Youth and energy beats guile and experience - or is it just the VC Squeeze ?

Fred Wilson, a blogger who normally seems very sensible, has made (to us anyway) a strange claim....essentially that anyone over 25 or so just doesn't "get" the 'Net.

"It is incredibly hard to think of new paradigms when you've grown up reading the newspaper every morning. When you turn to TV for your entertainment. When you read magazines on the train home from work.

But we have a generation coming of age right now that has never relied on newspapers, TV, and magazines for their information and entertainment.

They are the net natives. They grew up in AOL chatrooms, IMing with their friends for hours after dinner, and went to school with a Facebook login."

Heck...those of us who grew up in AOL chatrooms are 30, 40 somethings now boyo, and facebook or myspace were hardly the first social nets.....and much of the stuff coming out today was thought of 10 years ago, designed by a lot of people who have since learned many useful lessons in and after Web 1.0. Rob La Gesse makes the point well in a comment on Read/Write web

I don't agree with this at all - as a 45+ year old I helped CREATE the web as we know it now - most technical people my age did, in one way or another. And we certainly are not out of ideas - more importantly, I think my age group considers ideas that generate revenue more than the "under 25" crowd.

Amen bro....some of us still have our 900 baud modems too! As Michael Parekh notes:

Facebook today feels like a web-based AOL.

You log in to do anything.

You keep logging in because you get logged out if there are big periods of inactivity.

You log in to keep in touch with your friends, just like today's net natives did in AOL's chat rooms and IM sessions.

You exchange emails back and forth with them using Facebook's walled, proprietary, email system.

You select your "buddies" that you want to keep tabs of and stay in touch with through the day.

There's not much one does in the core functions of Facebook today, that you couldn't or didn't do with AOL's AIM and ICQ instant messaging systems of almost a decade ago.

Sure, there is more bandwidth so you can have richer media, but its pretty much doing the same job - the similarities usually far outweigh the differences. There is no shortage of Web 1.0 people still doing the new stuff at the cutting edges - in fact their experience makes them some of the most perceptive commentators going.

And we'd go back to the difference between the "presentation layer" - flashy stuff that looks cool, but often is an application not a business - and the "infrastructure layers" that you need to build to get a sustainable business going. Our own experience with the young entrepreneurs we see is most don't really have the experience at this level, and need to hand off to wise heads fairly fast (or sell early to the big iron guys).

Don't get me wrong...it is clear that the youngsters have as valid a claim to creativity as anyone else, and as they live "in the medium" they - in some areas, especially consumer "youth" applications - do have a better perception than others. Clay Shirky notes that:

I think the real issue, of which age is a predictor, is this: the future belongs to those who take the present for granted. I had this thought while talking to Robert Cook of Metaweb, who are making Freebase. They need structured metadata, lots of structured metadata, and one of the places they are getting it is from Wikipedia, by spidering the bio boxes (among other things) for things like birthplace and age of people listed Freebase. While Andrew Keen is trying to get a conversation going on whether Wikipedia is a good idea, Metaweb takes it for granted as a stable part of the environment, which lets them see past this hurdle to the next one.

But though this is an argument for people who are "in the milieu" its not necessarily one for age - its mindset - and its clear that there are a lot of older smart people out there doing stuff too (especially, dare I say it, those of us with kids a few years younger who are even more "in the milieu")....and as has been shown over and over again, real innovation often comes from people bringing ideas in from another area, or juxtaposing two existing but previously unconnected things. In that arena, a bit of experience - even just of the University of Life - should make a difference.

So...whats' really going on here - why would a smart VC write something like this, knowing that its palpably incorrect. What's the real agenda? VC's aren't really any more competent to understand the cutting edge of technology than anyone else in the game - but as Paul Graham (and others) note, they do need to see trends - and dealflow - faster than others.

Here's an alternative hypothesis - this has got nothing to do with youth and energy of young entrepreneurs per se, its got more to do with VC economics and with the guile and experience of those people who have been through Web 1.0, who are:

(i) able to fund their projects quite far into the buildout with their own funds or that of angels / of friends, so the cost of entry is far higher by the time a VC gets a sniff.

(ii) much cannier founders, and are not letting the VC's get the deals they like (if they are using them at all) - and are far more aware of the Founders' discount, so are much more likely to press for decent conditions.

In other words is it all about the Venture Capital Squeeze, and a lack of visibility of decent dealflow early enough?

If ( just suppose , as a thought experiment ) the VC's are no better at telling the good from the bad tech, then what they desperately need is that flow of callow yet bright youths through their doors.

But, if now even the youthful hopefuls are getting seduced into other places ( like Y Combinator etc ), where the companies are hothoused by smart players and the VC's thus get to pay top dollars to get into the action (if they ever see it before a trade sale). So, if even the young 'netheads are bypassing their friendly neighbourhood VC's, or getting them in later, how is that all important high quality dealflow assured?.

This would in theory be especially painful for the VC's who are trying to get in at the lower levels of funding (in fact I'm not sure this issue applies in Europe, where the opposite - the "equity gap" - is the most usual complaint about VC's there), and especially those not well established in the top tier (ie lower dealflow visibility).

So, whats an ambitious VC to do...how about start the Cult of the Youthful Entepreneur, wind up all teh old fogeys to look cool, try to get 'em early and cheap and naive with the sort of deals that guarantee the VC risk is minimised - a different sort of VC Squeeze, the sort they'd prefer.

Surely not

Or is this post of ours just another "dinosaur post" bemoaning the passing of the golden years.....

Postscript...Fred Wilson has put a more nuanced post of his views up here, where he juxtaposes the differences between the older and the younger entrepreneurs - so is our above analysis (which follows Patrick's Law - that the most cynical explanation is always correct ) is a tad uncharitable ?

Maybe it is...in fairness there have been many celebrated young entrepreneurs recently, but if one delves behind the scenes there are often some very seasoned hands holding strings....

Post-Postscript - a thought on the latest "you old farts don't get it" cool tool - facebook.

I think its a "what you use" thing...we want to communicate, us net-dinosaurs knew how to navigate an eGroup, an alt.net - and email, of course. Today its Facebook that one uses as a cool tool.

So...we've been trying out facebook (and myspace before it, and blogs, and chat groups before them...) and guess what - they all do roughly the same stuff, with different plusses and minuses.

It's not that we don't "get" facebook - its more that its yet another way of doing the same thing, and once you've seen one type....well, the next one along is no longer a paradigm shift, its just another tool to use, depending on how useful it is.

Mr Scoble has also weighed in on this one..........