This high school dropout now makes six figures at OpenAI—and he shares the strategy Gen Z can use to get hired in Silicon Valley, too

Gabriel Petersson’s childhood looked a lot like many Gen Z upbringings: collecting Pokemon cards and building worlds in Minecraft, while worries about college and careers sat somewhere in the distant future.

But by high school, growing up in a small Swedish town of about 5,000 people, Petersson found himself less interested in just playing games and more curious in how they worked. That quickly snowballed into a deeper obsession with startups, software, and artificial intelligence—what he saw as the next major technological shift.