Gabriel Petersson’s childhood seemed so much like many Gen Z upbringings: amassing Pokemon playing cards and constructing worlds in Minecraft, whereas worries about faculty and careers sat someplace within the distant future.
However by highschool, rising up in a small Swedish city of about 5,000 folks, Petersson discovered himself much less eager about simply taking part in video games and extra curious in how they labored. That shortly snowballed right into a deeper obsession with startups, software program, and synthetic intelligence—what he noticed as the subsequent main technological shift.
Slightly than observe a standard path of ending highschool, finding out laptop science, and climbing the company tech ladder, Petersson opted out fully. Throughout his senior yr, the then 17-year-old dropped out of highschool to cofound Depict.ai, an e-commerce information startup, alongside friends who would later go on to roles at corporations like Lovable and Lego.
5 years later, that wager has paid off. At 22, Petersson has landed a six-figure wage at ChatGPT father or mother OpenAI working as a researcher (formally a part of the now sun-setting Sora crew). And he’s develop into an unlikely evangelist for a easy thought: the credential hole is closable, when you’re keen to point out your work.
How a twentysomething landed a job in Silicon Valley—with no diploma to his identify
Touchdown a task at considered one of Silicon Valley’s most coveted corporations with no diploma—not to mention a highschool diploma—requires a special type of job-seeking technique. For Petersson, it got here all the way down to proving you are able to do the job earlier than anybody asks on your resume.
After his time at Depict, he joined Y Combinator-backed AI startup Dataland and relocated to New York in 2021. By most measures, issues have been going effectively. Then he visited San Francisco.
“I still remember the first week,” Petersson stated. “I just couldn’t sleep… you could just go to any place, and people would discuss programming. They would discuss startups. They would talk about all these things that I enjoy talking about…I was just mind blown.”
The journey recalibrated his ambitions fully. However there was the plain problem of how a highschool dropout may compete with candidates from Ivy League colleges and prime engineering applications. His reply was to cease competing on credentials altogether and compete on proof as a substitute.
Slightly than submitting purposes simply via conventional channels, Petersson developed a direct outreach playbook. The format was easy: introduce your self briefly, categorical real enthusiasm for the corporate, and—most critically—present them one thing constructed for them particularly.
“You can say something like, ‘I was so excited about your company that I’ve been having this side project of building an actual website for what you guys are doing,” he stated. “In this way I can prove all these things and not compete with anyone else.”
The technique helped him land a task at Dataland, and he put it to the take a look at once more at Midjourney, an AI analysis lab based mostly in Silicon Valley. Round that point, he was nonetheless putting out via conventional purposes, together with an early rejection from OpenAI.
So he doubled down on his strategy by spending a full week working 16-hour days to construct a customized web site for Midjourney, then sending over a video demo strolling via the code. The trouble paid off, and Midjourney employed him as a software program engineer in 2023.
“When I make a video demo of a product that I build, I show my understanding, I show that I’m good socially. They can see this person seems reasonable,” Petersson added. “I tick more boxes than I ever could by any proxy.”
The Midjourney position opened the subsequent door. A good friend related him to OpenAI’s analysis crew—the identical firm that had rejected him a yr earlier. This time, he was prepared. He landed the position in December 2024. It was a lesson, he stated, within the energy of attempting once more for alternatives after you recognize you are able to do extra.
Gen Z can land their dream job—so long as they’ve the precise mindset, in line with Petersson
For Petersson, Midjourney and OpenAI have been extra than simply jobs—they’ve been affirmation of one thing he now shares broadly with younger folks navigating an more and more credential-obsessed hiring market: elite careers will not be reserved for a choose few. Even folks working on the strongest corporations on the earth, he argued, aren’t as unreachable as they appear.
“Anyone can compete if you just put yourself in the right scenarios and the right things,” Petersson stated.
Many younger professionals fall into the entice of holding themselves again, he added, by staying in roles for too lengthy. Having labored at practically half a dozen corporations earlier than even turning 23, Petersson thinks early careers needs to be optimized for studying velocity, not stability.
At a second when many younger individuals are getting into the workforce questioning whether or not AI will merely take the roles they’re chasing, Petersson is satisfied there’s loads of alternative for these keen to embrace the know-how fairly than worry it.
And after working within the tech business, he identified even prime minds “don’t have everything figured out.”
