(From #4, Youth) A 26 year old may not be very good at managing people or dealing with the SEC. Those require experience. But those are also commodities, which can be handed off to some lieutenant. The most important quality in a CEO is his vision for the company's future. What will they build next? And in that department, there are 26 year olds who can compete with anyone.
Some 26-year-olds are immensely talented, sure. Anyone who would argue against that point is an idiot. Some people learn how to lead very early on. But the ability to lead a team or motivate people and the ability to keep one's company legal are not commodities. Not even close. If your CEO is an idiot or a naif then he can't evaluate his lieutenants, he will pick idiots to manage the day-to-day, they will do shoddy work (or screw him over behind his back) and he won't know, and disaster will ensue.
This has nothing to do with age, really, because there are many 26-year-olds who can do those stereotypically "older" jobs.
On age more directly, the age discrimination culture is disgusting and perverse in its half-assed homoeroticism (I have no problem with actual gay people; my issue is with the chickenhawks who rule VC-istan, who identify as heterosexual and are often married men, yet have creepy "I'll support your career in order to look at you" relationships with 24-year-old, hipsterish manboys with minimal talent. Hmmm. Nothing weird about that. Of the VCs who backed Duplan and Spiegel, what do their wives think?) The '90s bubble may have corrected for a previous (and surely pernicious) anti-young bias, but this 2014-era, VC-istan age discrimination culture is just as disgusting and stupid. Let's stop being crass fuckheads and just make age a total nonfactor either way, ok?
On "vision", I would likewise say that the age correlation is probably 0.0 over the relevant range (20 to 65). However, many businesses don't require a vision-- they require taking a known problem and executing well, and for those, I'd argue that age is an advantage (but a very slight one) in those.
(From #6, Nerds) A nerd, in other words, is someone who concentrates on substance.
Really? Because the current tech bubble is driven by fart (no typo) boys like Lucas Duplan and Evan Spiegel, who aren't nerds. This round is actually disgustingly conformist. It has the mechanisms of startups, but no soul. Sure, you don't have to dress up if you work for one of these post-2008 VC darlings, but you face closed allocation and corporate politics and cultish conformity and boring problems, so what's the fucking point?
True nerds (by that definition) have no home in the VC-funded world these days. It is now owned by the fratty shitscum.
(From #7, Options) Options are a good idea because (a) they're fair, and (b) they work.
I disagree. In a typical VC-funded tech company, an engineer makes $100k while the VP/NTWTFK (Non-Technical Who-The-Fuck-Knows) working 11-to-3 and bikeshedding makes $150k. That's 1.5x more. In equity, the engineer is getting 0.05% while the VP gets 1%. That's 20 times more. The inequities in equity are absurd and would never be tolerated in salary numbers. Gender and race inequities are also much more extreme in the options/equity front.
9. California
You mean that dysfunctional broke state with extreme economic inequality?
Real estate is still more expensive than just about anywhere else in the country.
That's a bad thing, and if you don't realize that, you're a dumbass with little insight into how the economy works (101 lesson: elasticity). Expensive real estate is what you get when regulatory corruption (NIMBYism) meets the extreme inelasticity of housing costs: a 2% gap between how much housing there should be and what there is can cause prices to go up 50% or even double. The price/income ratio of housing is constant absent regulatory dysfunction. Bay Area incomes are higher than the national average, but not by enough to match the housing prices.
What makes the Bay Area superior is the attitude of the people. I notice that when I come home to Boston. The first thing I see when I walk out of the airline terminal is the fat, grumpy guy in charge of the taxi line.
Wait, so you can't launch a startup if there are too many fat people? Weird. I know plenty of fat people I'd found with if they were so inclined, but what do I know?
That 26 year olds with good ideas will increasingly have an edge over 50 year olds with powerful connections.
Now, the 26-year-old and 50-year-old with great ideas both get screwed over because the VC and support and resources all go to the 26-year-old with powerful (inherited) connections. (Or the 26-year-old with the creepy chickenhawk relationship with the powerful 50-year-old.) Ageism begets classism, because any 22-year-old who can get VC (in 2014, with the social distance between VCs and peons at record high) had parental lift. What's happening now is not an improvement.