Fred Wilson stirred up the entrepreneurial blogosphere 6 months ago with a series of posts wondering about the influence of founder age on startup success. I wrote one of my typically long comments.

Today I was making myself a coffee, and thinking about how fast/slow I can move, and how that’s changed over the years. When I was 24 I perhaps had more energy, but I often acted in a quite unfocused way. Now I’m 44, and I still have tons of energy. E.g., I was up coding last night until 6:30am, and then got up at 10am this morning and continued, so I’m not exactly loafing around with slippers and a pipe reflecting on my glory days. But I also have 3 kids, and other things going on. I have to act in a much more focused way or I couldn’t do the things I want to do.

But….., I then thought, the life of your average VC probably has some strong similarities. A couple of kids, insanely busy when working, regularly carving out quality time for family, needing to stay very organized and on top of things, needing to keep multiple balls rolling, etc. Those thoughts led me to reconsider Fred’s posting, but in the context of VCs.

Might it be that the best VC general partners would actually be a bunch of 24 years olds? Of course they could have some older guys as analysts. What do 40-50 year old VCs have that 20-30 year olds don’t that makes them more qualified and better as VCs? If you want to argue that experience makes the older better, you probably need to argue that for entrepreneurs too. If you want to argue that the energy of youth makes for a better entrepreneur, you might need to argue that for VCs too. If you want to argue that young founders have unique insight into what products will be successful, you might think the same would be true of young VCs — if there were any.

It takes a massive amount of work to create and build a startup. Unless you’re a superstar, it’s also a huge amount of work to get funded. You have to go begging and scraping, on bended knee, hat in hand, to make mature and otherwise sober people with a lot of money believe in you. And that’s all done against a background of very steep odds. Similarly, it’s a massive amount of work to raise a venture fund. You have to make even more mature and more sober people with even more money believe in you. And you have to do it in a much less forgiving environment, also against steep odds.

Thirty or even twenty years ago, most CEOs would probably have scoffed at the idea that a 20-year-old could start and run a company, and sell it for tens or hundreds of millions, or even a billion, or take it public. We now know that that actually happens, and the idea that the very young can do it, including getting financial backing, is no longer foreign. Might not the same one day be true for fund managers? When will we see the first VC fund run by a couple of twenty-somethings? Will they exhibit a marked preference for funding older founders?

Back when Fred was posting, I pointed Howard Gutowitz to one of the postings. A couple of days later, Howard told me that he’d talked about it to his brother:

Robert made what is actually an interesting suggestion: get a figurehead 26 year old to be the CEO. Turn the old game around.

I think that’s pretty amusing.

Maybe Andrew Parker is actually running Union Square Ventures. Turn the old game around.

[These are some comments I wrote in reply to a Fred Wilson posting, The Age Question (final post). I've pulled them out here because I feel like it, and I want to link to them.]

I really don’t see what all the fuss is about. Fred posts some observations about the numbers he’s seeing, and people take it personally. It could hardly be clearer that he’s not ageist. This is shooting the messenger.

The world is a changing place, as usual. Technology and knowledge is better understood and packaged and available, especially to youth, as usual. Kids of 15 can do things today (including starting companies, which takes 10 minutes on the web) that older people wouldn’t have dreamed of at 15, as usual.

There’s a tendency to let two questions overlap here. One is whether young people do better at starting and running companies, etc. The other is whether young people are inherently different simply because they’re young.

I don’t think there’s enough evidence on the first question to know the answer. Personally, I doubt that young inexperienced people are better than older more experienced people on this question.

But, young people ARE different. They think differently. It’s very clear. The easiest way to see it is to ask yourself whether (at least with regards to technology) you’re more advanced (or similar word) than your own parents? Of course you are. Of course. How could you not be? Ask all your friends the same question, and they’ll probably all say the same thing. Now just extrapolate.

The “but we invented it” argument doesn’t hold water. Bicycles were invented many generations ago, and in many respects haven’t changed that much. But look at the innovations in cycling of the last 20 years! Kids are doing things on bicycles that people of my generation (I’m 43) never contemplated. Or take skateboards. The basic form hasn’t changed much in the last 20 years. Arguably, my generation invented the skateboard. But when we were kids the Ollie and grinding etc. hadn’t been thought of and the kinds of tricks that regular kids in the street are doing today would have blown our minds in the 70s. We had almost exactly the same gear. Back then, the ultimate in coolness was to do a few 360′s and maybe a handstand. If a mundane object like a skateboard or a bicycle can be put to such novel use, who can doubt what the internet/web can be made to do/look like in the hands of people who push the envelope? It’s very clear that successive generations of users (aka “kids”) push the envelope.

The internet, and of course the web, are not mature technologies. Our kids are still discovering amazing new way to use bikes 120 years after the invention of the “safety” bicycle. So we probably have a fair way to go on the internet/web. The sheer numbers alone argue that most of the innovation will come from people much younger than the current generation of users, some of whom are undoubtedly yet to be born, and none of whom will have had anything to do with the invention.

In summary: are youth better at starting and running companies? Don’t know. Are they different from us? Hell yes.

It’s probably useful to keep the two questions apart.

Another thought worth considering: in some cases (see above) it may take adults to invent something and bring it to market, but kids to figure out how to really use it.