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The cynic in me says that this may not be the point of SV ageism. Maybe young founders are preferred because they are cheap and they fail fast. They don't hav

• zenogais 12y ago
  Sounds pretty reasonable rather than cynical to me.
• discardorama 12y ago
  > Maybe young founders are preferred because they are cheap and they fail fast. ... and they're easier to take advantage of.
• Magi604 12y ago
  I actually have yet to read about that angle. Nice one! Maybe a little cynical, but also makes sense.
• jackgavigan 12y ago
  > Maybe young founders are preferred because they are cheap and they fail fast. Also, they have a lot of energy and enthusiasm, so they work longer hours than older founders. > They don't have the proverbial family to feed... ..or distract them (e.g. "I want to be home in time to put the kids to bed." vs "I pulled an all-nighter and finally cracked that problem." > ..and they don't have enough life experience to worry about going head first in a direction that may contain a blind corner. That lack of experience also means that they are less likely to reject an idea as too crazy/off-the-wall (which is what many people think the best ideas are, at first glance). Older founders are more likely to perceive the risks and downsides, and be more tentative and less aggressive as a result.
  • Swizec 12y ago
    As I like to say: I had my startup stint when I was 20/21. Now that I'm older (27), it's time to start a real business. The kind that takes 5 years to build, delivers solid value to customers, makes two or three people independently wealthy, and feeds twenty families. But no VC is ever going to fund that.
    • MCRed 12y ago
      .... and the chances of success are a hundred fold better.
    • michaelochurch 12y ago
      Now that I'm older (27), it's time to start a real business. The kind that takes 5 years to build, delivers solid value to customers, makes two or three people independently wealthy, and feeds twenty families. But no VC is ever going to fund that. I've come to believe that self-improving processes (such as economics and technology) exhibit a "natural growth rate", that this could even be applied to a person, and that for programmers it's about 20-40 percent per year. Compared to anything else, that's very high. We can reliably grow a skill base or a company at around that rate, give or take. Of course, starting a new business is risky, but there's not strong evidence that it ought to be riskier than starting a new job. Sure, half of small businesses fail within 5 years. But half of all jobs turn to crap in 5 years. At any rate, the mid-risk / mid-growth space that tends toward 20-40% growth and a non-zero but not obscene rate of failure is... as you've noted, severely overlooked. Bank loans require personal liability and are therefore only viable if there's nearly a zero chance of failure. VC builds disposable companies that have a 1/10 chance of returning 20x and a 1/100 chance of returning 250x. In the mid-risk / mid-growth space? Nothing. I think part of the problem is that such businesses-- even though they add more value in toto than anything else (they're where most open-source software comes from)-- are very difficult to sell. The issue is that VCs are optimizing for their careers rather than their portfolios. You can just as credibly build a portfolio out of mid-risk/mid-growth businesses as these get-rich-quick-or-die gambits. The problem is that you don't become a celebrity investor by building a great portfolio, but by having "been in on" the Facebook or Google that comes every few years.
  • deleted 12y ago
• analog31 12y ago
  It could simply be that people want to hire others who resemble themselves.
  • azakai 12y ago
    VCs and Angels are often not young as the founders are, so they are funding people that don't resemble them.
  • empressplay 12y ago
    How could this go for age and not go for gender (or race for that matter?) Bias is bias. If you acknowledge there's bias in one area it's hard to shout down the notion there's bias in other areas also.
  • frostmatthew 12y ago
    The post is discussing who VCs choose to fund.
• dntrkv 12y ago
  On the other hand, younger founders don't have enough experience so they may waste a ton of time trying things that older founders know won't work so they are able to produce results faster. Also, an older founder may have a healthier work/life balance and better time management skills so every minute they are working they are able to produce better results, whereas the younger founders will be wasting time on things that don't matter or recovering from drinking until 4am the night before.
  • empressplay 12y ago
    Experience can end up equating to an inability to try new things, so inexperience can be desirable in innovative pursuits. Older people often have a "healthier" work / life balance because they don't have the energy or stamina of their younger counterparts. Not every young founder parties all night (stereotype much?)
    • frostmatthew 12y ago
      > Experience can end up equating to an inability to try new things, so inexperience can be desirable in innovative pursuits. You're making this comment on a post exploring the age of famous inventors when they were awarded patents. Instead of responding with stereotypes it'd probably be a stronger case to point out inventors of similar caliber who achieved their most innovative pursuits in their early 20s rather than later in life.
