Dr Seth Matarasso is a cosmetic surgeon in San Francisco. When he started his practice two decades ago, his patients were middle-aged and female. Today, most of his patients are from Silicon Valley, and in their twenties.
Tech is young people's business. This is an impression that has been reinforced by the images of a young Jobs and Wozniak, beaming over their prototype Apple II, or by Mark Zuckerberg telling a Stanford audience that "young people are just smarter" and companies saying that they want people who have "Their Best Work Ahead of Them, Not Behind Them."
The New Republic's Noam Scheiber looks at the extreme ageism of Silicon Valley. He quotes an engineer in his 40s who met a tech CEO who was trying to acquire the company he worked for. The CEO looked at him and said: "You must be the token graybeard." The engineer responded that he was the token grown-up .
Snappy comebacks apart, Silicon Valley is notorious for its prejudice against older people. "In 2011, Google settled a multimillion-dollar claim brought by a computer scientist named Brian Reid, who had been fired when he was 54. Reid said colleagues and supervisors had frequently referred to him as 'an old man' and 'an old fuddy-duddy' ... ".
Scheiber follows the attempts of Nick Stamos, a 40-something techie and former CTO of a billion -dollar tech company, to raise venture funding for his idea. Stamos gets steadily frustrated as VCs happily fund companies founded by pimply kids with half-baked ideas, throwing in good money after bad. The funders he talks to believe that his idea is good, and his grasp of technology is excellent, but when it comes to funding, they say nothing.
Ultimately, the idea of young innovators may just be a mirage. About 15% of the winners of the Nobel prize in scientific disciplines are in their 20s - and the percentage holds good for 50-somethings as well.