One of the things that irritates me about Silicon Valley culture is its blatant ageism. I dislike it for several reasons: Let’s start with the easy one: it’s illegal . As an employer you should be looking for someone qualified to do the job, not someone of a specific age. While certain job requirements may end up setting a de facto lower bound on age (e.g., it’s hard to have a top MBA and 5 years of second-line management experience before you’re 30), age is not something you should talk about in the recruiting or management process. People who would never say “let’s go find a Baptist to do this job” or “let’s go find a woman” will say things like “let’s go find a 32-year-old,” seemingly unaware it’s the exact same kind of discrimination. The media, probably for the simple reason that it sells more newspapers, drives a distorted perception of age and entrepreneurship. They love the oneupsmanship of “you found a 17-year-old entrepreneur , well we found a 13-year-old one ” (who, by the way, is also a social media consultant). They love to write stories like How This Kid Made $60M in 18 Months , despite the fact they aren’t true . They continue to both directly and indirectly promote the age-entrepreneurship myth despite the fact that the average of technology company founders is 39. In addition to over-promoting the whiz kids, the media almost never does any follow-up, telling us what became of the wunderkinds ten or twenty years later. That’s why I was surprised to see this story in today’s New York Times, For A Mogul Money and Magic Have Limits , which details the dog’s breakfast whiz kid Halsey Minor has made of things since making a fortune off CNet during the Web 1.0 era. Find the lessons in this quote: “he thought he was a billionaire, spending far more than he had … but he really was a multi-millionaire always thinking I’m going to make the big score.” The asymmetric media coverage gives people a distorted sense of reality: (1) that they must start a company before they’re 30 or they never will, (2) that after 30 they are washed up, (3) that the odds of succeeding in a venture are way higher than they are, (4) that skills are more the determinants of success than luck, and (5) that youth/energy are more important than experience.
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Questioning the Tech Wunderkind Image
