“I’ve given him unlimited tokens because he’s going to refactor code,” Patel told Fortune at a small roundtable dinner. “So I’m like, you can go, you can go nuts.”

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 Krishnamurthy cofounded in 2023. And despite coming in as a former founder with CEO experience, he was, in Patel’s words, “buried away in the organization doing something unstrategic.”

That changed when Patel dropped into Cisco’s San Francisco office, and the pair got talking. Krishnamurthy reckoned he could rewrite Cisco’s legacy code with a two-person team. Patel says even the most AI-forward people on his own team weren’t thinking that way.

So he has given himself four weeks to prove it, with the final goal of rewriting 98% of Cisco’s legacy code within 24 months.

Now, he’s on the hunt for more Paddys: young hires who will “challenge the system and the status quo,” or, as he puts it, be “an energizer bunny that just goes out and kind of revs everyone up.”

Cisco’s president says Gen Z should be teaching his veterans, not doing data entry—and he’s fine with the tension that causes

At most companies, only someone with decades of experience under their belt would be trusted with a project this size. Patel thinks that’s a problem.

“If you don’t hire the early-in-career [workers], and you just let your workforce continue the way that they were, where do fresh ideas get injected? How do you challenge the status quo?” he said.

Seasoned staff can still come up with new ideas, Patel added. What they can’t do is ask the questions that only someone with no experience would think to ask.

And getting the two to get along isn’t always smooth. Patel admits that putting a Gen Zer in a room with people who’ve been at Cisco for decades can create friction—but he says that’s the point.

“Tension is good,” he said. “I actually try to create tension in the teams because you want to have enough friction on the ideas. You don’t want to have friction with people and personalities.”

“What you have to do is establish enough trust with people to say you are going to be expected to create unreasonable goals for yourself,” he added. “And so, in order to go out and achieve those unreasonable goals, think outside of the box.”

And he’s not just pushing senior staff to take notes from twentysomethings. He said that he treats every intern as “kind of a reverse mentor,” and even does talks at colleges to find students who are “hungry.” 

His latest Gen Z bet came out of one of those talks, to 17- and 18-year-old Stanford scholarship students. While a line of students fired questions at him, one, Baya, stood off to the side, just listening. She waited until everyone else had finished before she opened up.

He told her to email him every month with what she’d learned about AI. It was a test of follow-through: “Everyone can go out and have one good conversation. But are they going to stick with their commitments?”

She never missed one, landed an internship at Cisco, and redesigned “something” that experienced staff hadn’t been able to crack. 

“I didn’t bring her in so that she can do grunt work and do data entry,” he said. “We brought her in so that she could actually 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 investor Josh Kushner and Will.i.am are hunting for young, hungry talent

Patel isn’t the only boss who sees Gen Z’s lack of experience as an asset.

Thrive Capital’s founder Josh Kushner told Fortune he specifically likes to hire people with less than four years of industry experience.

When he launched the venture capital firm at just 26, he faced pressure to bring in older, more seasoned hires. But, as he put it, “anyone who has experience that is talented will never want to work with a 26-year-old.” So, instead, he recruited the “smartest people that we knew who were our ages.”

And that bet paid off: His firm made early investments in startups worth billions, including OpenAI, which is currently raising up to $30 billion at a $1.25 trillion valuation.

These days, Kushner could easily hire industry veterans with glowing résumés—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 looking for Gen Zers with zero experience.

“I’m hiring entry-level because they have no boundaries or limitations in how they think about the world,” Chen told Fortune. “They’re almost like AI natives themselves, having been born and raised in this new realm of opportunities. And I see some of the best ideas coming from the younger generation that have not yet been in the job market.”

And Will.i.am has reached a similar conclusion. The Grammy-winning Black Eyed Peas frontman might be best known for his chart-topping hits, but behind the scenes, he’s a serious investor too. He backed Tesla, OpenAI, and Pinterest before they became household names—and now, he’s betting on Gen Z for his next investment. 

Why? He believes the next big tech breakthroughs will come from young innovators at MIT and Stanford.  “They’re young kids, and they’re native to this,” Will.i.am told Fortune. “So you want to hunt for that. That’s the only thing I’m focused on.”

And Patel told Fortune that the trend toward hiring Gen Z will only continue, thanks to AI.

“The only way for us to keep accelerating is to make sure we’re surrounded by people with a broad range of experience,” he said. “Roughly one-third of my team is experienced, scaled operators who understand how the Cisco engine works. The second third are systems thinkers from the market who bring the outside-in perspective. And the final third is made of entrepreneurial founders, CEOs, and engineers who are AI-native who operate in founder mode.”

“Either of these groups by themselves aren’t nearly as potent as when all three work together. It’s what creates magic.”