Cisco Hands 27-Year-Old Ex-Founder Unlimited AI Tokens to Rewrite 98% of Code

Cisco has given a 27-year-old former startup founder four weeks to prove he can rewrite 98% of the $429 billion company's legacy code within 24 months — with unlimited AI tokens to do it.

The executive making the bet is Jeetu Patel, Cisco's president and chief product officer. He found Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy — "Paddy" — buried in the org chart "five levels" below him, doing what Patel calls something "unstrategic."

Krishnamurthy joined Cisco in 2025 through its acquisition of EzDubs, the real-time translation startup he cofounded in 2023. He arrived with CEO experience. He was not, in Patel's telling, being used for it.

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

The origin of the deal was a chance conversation at Cisco's San Francisco office. Krishnamurthy reckoned a two-person team could rewrite Cisco's legacy code. Patel says even the most AI-forward people on his own team were not thinking in those terms.

The claim is audacious, and the 24-month timeline for 98% of legacy code at a company of Cisco's scale invites skepticism. Patel's answer is the bet itself: prove it in four weeks, or it fails cheap.

Why a 27-year-old and not a veteran?

At most companies, a project of this size would go to someone with decades of experience. Patel argues that instinct starves organizations of new thinking.

"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 generate new ideas, Patel conceded. What they cannot do is ask the questions only someone with no experience would think to ask.

He admits the friction is real. Putting a Gen Zer in a room with people who have spent decades at Cisco creates tension — deliberately, in his view.

"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."

Patel frames the management task as trust plus impossible targets. "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 said.

Now he is hunting for more Paddys — young hires who "challenge the system and the status quo," what he calls "an energizer bunny that just goes out and kind of revs everyone up."

The Stanford intern who never missed a month

Patel's method for finding them is unglamorous: follow-through. He treats every intern as "kind of a reverse mentor" and gives talks at colleges to find students who are "hungry."

One of those talks, to 17- and 18-year-old Stanford scholarship students, produced his latest test case. While a line of students fired questions at him, a student named Baya stood off to the side, listening, and spoke only after everyone else finished.

Patel told her to email him monthly with what she had learned about AI. "Everyone can go out and have one good conversation. But are they going to stick with their commitments?" he said.

She never missed a month. She landed a Cisco internship and redesigned "something" that experienced staff had failed to crack — the source does not specify what.

"I didn't bring her in so that she can do grunt work and do data entry," Patel said. "We brought her in so that she could actually teach our people how to think completely differently." He now wants to recruit her permanently.

Who else is betting on Gen Z?

Patel is not alone in treating inexperience as an asset. Thrive Capital founder Josh Kushner — OpenAI's lead investor — told Fortune he specifically hires people with fewer than four years of industry experience.

When he launched the firm at 26, he faced pressure to hire older hands. His response: "anyone who has experience that is talented will never want to work with a 26-year-old." So he recruited the "smartest people that we knew who were our ages."

That bet paid off: Thrive made early investments in OpenAI, currently raising up to $30 billion at a $1.25 trillion valuation. Today Kushner could hire veterans with glowing résumés. He would still rather "find that young, hungry person."

Alon Chen, founder and CEO of Tastewise — a generative AI platform used by PepsiCo, Nestlé and Mars — is hiring 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."

Will.i.am, the Black Eyed Peas frontman who backed Tesla, OpenAI and Pinterest early, has reached the same conclusion. He believes the next breakthroughs will come from young innovators at MIT and Stanford.

"They're young kids, and they're native to this," he told Fortune. "So you want to hunt for that. That's the only thing I'm focused on."

How Patel has structured his team

Patel divides his own team into thirds:

• One-third experienced Cisco operators who know "how the Cisco engine works"
• One-third systems thinkers from the market bringing an outside-in perspective
• One-third entrepreneurial founders, CEOs and AI-native engineers who "operate in founder mode"

"Either of these groups by themselves aren't nearly as potent as when all three work together," he said. "It's what creates magic."

Patel predicts AI will only accelerate the trend toward hiring young talent. The counterpoint he does not address: roughly 40% of bosses plan to hire fewer graduates precisely because AI can do the work cheaper — the same technology powering Krishnamurthy's code rewrite is also shrinking the entry-level jobs that produce the next Paddy. The four-week proof point, and the 24-month code target, will show whether Cisco's bet is a template or an outlier.