Yostivanich

So every­one on Tech­meme is talk­ing about The Age Ques­tion, the idea that some­one who is over 25 or so is no longer able to come up with a new idea for the inter­net. Frankly this is a stu­pid argu­ment, Ven­ture Cap­i­tal­ists by the very idea of what they do shouldn’t care about someone’s age. Now granted of course they will look at some­one with less expe­ri­ence run­ning a com­pany as a riskier invest­ment, how­ever this is one of the rea­sons that VC’s can help the com­pany with find­ing suit­able man­age­ment. Also look at the dot­com bust, many of those com­pa­nies were run by smart edu­cated peo­ple with MBA’s, did that make their com­pa­nies some­how a safer invest­ment? I think not.

Age does mat­ter, but not as much as I feel the blo­gos­phere is mak­ing it out to be. If a smart young per­son came to me a great idea that I thought had a chance to suc­ceed and I could and was will­ing to risk the money would I, yes. Now, if that same per­son was older than 30 or so, would I feel safer? Not really, the risk is essen­tially the same. The prod­uct isn’t judged on the man­age­ment or the cre­ator, but rather on the prod­uct, espe­cially when it comes to Web 2.0 offerings.

Say­ing that just because some­one is older than 25 they no longer have any new ideas to add to the Inter­net negates a whole group of peo­ple who look at things in a dif­fer­ent man­ner than those under 25. And look­ing a the same thing in a dif­fer­ent way is where inven­tion is most likely to occur.

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