That’s how Noam Scheiber describes Silicon Valley:
Tech luminaries who otherwise pride themselves on their dedication to meritocracy don’t think twice about deriding the not-actually-old. “Young people are just smarter,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told an audience at Stanford back in 2007. As I write, the website of ServiceNow, a large Santa Clara–based I.T. services company, features the following advisory in large letters atop its “careers” page: “We Want People Who Have Their Best Work Ahead of Them, Not Behind Them.”
And that’s just what gets said in public. An engineer in his forties recently told me about meeting a tech CEO who was trying to acquire his company. “You must be the token graybeard,” said the CEO, who was in his late twenties or early thirties. “I looked at him and said, ‘No, I’m the token grown-up.’ ”
One consequence: cosmetic surgery is in high demand:
In talking to dozens of people around Silicon Valley over the past eight months – engineers, entrepreneurs, moneymen, uncomfortably inquisitive cosmetic surgeons—I got the distinct sense that it’s better to be perceived as naïve and immature than to have voted in the 1980s. And so it has fallen to [San Francisco surgeon Seth] Matarasso to make older workers look like they still belong at the office. “It’s really morphed into, ‘Hey, I’m forty years old and I have to get in front of a board of fresh-faced kids. I can’t look like I have a wife and two-point-five kids and a mortgage,’ ” he told me.
McArdle wonders why venture capitalists prefer younger entrepreneurs:
One possibility is that VCs are looking for a lottery ticket of sorts — the fantastic scores that will make you Facebook money from a small initial investment. And maybe you’re more likely to get a winning lottery ticket from a young entrepreneur, not just because they’re unconstrained by past experience, but also because the markets they cater to simply have more of that potential than businesses based around an older demographic. Older people are more set in their ways and have more obligations; they’re unlikely to spend hours of their valuable time helping you build a sustainable user base for the next Facebook or Twitter.
Another possibility is that most of the people who want to be first-time entrepreneurs are in their 20s and early 30s, before they have families and mortgages that need to be paid every month. Because older entrepreneurs are rare, they don’t fit investors’ mental model of what an entrepreneur looks like.
The Dish 