• Paradigm CEO Matt Huang feels like he’s “running the X-Men Academy”. While other leaders complain about their Gen Z new hires, the $12 billion crypto company chief is going against the grain and promoting them into the C-suite.

It’s no secret that Gen Z often gets flak for showing up late to work, ghosting job interviews, refusing to do put in any overtime for free, and demanding senior titles and work-life balance before they’ve really earned it.  

Some bosses are fed up—firing fresh-faced Gen Z grads just months in and branding the whole cohort “unprofessional.”

Even Gen Z workers have described themselves as the hardest generation to work with. 

“They create an absurd amount of chaos sometimes and you want to pull your hair out,” echoes Matt Huang, the cofounder of the $12 billion crypto investment firm Paradigm. 

“But then you see what they can do and it’s like, holy crap,” he told Colossus Review. “Nobody else in the world could do that.”

Case in point: Paradigm’s first hire, Charlie Noyes, was a 19-year-old MIT dropout who walked into his first 10 a.m. meeting five hours late. Fast forward to today, and Noyes is a general partner at the crypto company at just 25.

In 2020, Noyes was the one who saw MEV as a critical blockchain issue, leading Paradigm to become the lead investor in Flashbots—a company whose infrastructure now touches nearly every transaction on Ethereum and has established key market rules in the $450 billion ecosystem.

And Noyes isn’t the only bright young mind making waves at Paradigm. 

Georgios Konstantopoulos, the firm’s CTO,  joined the company just two years after graduating college in 2018 and has since become one of crypto’s most prolific engineers. Then there’s the developer known only by his Discord handle, transmissions11, whom Paradigm reportedly found while he was still in high school.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m running the X-Men Academy,” Huang jokes, referencing the eccentric minds on his team—young mutants whose exceptional skills make all the chaos worth it.

Fortune has reached out to Huang for comment.

Gen Z may be hard to work with—but they’re vital 

Like most generations did before them—millennials will remember being labeled work-shy snowflakes before climbing the corporate ranks into management—Gen Zers have gained a reputation for being difficult to work with. 

A survey of more than 960 employers from Intelligent revealed that one in six companies were hesitant to hire a Gen Z worker. 

But the same research that describes the youngest generation of workers as the hardest to work with, also notes that much is to be learned from them—and that perhaps the corporate world is long overdue a shakeup.

“They bring a unique blend of talent and bold ideas that can rejuvenate any workforce,” wrote Geoffrey Scott, senior hiring manager at Resume Genius. “Gen Zers might have a bad rep, but they have the power to transform workplaces for the better.” 

Because if companies don’t adapt, they risk getting left behind. 

Tobba Vigfusdottir, a psychologist and the CEO of Kara Connect, a workplace well-being platform, recently told Fortune that employers need to bend to Gen Z’s desires (read: flexible work policies, sustainability pledges and purpose-driven work) if they want to stay competitive after the baby boomers retire.

“Companies really need to wake up and smell the coffee,” Vigfusdottir warned. “The companies that will survive are listening and letting them in, because they’re changing things.” 

Will.i.am and Josh Kushner are betting on Gen Z too

Huang’s not the only future-thinking leader betting on the disruptive energy of Gen Z. The multimillionaire rapper and songwriter Will.i.am and Thrive Capital’s founder Josh Kushner are betting on the bright young minds of tomorrow too.

In fact, Kushner previously told Fortune he specifically likes to hire people with less than 4 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 was recently valued at $300 billion.

These days, Kushner could easily hire industry veterans with glowing résumés—but he’d still rather “find that young, hungry person who’s willing to run through walls like we were ten years ago.”

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 breakthroughs in tech 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.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

You scoffed at your boss in a rush, dismissed your employee’s ideas at a meeting, or snapped at a colleague unfairly.

Workplace stress can cause people to take out their frustrations on others, especially colleagues who are by their side for hours each day. We are also facing unprecedented economic turmoil, with whispers of a recession running down the halls. The bottom line? Tensions are running high from the corner office down. One recent survey reports that 61% of employees are feeling thrown under the bus by colleagues, as RTO mandates bring people back together and force them to remember conflict resolution.

We all make mistakes or say something we later regret. Instead of retreating solemnly and berating ourselves at home (on the couch with a pint of mint chip and an episode of Severance), we can reframe how we manage relational mishaps and move forward faster. It’s how we deal with these moments in the context of protecting our relationships that matters most. It’s essential when that person is a core part of our work-life community.  

Becky Kennedy, a clinical psychologist and parenting expert known to her over three million Instagram followers as “Dr. Becky,” calls out the single most important strategy in strengthening our relationships at last week’s BetterUp Summit “Uplift” in New York City’s midtown. 

“There is really no more important relationship strategy than repair,” Kennedy told Fortune Well Editor Jennifer Fields, who moderated the discussion. “Nothing builds a relationship like a good repair.” 

Often we run away from repair because it means we did something wrong and that we weren’t perfect. But, Kennedy says it’s important to recognize that we cannot walk through life and never ruffle any feathers. It’s simply not human. “Recognizing that is powerful,” Kennedy said. “We have this opportunity to do things a little differently.” 

Kennedy shares that it’s important to challenge ourselves to be uncomfortable by taking a beat to understand where someone was coming from, even if we disagreed initially. “Can I build my muscle by seeing and believing what’s going on for the other person? That’s as relevant at home as it is at work,” she said.

Repairing starts with looking at the moment that felt uncomfortable in the relationship. “It’s really about acknowledging what didn’t feel good and taking responsibility for your part,” she said. “It’s very similar at home and at work. For me, it’s often a version of, ‘I’m sorry I yelled,’ or ‘I’m sorry I was so short’ or ‘I jumped to conclusions. I’m sorry I didn’t listen to your side of the story.’” 

