Venture Capital: Over 30 Need Not Apply

Newsweek has a great story about a "boot camp" for start-ups. My favorite section?

Y Combinator's model dovetails perfectly with the new start-up ethic in Silicon Valley. It's dramatically cheaper to start a company now than it was in the dot-com boom, and possible to build a substantial operation before requiring venture capital or achieving that liquidity event. (To pay salaries and costs during that time, one can get "angel funding"—less money than a VC firm pays, but in exchange for less equity.) Software tools, which used to cost hundreds of thousands, are now largely free. A wide variety of tasks can be outsourced cheaply. Computers, servers, bandwidth and storage cost a fraction of what they did a decade ago. And there's no need for a marketing budget when you've got Internet word of mouth.

As a result, when it comes to funding, "$500,000 is the new $5 million," says tech investor Mike Maples. It's several weeks into the program, and Maples is in a Palo Alto, Calif., coffeehouse for a meeting with the Weeblies. He sees a lot of people barely out of their teens. The old wisdom for investors in start-ups said you needed an experienced hand as a CEO. The Valley's new wisdom: don't fund anyone over 30. The average age of Y Combinator founders is 25.

I guess I could take a page from the IBM'ers on that the article below and start a political action committee. But I think I'll just keep slogging along, and let the market sort the winners and losers out.