Barry Li: He Ran a $1K/Week “Dark Market” at 15 — Now He Teaches Kids to Out-Build AI

At 15 he was buying instant noodles off Alibaba and reselling them at a 200% margin to boarding-school kids — until the principal shut it down. Barry didn't know it yet, but that was his first lesson in supply, demand, and distribution. Five ventures later, he's betting his career on a blunt thesis: in the AI era, either you're well-rounded enough to do anything or deep enough to be irreplaceable, and everyone in the “medium” gets wiped out.

On this episode of 18VC, we sit down with Barry Li — founder of OMNIAPATH (an AI-native entrepreneurship school for young founders) and Wov3, and advisor to Hacker Dojo's first accelerator cohort — on why he teaches teenagers to start companies, why he picked China first, and what 40 partners coming and going taught him about who actually survives.

Highlights

• The 200%-margin “dark market” he ran out of his dorm — and why getting shut down was his first real business school
• His rule for who survives AI: be super well-rounded or go absurdly deep — “medium deep” gets replaced
• Why he killed a profitable $100K college-admissions business the moment he saw ChatGPT 3.5
• The “one-person company” bet — and why he thinks solo founders are the default future of work
• Why he started in China, not the US — and the one word he keeps repeating: distribution
• What working one-on-one with 300+ students and 40 partners taught him about reading founders before they quit