The power of authentically repairing goes under-recognized because the event takes up so much brain power in the moments following. But, ironically, repairing can free up some of that rumination. 

“If you think about a moment that felt bad and then you berate yourself, like ‘I yelled at my kid.’ ‘I was so short in that meeting.’ ‘I’m such a bad manager’ … We’re focusing on the event,” she said. “The thing that’s going to impact the other person isn’t actually the event as much as us not talking to the person after the event.” 

The trickiest part of repair is ensuring you don’t go into the conversation looking to be wooed back by the other person or to check it off the box by brushing the incident under the rug. “It’s going to come off as something you ask of the person, not something you give to that person,” Kennedy said. As with many leadership and self-improvement techniques, you must focus on repairing yourself before you can repair your relationship.

“That repair really looks like saying to yourself some version of ‘I’m a good person who did something I’m not proud of.’ ‘That moment doesn’t define me,’ and ‘I’m rejecting this idea as of [insert today’s date],’” Kennedy says. “Then you can go to the other person and say something like, ‘I’m sorry I yelled. I’m sure that felt scary.’”

Then find connection. Grab a coffee with that individual and listen to their perspective, too. The repair might just make that relationship stronger. 

For more on parenting and leadership: 

• Want to be a good parent? Experts boil it down to 4 things you should do
• Modern parenting is hurting kids and adults, ‘Anxious Generation’ author warns
• Why moms rejecting the ‘tiger’ approach turn to ‘panda’ parenting instead

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

A tariff-induced meltdown of U.S. equity and bond markets has been spooking financial circles. But stocks and Treasuries aren’t the only assets on the fritz—the U.S. dollar is also falling, with analysts warning of a global “de-dollarization” in response to the Trump administration’s frenetic foreign policy decisions.

“We are witnessing a simultaneous collapse in the price of all U.S. assets including equities, the dollar versus alternative reserve [foreign exchange], and the bond market,” writes George Saravelos, global head of FX research at Deutsche Bank, in a note this week. “We are entering unchart[ed] territory in the global financial system.”

Even as markets tank and bond yields rise, the dollar is down to a three-year low this week. In a more typical environment, markets would be “hoarding” dollars as a safe haven from the other noise, says Saravelos, and the dollar would be strengthening. But what Trump has unleashed on global markets is far from typical. Now, other countries are losing faith in the U.S. and actively selling down U.S. assets, possibly upending the dollar’s global reserve status.

This is a problem, as the U.S. dollar’s exceptionalism is subsidized by other countries: Foreigners invest nearly $2 trillion in the U.S. every year. Foreign investors, both individuals and governments, own 30% of U.S. debt. Seeing them heading for the exits is cause for major concern, not least because it could lead to increased borrowing costs for the U.S. at a time when the national debt is ballooning.

Analysts would be less worried about the recent volatility if the U.S. government was committed to maintaining the dollar’s reserve status. But Stephen Miran, chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, gave a speech this week in which he said the primacy of USD is “costly,” alleging it makes U.S. labor and products uncompetitive.

So where does that leave investors? Some are looking for reassurance in assets like gold, German bunds, Swiss francs, and the Japanese yen, says Gary Schlossberg, global strategist at Wells Fargo Investment Institute.

But it isn’t time to give up all faith in the USD, he says—market collapse isn’t imminent. The current erosion in its strength can still be reversed. Because although considerable damage has been done over the past few months, the pillars of U.S. exceptionalism are still in place: The U.S. market is still deeper, more liquid, more developed, and more efficient than any other. Though some have positioned the euro as a possible alternative, Europe is far more fragmented than the U.S., and faces risks of disintegration.

“Certainly there is a withdrawal from the U.S.,” says Schlossberg, noting that it’s a reflection of the deep unease within markets. But “the dollar is going to remain the centerpiece. There are so few alternatives out there.”

Global confidence in the U.S. is shaken

That said, Schlossberg and other analysts have noted that the current market environment is substantially different from previous shocks. Take the 2011 credit downgrade of U.S. Treasury debt. At that time, investors looked through it, and still considered the dollar a stable safe haven, preventing a rollover of the market. During the 2008 financial crisis, governments came together to right the ship.

But the Trump administration’s tariff policies and intention to silo U.S. manufacturing from other countries is a different beast, upending decades of agreed-upon rules and threatening the U.S.’s role as the world’s de facto leader. The ramifications are likely to be longer-term.

“You’re talking about basically removing, by degree, the U.S. from the global economy,” Schlossberg says. “I don’t mean to suggest that we’re on the verge of a collapse in the trade and payment system that goes back to World War II, but it just creates uncertainty.”

Creating even more uncertainty is how fluid Trump’s policies have been. Within just a few weeks, he has implemented tariffs, changed them multiple times, and now frozen some of them, although the blanket 10% tariff on most countries and 145% tariff on China is currently in place. As all of this has been done by executive order—and not codified by Congress into law, though tariffs are in its purview—it can easily be rescinded or replaced, as Trump himself has already done. All of this is eroding trust in the U.S., which will be hard to undo even if all of the policies were reversed. The big winners from all of this are the euro and the yen, analysts say.

Schlossberg says jittery investors should talk through their feelings with a financial advisor, and get their read on how they view the market environment changing. But for now at least, the fundamentals remain: Diversify your holdings to include both U.S. and international exposure, consider gold as a safe haven, and consider upping your cash allocation for the time being. Don’t get “too over your skis” trying to find alternatives in a rapidly changing environment.

“Optimistically you can say, this too shall pass, the turbulence that’s been created. It’s not Armageddon tomorrow,” says Schlossberg. “I mean, this may reverse on Monday.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com