At the core, being a "founder" (as cringe as the cult around that word has become) is about accumulating capital. As technology advances it becomes more capital-intensive to create. You outcompete other businesses based on how advanced your technology is. Older people generally have more money even if for no other reason than they've had more time to accumulate it.
Thus, so long as you are still able to grasp the concepts related to the technology and can act upon it to accumulate more capital, you're at an advantage in the quest to start a successful business over younger people. Not an insurmountable advantage for the younger people to overcome, mind, but it's still an advantage.
Software businesses in the 2000-2020 era were famously capital light. Much more so than the technology businesses that came before them. I think these extremely capital light businesses were an aberration that briefly lowered average founder age and now we're just reverting to the mean.
Yes, AI is capital intense, but many of the world's previous technological endeavors were also capital heavy.
iou•1mo ago
swyx•1mo ago