NY Times follows Newsweek in suggesting VCs are not funding companies with older entrepreneurs. It is the MTV model - have young managers who are much more in sync with your audience. Of course, MSM primarily focuses on consumer technology.
But for enterprise technologies? With few exceptions, I dare you to find many 27 year olds or younger who understand enough of enterprise processes and technologies to deliver a whopping success. Of course there are exceptions (Michael Dell, for example or Ben Casnocha), but if I was funding enterprise technologies I would vote for someone globally traveled and with several years in an enterprise technology vendor or someone who has run a major project or a unit in a large corporation.
In tech world, we have a smug view that only we can do start ups right. Managers at big companies are constantly launching new products, opening new global operations - building billion dollar businesses from scratch. If VCs would loosen the low cash/high equity comp packages, you would see several 30, 40, 50, 60 year olds come out of the woodwork and make pretty damn good entrepreneurs. And they would mirror the enterprise customer audience - which is not likely to be in its teens or 20s.
Age has little to do it. Just ask serial entrepreneurs like Dave Duffield, Dan Bricklin, Jim Barksdale.