      • empressplay 12y ago
        I'm being sarcastic. Many of those same older men who argue they're just as good as younger men "they just have different strengths" are the same ones who will argue that women don't do well in technical areas because they don't match a particular rigid set of qualities, ignoring that they also have different but equally useful aptitudes. I'm trying to make the point that finding justifications for having a bias against older men are just as easy as finding biases against women. Neither are particularly useful.
• empressplay 12y ago
  Or it could be that younger people are mentally able to devote 24/7 to a problem, they have less biases and attachments to pet concepts, it's easier to learn new things (because they don't have to unlearn old ones) and they've come straight from school so they're still accustomed to navigating steep learning curves. Young people have many advantages older people do not.
  • robotkilla 12y ago
    I'm going on 34. Maybe I'm not in the older bracket yet, I think I am. But I'm learning more complex things now than I was ten years ago and retaining more of it too. At what age is that supposed to go away for me when I devote almost all of my free time to learning new things?
    • empressplay 12y ago
      I was being partly-sarcastic. The point I'm trying to make here is that it's easy to find justification for bias. You can argue all you like that you're an exception but it really doesn't matter. My blanket reasons will always win over a crowd easier than your 'deviant' experience. Ageism, racism, sexism, homophobia all belong in the same bucket. You can't argue for one and against the next -- either bias _in general_ is a problem that needs to be addressed or it's not. You can't cherry-pick. Attempting to do so just makes you look self-interested (and kind of a dick.) Saying for example that adding a woman to a team might affect team cohesion negatively is the exact same as saying that adding an older man to a younger team might affect said cohesion, or a non-white to an all-white team. The problem that needs to be addressed here is a lack of diversity, not ageism, or sexism, or racism.
      • normloman 12y ago
        It's hard to tell that you're being sarcastic. Because I've read plenty of sincere comments from HN people expressing the same backwards views. You're being downvoted because your satire is too realistic. I haven't seen anyone in this discussion cherrypick ageism over sexism or racism. I think the reason you're not hearing talk about the other two is because ageism is mentioned in the article. But you're right. All three hiring biases have origin in the same fallacy (that good hires should look a certain way). There seems to be some political will here to combat ageism. I guess HN users are worrying about their future. But mention sexism / racism and everyone gets defensive. I suspect nobody wants to solve these problems, because they're hard (or because it doesn't directly benefit them).
• michaelochurch 12y ago
  Maybe young founders are preferred because they are cheap and they fail fast. They don't have the proverbial family to feed, and they don't have enough life experience to worry about going head first in a direction that may contain a blind corner. If you want even more cynicism, it is also possible that less scrupulous VCs find younger founders easier to manipulate, over promise, over work, and under deliver. All this. You're absolutely right, and you're not being cynical or mean or harsh. You're citing what are essentially sociological facts about Silicon Valley. If you want to go hard cynical, read this: https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/12/14/vc-istan-6-the-isms-of-venture-funded-technology/ https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/12/14/vc-istan-6-t... The short version is that this funding of a certain type of young person (frat-boy psychopaths) is actually an expression of a midlife crisis. Instead of doing the midlife crisis honestly and buying a Ferrari or pursuing a new religion, they pick up young sociopaths as proteges, taking care of their careers in order to live vicariously through younger men who, given the cash, could do some real damage to the world (and toss back a story about his escapades in exchange for continued funding). The term for this is chickenhawking, because both common meanings apply.
  • empressplay 12y ago
    Thank you for acknowledging here that women (in particular young women) are also undesirable to VCs for those same reasons.
    • michaelochurch 12y ago
      Vivek Wadhwa is taking a lot of heat for exposing the way that one plays: women get a lot of positive attention and small investments, but the ones who get made into players are men. (Their goal, with regard to women, is something more direct than vicarious living.)
• geezergeeksrock 12y ago
  Of course SV is ageist, but is the ageism reflective of reality, caricatures, misunderstandings, or just plain old bigotry. In my experience, being 50 and being a First-Wave Coder, I'd say little is based on reality and much on ignorance and misunderstanding of what experienced uber-coding looks like. The young coder who's spend the entire night and a case of Red Bull coding has in all likelihood produced a bunch of crap-code. In our industry, "Maintenance Kills" because lots of code may get the produce to the deadline, but be poorly written, poorly scalable, and in time die due to increasing maintainability. Yet, the young founders see the Geezer-Geek going home at 5:00 and think, "Slow Old Fart can't pull an all nighter ..." without realizing the Geezer Geek has completed rock solid scalable maintainable code and will come back refreshed in the morning to kick out another 6-8 hours of beauty.