Ageism is a very serious problem and this article does not really help. Most innovation actually involves applying recent technological advancements to various

Ageism is a very serious problem and this article does not really help. Most innovation actually involves applying recent technological advancements to various problems. This is the same regardless of the age of the person. So most of these disruptions do not require some big leap or fresh new perspective. For example, I was around 35 when Docker was really becoming popular. The immediate idea that occurred to me was to build an IaaS business around it. I believe that lots of other people in their 20s or whatever age had the same idea. Because the idea was really just about applying the new technology in a fairly obvious way. Since it was already a disruptive technology, that was enough to be disruptive in that domain it was applied to. So again, I think the vast majority of innovation is in this category. Maybe because those types of innovations are much more accessible than fundamental research. When I saw what ChatGPT could do last year I immediately started trying to figure out how to use it to build a code generation startup. I know that many people who were not 45 like me and instead were in their 30s or just out of college or in college or high school or 50 or 60s or whatever had a very similar idea. I literally saw demos of software that was very similar to my own tests along with articles about how they had just finished college or whatever. I also have seen young people in a particular domain that is obviously being disrupted ignore the disruption. You can be entrenched in something just as easily as a 23 year old. Whereas someone like me who has always been excited about applying new technologies was quite interested in shifting focus onto how the new technology really changed that area. The younger and older people who had been invested in this specific activity and were not by nature primarily into innovation were unaware or at least unexcited about abandoning their existing domain for something that was related but new. It's really about mindset and skillset. Someone who has technology skills in certain areas and has made a habit of, for example, picking up new technologies and applying them, is going to be much more likely to do that and keep doing that, than someone who is younger and doesn't have those skills and habits. It's about an orientation embracing technologically-driven change. That isn't determined by age. It's a worldview and type of skillset. One other thing that matters is going to be your circumstances. I have a twin brother who has a family and a real job. I have either avoided that or just not managed it, depending on how you interpret things. But at least part of it is my attitude and my identity. As our society ages, I predict that attitudes towards ageism, even in the technology world, will shift towards less tolerance for it.