Who are the most successful entrepreneurs? The middle-aged.
OLD SCHOOL
BY CLIVE THOMPSON
Back in 2007, a 22-year-old Mark Zuckerberg gave some advice at Y Combinator’s Startup School: Do a
startup before you’re old. In technology, he said, twentysomethings rule. The olds are useless.Q“I want to
stress the importance of being young and technical,” he said. “Young people are just smarter.” Q That com-
ment has not aged well. As we watch tsunamis of disinfo rage through social networks, we’re now suspect-
ing it wasn’t so great for cocky young techies to so rapidly reupholster the public sphere. Those dudes may
have been technically adept, but they were, as one early Twitter employee told me, “naive as fuck.” With little
experience of the real world, the dewy pioneers were woefully unprepared for the hate speech, dog-piling,
and sock-puppeted algorithm-juking that ran riot in the 2010s. Now we’re living in the wreckage. Q Sure,
innocence is great. But what if experience is even greater? Maybe we’d get better innovation if we left it to
Zuckerberg’s elders. When it comes to building tools that help solve the world’s truly wicked problems, it’s
the older visionaries who’ll get it done. Q Consider the recent findings of a group of academics from
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MIND GRENADES
ILLUSTRATION / GUANGYUAN LIM
