Iron Lad was the one who formed the Young Avengers in a doomed attempt to stop himself from becoming Kang the Conqueror.
The Young Avengers didn’t just come into existence to take the place of their predecessors when the original Avengers were disbanded. They were brought together for a very specific reason: to stop the rise of Kang the Conqueror. And the one who assembled them was… Kang the Conqueror. Sort of. In the future, a young man named Nathaniel Richards became aware that he would one day turn into Kang and was horrified by the evil he foresaw. Unwilling to accept it, he traveled to the past to enlist the Avengers’ aid, but only found the remains of their work. But that led to the formation of the Young Avengers and, eventually, his descent into villainy.
Nathaniel Richards was pulled out of time by Kang to prevent him from receiving an injury that would have hospitalized him for years. Kang showed Nathaniel all that would come to pass when he became the conqueror and implored Nathaniel to kill those who would have been responsible for injuring him, potentially setting him on the path to becoming Kang much earlier. But this plan backfired. Horrified by his future and the atrocities he would commit, Nathaniel instead stole time travel technology from Kang and fled to the past.
