Dev.SN

c0lo writes:

"New Republic runs a story on what seems (to me) to be an exaggerated obsession among Silicon Valley techs of needing to look young, even going to the extreme of undergoing cosmetic surgery.

Says the author:

In talking to dozens of people around Silicon Valley over the past eight months, engineers, entrepreneurs, money-men, [and] uncomfortably inquisitive cosmetic surgeons, I got the distinct sense that it's better to be perceived as naive and immature than to have voted in the 1980s.

The spirit seems to be captured best by the motto of a large I.T. services company operating in the bay: 'We Want People Who Have Their Best Work Ahead of Them, Not Behind Them.'

The story also cites Dan Scheinman, a former Cisco acquisition head who's proposal for Cisco to buy VMWare back in 2000 was not cleared by the Cisco's bureaucracy, who says that:

during a meeting with two bratty Zuckerberg wannabes, it hit him: Older entrepreneurs were 'the mother of all undervalued opportunities.' Indeed, of all the ways that V.C.s could be misled, the allure of youth ranked highest. The cutoff in investors' heads is 32. After 32, they [the V.C.] start to be a little skeptical.

The economics of the V.C. industry help explain why... Whereas a 500 percent return on a $2 million investment would be considered remarkable in any other line of work, the investments that sustain a large V.C. fund are the 'unicorns' and 'super-unicorns' that return 100x or 1,000x.

Finding themselves in the position of chasing 100x or 1,000x returns, V.C.s invariably tell themselves a story about youngsters. 'One of the reasons they collectively prefer youth is because youth has the potential for the black swan,' one V.C. told me of his competitors. 'It hasn't been marked down to reality yet. If I was at Google for five years, what's the chance I would be a black swan? A lot lower than if you never heard of me. That's the collective mentality.'

Speaking for myself, it almost makes falling for the sin of using cliches and exclaiming "Stop the world, I need to get off. I'm too old for this BS." What about you my fellow soylentnews netizens?"