[michaelochurch]

I don't know why the fuck you were down-voted.

That said, age is only a small part of the issue. I'm older and there's still a lot more that I don't know than there is that I do know. I don't expect that fact to change in a fundamental way: there will always be far more that I don't know.

The problem is that Silicon Valley people are arrogant and don't listen. They call the rest of the country "the paper belt" and think that regulators are just stupid, without taking time to understand why the regulations exist in the first place.

Also, there are a lot of older, man-child VCs who aren't 20-somethings and ought to know better.

Much of the youth/inexperience image that Silicon Valley wants to project is out of an intention to create plausible deniability when these companies do wrong. (The same with "Aspie chic"; Evan Spiegel is a lot of things, but I don't think that he has Asperger's, and I wish these people would stop using a real disease that they don't have to justify assholish behavior.) In comparison, if you're 55 and your company is at the center of a sexual harassment scandal, you can't use the "I didn't know any better" excuse or the "I was crushing code 20 hours per day, but I'll create a token 'Chief Cultural Officer' position and pretend to have solved this" justification.

[ocdtrekkie]

I know why I was downvoted. I heavily criticized startup culture on a community meant for startup folks. ;)

Sidebar: I have Asperger's. It's not a disease, just a difference. And it's definitely not an excuse.