was, where are the new ideas being injected? How do you challenge the status quo?” he said.
Seasoned staff can always come up with new ideas, Patel added. What they can’t do is ask the questions that only an inexperienced person would think to ask.
And getting the two to agree is not always easy. Patel admits that putting a Gen Zer in a room with people who have worked at Cisco for decades can create friction, but he says that’s the problem.
“The tension is good,” he said. “In fact, I try to create tension in the teams because you have to have enough friction over ideas. We don’t want to have friction with people and personalities.”
“What you need to do is build enough trust with people to tell them that you’re going to be expected to set unreasonable goals,” he added. “And so, to think outside the box and achieve these unreasonable goals, think outside the box.”
And he’s not just pushing senior executives to take notes from twenty-somethings. He said he treated each intern as “a sort of reverse mentor” and even led discussions at universities to find “hungry” students.
His latest bet on Generation Z came from one of these discussions, with Stanford scholarship students aged 17 and 18. As a line of students asked him questions, one of them, Baya, stood aside, just listening. She waited until everyone was finished before opening the door.
He told her to send him an email every month with what she learned about AI. It was a follow-up test: “Everyone can go out and have a good conversation. But will they follow through on their commitments?”
She never missed one, landed an internship at Cisco, and reimagined “something” that experienced staff had failed to solve.
“I didn’t bring her here so she could do a big job and enter data,” he said. “We hired her so she could really teach our people how to think completely differently. » Now he wants to recruit her.
Patel isn’t the only one betting on Gen Z: OpenAI investors Josh Kushner and Will.i.am are looking for hungry young talent.
Patel isn’t the only boss who sees Gen Z’s lack of experience as an asset.
Thrive Capital founder Josh Kushner said Fortune he particularly likes to hire people with less than four years of industry experience.
When he started the venture capital firm at just 26 years old, he faced pressure to bring in older, more experienced recruits. But, as he said, “anyone with talented experience will never want to work with a 26-year-old.” Instead, he recruited “the smartest people we knew who were our age.”
And that gamble paid off: His company invested early on in startups worth billions, including OpenAI, which is currently raising up to $30 billion at a valuation of $1.25 trillion.
These days, Kushner could easily hire industry veterans with stellar resumes, but he’d still rather “find that young, hungry person.”
Alon Chen, founder and CEO of Tastewise, a generative AI platform trusted by PepsiCo, Nestlé and Mars, is also actively seeking Gen Zers with no experience.
“I hire beginners because they have no boundaries or limitations in the way they think about the world,” Chen said. Fortune. “They are almost AI natives themselves, having been born and raised in this new opportunity space. And I see some of the best ideas coming from the younger generation who haven’t been in the workforce yet.”
And Will.i.am came to a similar conclusion. The Grammy-winning Black Eyed Peas frontman may be best known for his chart-topping hits, but behind the scenes he’s also a serious investor. He backed Tesla, OpenAI and Pinterest before they became household names – and now he’s betting on Gen Z for his next investment.
For what? He believes the next big technological advances will come from young innovators at MIT and Stanford. “They’re young kids and they’re from this place,” Will.i.am said. Fortune. “So you want to chase this. It’s the only thing I focus on.”
And Patel said Fortune that the trend of hiring Gen Z will only continue, thanks to AI.
“The only way for us to continue to accelerate is to make sure we are surrounded by people with a wide range of experiences,” he said. “About a third of my team are senior, experienced operators who understand how the Cisco engine works. The second third are market systems thinkers who bring an outside perspective. And the final third are business founders, CEOs, and native AI engineers who operate in founder mode.”
“Any one of these groups isn’t as powerful as when all three work together. That’s what creates the magic.”
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