Cal Sunday Magazine Covers What's Indistinguishable From Magic
Youth is magical. And some venture capitalists (VCs) are magic junkies. From California Sunday magazine's The Real Teenagers of Silicon Valley:
Even the teens think it’s a little strange. “I want people to think of me for my merit, not my age,” Latta says. “I almost feel like my age can be distracting. I’ll often lie about it.” But he did admit that he’ll sometimes “pull the age card.”Theil fellows drop out of college, sometimes high school, move west and code:
She knows the tech teen posse but has her own friends outside of it. “I’ll either meet people who will fetishize it or will dismiss it. The fetish is kind of weird,” Varshavskaya says. “The group of young guys here. A lot of them are treated like gods and wizards and heroes, and all the venture capitalists are waiting for their next magic thing, but they’re not doing anything that special. They’re just really young. I include myself in that.”The smart VCs -- which The Information recently reported are running out of places to invest -- will figure out how to get more of this young skin in the game. In order to lengthen follow-through:
To Orbuch, starting a company as a teenager makes more sense than starting one later in life. “People are always saying, ‘Oh, you’re so young to be taking such a risk.’ I’m amazed when people start companies in their 30s!” he said. “If I mess up, I go home and go to college. The worst that can happen is minimal.”
An anecdote to this youth-induced vertigo, might be found in a complete read of Walter Kirn's Easy Chair essay for Harper's Shopping Mall Time Machine. The payoff requires a minimal time investment. The essay begins:
I started hearing it about two years ago, and then I seemed to hear it constantly: people in their late teens and early twenties complaining, quite sincerely, that they felt old. The first case I remember was a college student at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. I’d just finished speaking to her class about an essay I’d written on electronic surveillance, and during the discussion afterward she grumbled that kids a few years younger than she was — kids who’d been using smartphones and social media since their grade-school days — seemed to have no concept of personal privacy. Her tone was exasperated, almost disgusted, and she carried on for a few minutes about the sorry state of youth today. Spoiled. Without boundaries. Distracted. Apathetic. She sounded like she was ninety, not nineteen. She concluded with something like, “I can’t even talk to that generation. No point. Nothing in common. They make me feel so ancient.” I may have grinned....full essay at Harpers.org.
My most recent encounter with young people feeling like elders occurred a few weeks back, at a shoe store in the Fashion Show Mall on the Las Vegas Strip. My wife, who at forty-one is thirteen years younger than me but feels like a peer in cultural time (maybe because we’re both from the Midwest, where cultural time passes relatively slowly), was hunting for a certain type of clogs that she said were “in” again. This surprised me. During my childhood in the 1970s, clogs had a big run, but because they coincided with other big runs that petered out and haven’t resumed — waterbeds, the Billy Jack films, quasi-incestuous brother-sister singing duos such as the Osmonds and the Carpenters — I thought we’d seen the last of them...
This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
