When Deven Jain speaks, corporate executives three times his age listen. That’s because he has something almost no other 23-year-old does: a board seat at a publicly traded company.
Jain became a director of BranchOut Food Inc., an Oregon-based snack maker, two years ago, when he was still studying finance at the University of Virginia and working as an analyst at a family office. BranchOut Food was trading below $1 per share at the time, but Jain — who’d gained a significant following on Substack picking microcap stocks — saw potential. He persuaded his boss to take a stake, and in return Jain got a seat at the directors table. Now the management teams he meets at his day job “treat me more as an equal when I mention I’m a board member versus, to them, a little kid trying to buy their stock,” he says.
Jain is part of an exclusive club. The age of the average board member at a public company in the US has ticked up from about 61.9 years old a decade ago to 63.4 today, while the share of board members over the age of 70 has jumped almost a quarter, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. On the Russell index of the 3,000 largest public companies, only 11 of the more than 26,000 board seats are held by people in their 20s, according to Bloomberg data. (Millennials occupy just 3.1% of seats.)
Some of those rare Generation Z board members are heirs to massive family fortunes or offspring of well-known businessmen. (Brandon and Kyle Lutnick, for instance, both in their 20s, landed on the board of Cantor Fitzgerald when their dad, Howard, joined the Trump administration as US commerce secretary.) Another handful of Gen Z board members are artificial intelligence and fintech founders.
Yet a few, like Jain, have found their way onto boards — some at public companies, others at nonprofits — simply by offering them perspectives on investors and consumers they can’t get from the aging executives who typically fill their ranks. In return the companies get an inside view on how the next generation of clients and consumers thinks. “There’s this new class of young retail investors on Robinhood, on all these apps,” says Eric Healy, chief executive officer of BranchOut. “It takes somebody younger that has a pulse on all of that.”
As the rise of AI threatens an already competitive entry-level job market , Gen Zers are increasingly looking for outside-the-box ways to get ahead . A recent survey from Cash App found that nearly 16% of Gen Z respondents had multiple streams of income. On social media, would-be career gurus have identified boards as the places where real influence is held in organizations — and Gen Z strivers have taken notice of the perks, including extra income and exclusive networking opportunities. For an ambitious cohort of young professionals, who tend to value social impact but may be wary of traditional corporate ladder-climbing, a seat in the boardroom has become a bona fide career goal.
Cosimo Fabrizio, a 26-year-old associate at New York law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, wasn’t looking to join a board when Jazz at Lincoln Center’s legendary founder, Wynton Marsalis, sought him out in the summer of 2024, after his second year at Harvard Law School. “I kind of laughed and kept pushing on with the conversation,” Fabrizio says. But Marsalis was resolute. The organization was searching for its next generation of leaders, and Fabrizio, who’d first met Marsalis while he was playing jazz guitar at one of the center’s summer programs in middle school, was on a short list of potential board members. With the founder’s blessing, Fabrizio sailed through the nomination and governance process, attending his first meeting in January 2025. “People found it funny that I was coming from final exams to a board meeting,” he says.
Fabrizio was pleasantly surprised that his status as the only Gen Z board member made people “uniquely interested” in his opinions. “He’s really been able to talk to the younger folks in the jazz community and get a feel for how they think about the organization,” says Clarence Otis Jr., chairman of the board of Jazz at Lincoln Center and former CEO of Darden Restaurants Inc.
Cynthia Remec, who runs an organization called BoardAssist , which pairs professionals with nonprofit boards looking for members, says that’s often the case. “If anything, I would say my less experienced candidates bring more enthusiasm to their board service and outperform the other candidates that we place,” Remec says. Whereas nonprofit board members in their 20s would have been nearly unthinkable three decades ago, when she founded the organization, she says half her clients are now actively seeking out younger directors: “It’s a huge change on the demand side.” Gen Z candidates often have a number of skills nonprofits and companies desperately need: fluency in the latest technology , communication through social media and the ability to design messaging that resonates with younger people.
They’re also valuable as fundraisers, a crucial component of nonprofit work. Recent survey data from GoFundMe shows that despite being the youngest generation in the workforce, Gen Z gives at higher rates than the broader population does. And Gen Zers have no qualms about hitting up those in their lives with more disposable income, Remec says. “They’re very fearless and willing to tap their networks, and their networks are very happy to be tapped.”
In exchange for their participation, the young directors get to expand their networks, meet new mentors and gain what 29-year-old New York Classical Theatre board member Katriana Lopez calls “street cred.” Lopez, who’d moved to New York City from the West Coast in 2019 after an acting career that didn’t pan out, decided to seek a board position after her mom suggested it might be a smart career move and a good use of her skills, especially her experience in nonprofit fundraising. “The idea of me joining a board was really not on my radar. I thought it was something that people with tons and tons and tons of money” did, says Lopez, who worked with Remec to find the right board role.
For those serving on public company boards, there’s also the perk of a paycheck. At BranchOut Food, Jain was paid $13,195 in stock options last year. Connor Klein, a Gen Z director at Bonk Inc., which started as a wellness drink maker but recently pivoted to cryptocurrency, is paid $30,000 a year for his board service, plus restricted stock grants. That’s on top of the salary from his partner role at a venture capital firm — the kind of windfall most 25-year-olds can hardly fathom.
There are other benefits that a twentysomething would find appealing. Jazz at Lincoln Center, for example, has an annual gala, which brings the organization’s high-flying donors to Dizzy’s , the swanky fifth-floor venue above the main auditorium, for a night of well-connected revelry. And there are the more intimate holiday parties and chats with the board’s other illustrious members, including former CEOs of American Express Co. and Pfizer Inc. Fabrizio says he remembers one instance when Gordon Davis, a founder of the Harvard Black Law Students Association and an emeritus member of the board, invited him up to his apartment after a breakfast to meet his wife and share reflections on his life and career. “That was a beautiful moment,” Fabrizio says.
Yet while serving on a board can look glamorous, Klein warns that the responsibilities are no joke. “The opportunity-to-liability ratio is pretty skewed,” he says, referring to the fiduciary duty held by board members to act in the shareholders’ best interests. If shareholders decide directors have failed on that account, board members can face lawsuits and even be held personally liable. It can also be a major time commitment. At Jazz at Lincoln Center, Fabrizio now sits on two of the board’s subcommittees as well, a commitment he says can vary from a couple of hours on a slow week to something closer to a “second job” when things get busy.
Brandon Elster, 27, learned about the downsides of directorship the hard way. He was still a college student when he got a job managing properties for LuxUrban Hotels, a hospitality company targeting distressed buildings. Within a few years, LuxUrban had gone public, and Elster shot up through the ranks to senior management as chief development officer and then a director on the board. But things at LuxUrban quickly spiraled out of control. The company had grown too fast and was left without enough capital to cover the purchases it had already made. Last fall, LuxUrban declared bankruptcy and was forced to liquidate.
Elster says he’s still on the hook for about $5,000 a month in legal fees related to a tax audit of the company during its downfall, which he says he pays for out of pocket. But he still doesn’t regret his time at LuxUrban Hotels — or his board tenure — one bit. “I would trade losing a billion dollars 50 years in a row for the experience I got at that age,” he says.
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