Alpha, Beta, Meta

There is an old Neapolitan joke whose punchline runs like this: "Those who work, eat. Those who don't work, eat and drink.".

The punchline has recently socked several workers at Facebook, who despite earning $400,000/year salaries working from home, found enough time to grift not only their employer, but their hungry, lower-paid, peers as well. In addition to their salaries, these employees received the astoundingly generous benefit of $70 dollars per day in food credits. This amounts to a paycheck of $350 dollars per week, which is half of the median weekly income of 22 million 16-24 year olds in America. This is also more than the average amount families -- with children -- spend on groceries per week.

These workers were fired. Apparently many of them were surprised by this outcome.

In 2007 Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus (he developed the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet, founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and has generally dedicated his life to making other lives better) once had a little debate with Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, at a founding YCombinator Startup School event:

Kapor is the legendary founder of Lotus...spoke about the dangers of what he called the "mirror-tocracy": confirmation bias, insularity, and cliquish modes of thinking. He described the work of his institute to combat bias, countering the anecdotes and fantasies that pass for truth with actual research about diversity in the workplace. -- "Inside the Mirrotocracy"

A 22 year old Mark Zuckerberg responded:

Almost on cue, Mark started out by saying that the two most important things for a company is to have people who are “young and technical,” and his explanation of such was actually the entirety of his prepared remarks. (He arrived shortly before his presentation, so AFAIK hadn’t heard any of Mitch’s.) He made some fair arguments for biasing toward a technically inclined workforce, even in roles like marketing and support, however he didn’t really say anything compelling in support of youth, besides some vague references to many great creators and chessmasters being between 20 and 35 years old. But in no uncertain terms, he said they have a bias toward hiring young people at Facebook. -- "Mitch Kapor vs. Mark Zuckerberg"

Of course he grew, and grew, this stream of thought. One of the most innovative things Mark Zuckerberg ever did was entrench age bias into hiring. It's possibly his biggest accomplishment.

Yummy Chummy Tummy

You might write this off as a...folly of youth. Instead, this is a pretty common position amongst the chummy Silicon Valley elite.

For example, Keith Rabois, a managing partner at Khosla Ventures, gave a talk recently, and it was noted by an attendee that Rabois, alongside Zuckerberg, doesn't believe startups should hire anyone over 30 years of age:

Rabois tried to clarify:

I addressed this hole-digging, and pointed out that Rabois, perhaps not surprisingly, likes to use stock stock trading words like "alphas" and "betas" in reference to human beings, while seemingly oblivious to the subtleties:

William James once noted:

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

Keith Rabois is a crony in the "Paypal Mafia", a chummy club of founders and early employees at the company. Elon Musk is one, who has taken an obsession with youth down to first principles, holding the position that spreading his seed will save society. Another mafioso is Max Levchin, who, referencing everyone's favorite Howard Roark wannabe Peter Thiel, tells this story:

PayPal once rejected a candidate who aced all the engineering tests because for fun, the guy said that he liked to play hoops. That single sentence lost him the job."

Cool.

David O. Sacks is perhaps the oddest of the bunch. Having made generational money suckering Microsoft into buying a terrible "social network for work" named Yammer (don't feel bad if you've never heard of it), he still, somehow, manages to be a misanthrope. Here he is slagging off his co-host on a popular podcast, who dared to suggest that Putin is evil:

Paul Graham, a founder of YCombinator, referring to sad Sacks:

I was talking recently to another investor about whether you're the most evil person in Silicon Valley. He thought about it for a few seconds, and agreed that he couldn't think of anyone worse.

Salty.

I could go on, but I'm throwing up a little in my mouth. The point is that there is a strange responsibility-hating youth cult in Silicon Valley, where another childish Gambino pal, Peter Thiel, shows a great love of impetuousness, even using what should be an inside voice to happily tell the world he thinks injecting himself with the blood of youths might reverse his own aging:

I'm looking into parabiosis stuff, which I think is really interesting. This is where they did the young blood into older mice and they found that had a massive rejuvenating effect...And so that’s . . . that is one that . . . again, it’s one of these very odd things where people had done these studies in the 1950s and then it got dropped altogether. I think there are a lot of these things that have been strangely under-explored.

