Re:Silicon Valley's dirty secret - age bias
by jasonshen on Tuesday November 27, 2012 @04:14PM
(#4839078)
While that might be true (that young people are more easily manipulated) it doesn't make much sense as a primary reason for why VC's like young people.
Ultimately, making a big successful company is really hard and VC's would want to bet on people who have the best chance of doing that - not the ones they can easily screw with.
Note: I don't buy the idea that only young people make good entrepreneurs. There's tons of evidence that older entrepreneurs can be very successful. It's probably true though that young people in general are more likely to massively revolutionize something entrenched, even if their overall success rate is the same or lower than older people.
Einstein, for example, was 26 when he published 4 papers that would change the field of physics forever: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annus_Mirabilis_papers
Re:Silicon Valley's dirty secret - age bias
by sedev on Tuesday November 27, 2012 @08:07PM
(#4840359)
I was shocked that none of the top-voted comments mention this aspect of the matter. The attitude of founders is one thing, and possibly worrisome, but the attitude of funders is predictable: they'd like to maximize some index that combines "likely to start a company that goes huge" and "likely to be much better at starting that company than at negotiating how much of a stake we'll get in it." There is an obvious economic incentive to be balancing those, not just looking at the first. With respect to pg, VCs clearly vary in how they construct that index - but a cold look at the matter through the lens of economics should tell anyone that it certainly is an index, not just Most Likely To Succeed.
The flip side of this analysis would be: YC and Sequoia prefer to fund kids because kids are easier to manipulate. Kids don't know how to read a contract or a term sheet. Kids don't know how to protect their own interests in their business when accepting funding. Kids don't know how to play hardball in negotiations.
Kids, in other words, are very easy to use as disposable resources.
(Indeed, with appropriate conditioning you can even convince them to believe that becoming a disposable resource is a sign of their Epic Founderhood.)
Someone who's seen peers get screwed over in previous gigs, or who's been screwed over themselves, is going to have learned a few things about how not to get screwed over the next time. So it's more profitable to deal with people who haven't learned those lessons yet. And once they have learned those lessons, you throw them overboard and replace them with the next batch of dewey-eyed innocents.