The first negotiation of 23-year-old’s Anand Srivatsa Chunduri’s American life took place in a school administrator’s office in Raleigh, North Carolina. He was 12 years old. He had been in the country for a matter of weeks. And he was arguing, with the composure of someone twice his age, that he should not be sent back to the eighth grade.
The academic calendars of India and the United States did not line up cleanly, and the path of least administrative resistance was to make him repeat the year he had just finished. Chunduri presented his transcripts. He made his case. He won. By the time he walked into his first American classroom, in the spring of 2016, he was a ninth grader.
It was an early demonstration of a temperament that would, nearly a decade later, lead him to scrap an entire mobile app codebase and rebuild it from a blank project, and to do so as one of the first engineering hires at Giggles, a $15 million startup whose name, until recently, had been a joke.
Chunduri came to the United States on parole status, and his family had spent months threading the bureaucratic needle of American immigration. He learned the cadence of Southern American English the way immigrants tend to: by watching, listening, absorbing. The slang of a Research Triangle public school bore no resemblance to anything he had known in Hyderabad. His
classmates rarely glimpsed the weight he carried alongside the ordinary adolescent inventory of homework and social positioning: the quiet, persistent awareness that his family’s place in the country could be revoked.
By the time he enrolled at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte to study computer science, that weight had taken on a financial dimension. The architecture of American higher education, including FAFSA, Pell Grants, subsidized loans, state scholarships, is built around citizens and permanent residents.
So Chunduri turned to meme coins. He turned to sports betting. He traded volatile cryptocurrencies and placed wagers on games, and he made side cash to help pay his way through school.
He was not alone in the impulse, even if his stakes were unusually concrete. A 2026 Northwestern Mutual study found that roughly 80 percent of Gen Z respondents reported feeling financially behind — a phenomenon researchers have labeled “financial nihilism.” The term describes a generation that has, in significant numbers, concluded that the inherited American playbook of steady employment, index funds and patient saving cannot close the gap between where they stand and where their parents stood at the same age.
“When people feel behind, they often look for shortcuts,” John Roberts, Northwestern Mutual’s chief field officer, said in the study. The economist Kyla Scanlon, who coined the term “vibecession,” has argued in The Wall Street Journal that young adults pursuing these wagers are not, on the whole, miscalculating the odds. They have read the odds. They have decided the traditional advice no longer maps cleanly onto the world they live in.
Chunduri graduated in 2025 with a bachelor’s degree in computer science. The clock began again.
Inside Giggles
To describe Giggles is to wade into a definitional swamp. It is, depending on the angle, a prediction market built around viral video, a social media platform with a trading layer grafted onto it, or — most accurately, perhaps — a joke that metastasized into a company. Its founders, Justin Jin and Edwin Wang, are Canadian entrepreneurs who first met as teenagers on the Minecraft server Hypixel. Jin, 19 at the time of the company’s most recent fundraise, had previously run a YouTube channel with more than 100,000 subscribers and founded a youth media company called Mediababy.
The origin story is, characteristically, absurd. In 2023, amid the recurring rumors of a TikTok ban, Jin put up a fake landing page for an app that did not yet exist. The page drew 100,000 visits in a single day. He called Wang. They decided to build the thing.
The company’s pre-seed round closed in 2025 at $1,234,567, a figure formatted as a meme, led by the blockchain-focused venture firm 1kx, with angel participation from people at OpenAI and Bain Capital. The product — an app that lets users invest “aura points,” and eventually real money, in short-form videos they believe will go viral — had drawn roughly 450,000 people onto its waitlist and nearly 30,000 daily active users during its beta.
Chunduri joined as the first engineer of eight employees, ranging in age from 19 to 38.
He began to take on the full stack. The iOS client. The real-time systems. The blockchain integration. The data layer. With this, the first beta version of Giggles reached top 50 on the U.S. App Store and held tens of thousands of daily active users.
The same instinct that led a 12-year-old to argue his way out of repeating a grade led a college student to experiment with speculative markets, and led a new graduate to a company trying, in essence, to construct a stock exchange for viral content.
Whether the bet pays off, for either Chunduri or the Giggles application, is a question that will not be answered for some time. What is already clear is the rational response to a system in which, for a growing share of young people, the conventional path has come to feel like the riskiest option on the menu.