Another way of looking at it is finding a group of motivated 20 somethings is almost trivial. Find a motivated group with 20 years experience is vastly harder because it's a smaller group who have less interest in joining a startup.
PS: IMO, it would be a really interesting experiment, but I am not sure how you would go about it.
It is possible to start a company without turning the first 10 employees into desiccated husks. It's just not possible to do that while also doing what your VCs think is necessary. Maybe that's a thing to work on changing...
Driven, talented, experienced engineers have been paid six figures for a decade and presumably have saved some of it. If they don't want to do the start-up grind, they don't have to. If they do want to do the start-up grind, they can do so as founders.
Incidentally, that's one very solid reason to raise VC: the ability to attract and retain experienced team members that already have many options.
I'm not saying this from a position of authority, I haven't founded a startup or anything like that. But the average age of a startup founder is mid-20s IIRC, and you'd have a hard time convincing an extremely talented individual, who's older than you, to sign on.
The hardest part is not getting them to join you.. the problem is getting them to stick! Especially in the beginning at a bootstrapped startup without a salary. Simply put, they have other options -- a Real Job(tm) or career they can go back to; and those options start looking better and better when things are bumpy (esp at the beginning). But, you can compensate for that. (by aggressively compensating on actual profits.)
On that note...
If you're reading this thread and have lots of experience and looking to join a hot security startup, we're looking for both experienced and inexperienced rockstars/ninjas/10x/etc. Please email me at first.last at userify.com. We have specific needs in the areas of enterprise sales and marketing, as well as engineering, security, systems architecture, Go, Python, and we're also looking for a strong Windows lead.