I might be missing something, but this seems so obvious it's almost tautological. He's limiting his discussion to startups in the "consumer internet" arena and

I might be missing something, but this seems so obvious it's almost tautological. He's limiting his discussion to startups in the "consumer internet" arena and speaking from the perspective of a VC. So you need hype, quick movement and you don't expect the company to be around in a few years (unless it's acquired by another company, probably not run by 25 year olds). Young people are going to be more in touch with what's fashionable or about to be fashionable in order to get hype. They're inexperienced so they'll work crazy hours for no money for the promise of a lottery ticket. This market is not really dependent on quality engineering, since the code won't be around very long to be maintained and downtime or data loss is accepted by most users (who probably aren't paying for the service anyway). And I'm not trying to bad mouth the sector either, it's a great proving ground for new ideas and we've gotten fantastic stuff out of it. So the point is that in a business sector where it's in the investors best interest for the founders to be young, most of the founders are young? In the financial industry this would be phrased differently: "The consumer internet market is highly tolerant of all the faults of young, inexperienced and easily exploited workers while also being easily influenced by the least expensive marketing on the planet" I don't think that way of framing the exact same point would make it on techcrunch though.