The Peachfuzz Billionaires

If you're 19, you don't know what can't be done. According to Web guru Clay Shirky, who wrote about the subject on his blog, the knowledge that comes from experience is the very thing that prevents older techies from coming up with groundbreaking ideas. For instance, he says, a person with fixed ideas about what a VCR is and what a PC is is much less likely to come up with the idea of mashing the two concepts together to invent TiVo. "People who … do that kind of work … are, overwhelmingly, young," wrote Shirky.

This paradox of vision—the genius of youthful ignorance—is nothing new. Had Bill Gates not been in diapers in the early days of computer software, he may have understood that there could never be a market for consumer software—but the 19-year-old Gates went ahead and co-founded Microsoft. And Steve Jobs at 21 hadn't the chance to learn what the executives of IBM knew for certain—that no one had any use for a personal computer. Thus blinkered, he joined with Steve Wozniak to found Apple. But now Jobs and Gates are still at it, and Apple's CEO—who I believe is still a force in the industry—jokes about being "the oldest guy in the room," when he was once the youngest.

While youth is being served in the Valley, experience still counts for plenty, especially when it comes to creating innovative hardware products or intricate projects involving infrastructure. When Palm wanted to revamp its product line, it reached out for Apple veteran Jon Rubinstein, 51. So while there's never been a better time to be young, technical and working a Silicon Valley start-up, there's still hope for those with a touch of gray. Remember Clay Shirky's blog posting on why it makes more sense that a young person would do a VCR-PC mash-up to make TiVo? As Shirky's readers quickly pointed out to him, when TiVo began, its two founders were 47 and 38 years old.

© 2007