Ghoul.

Truths, damn truths, and statistics

What if this M?tley Crüe is right about youth? What if what we're hearing aren't the plaintive laments of lucky men who gained power before wisdom, men simply afraid of getting old and stiff, but something based in reality?

I've managed large teams of engineers at Fortune 50 companies, and startups, of all ages. I was a young founder myself. When you have no children, responsibilities, and can sleep on a mattress in a basement without hating yourself, you are at least capable of working under adverse conditions while staying positive. You'll certainly work for less money. For any money.

Rabois et. al. often mention how young those in pursuits that required the very finest tuned minds like advanced mathematics or physics are. They'll assume it is true that breakthroughs and discoveries in these fields are made by those at "peak mind", early 20s, something like that. It seems like that should be true.

They might also talk about history, how if you study "all the great internet companies" you'll find that the founders were under thirty. Seems like they're on to something, right?

But here's the thing...

If something "feels true" that doesn't make it true. When conclusions are drawn from a sample that isn't representative of an entire population because certain groups are not represented -- in this case, older workers in a new industry -- what you're producing are not insights but biases.

This whole internet engineering thing is only about 25 years old. Until about 15 years ago there weren't any older workers, as the industry itself was new. This is a sampling bias, which arises when the sample used is not representative of the population intended to be analyzed. A new industry naturally lacks older workers. Attributing success solely to youth ignores the fact that older individuals are underrepresented not due to lack of ability but because of the industry's novelty. It's a misattribution of success. Or to take another tack, because one event follows another, it doesn't mean the first event caused the second.

Then there is that whole tricky thing about facts. Do the most insightful breakthroughs in mathematics come to those under 30? It turns out that when you actually look into it, this assumption falls apart. And it can be destructive -- to the young:

Taken together we arrive at a rather unexpected conclusion, representing our main empirical finding: impact is randomly distributed within a scientist’s body of work, regardless of publication time or order in the sequence of publications,” the paper says. “We call this the random impact rule, as it indicates that the highest-impact work can be, with the same probability, anywhere in the sequence of [papers] published by a scientist -- https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/11/04/paper-creativity-doesnt-have-decrease-age-scientists-have-unique-kind-iq-predicts

For me it's a little ick to even be having this conversation. Is that what we are? Always looking for some number or factor or study to prove that person over there is a loser and this person over here is a winner? It's gross.

I think we need to show a little more respect for each other. The very idea that the factor which most impacts your career is the number of grey hairs on your head is ridiculous. Do I need to mention, for the nth time, how the average age of a successful startup founder is 45?

When we analyzed founders who have won TechCrunch awards over the last decade, the average age at the time of founding was just 31. For?the people?selected by Inc. magazine as the founders of the fastest-growing startups in 2015, the average age at founding was only 29. Consistent with these findings, Paul Graham,?a?cofounder of Y Combinator,?once quipped that “the cutoff in investors’ heads is 32… After 32, they start to be a little skeptical.” But is this view correct?

It is not:

In light of this evidence, why do some VCs persist in betting on young founders? We cannot definitively answer this question with the data at our disposal, but we believe that two mechanisms could be at play. First, many VCs may operate under a mistaken belief that youth is the elixir of successful entrepreneurship?— in other words, VCs are simply wrong. Though it is tempting to see age bias as the leading explanation for the divergence between our findings and investor behavior, there is a more benign possibility: VCs are not simply looking to identify the firms with the highest growth potential. Rather, they may seek investments that will yield the highest returns, and it is possible that young founders are more financially constrained than more experienced ones, leading them to cede upside to investors at a lower price. In other words, younger entrepreneurs may be a better “deal” for investors than more experienced founders.

Cool.