A word before I start, since I’m going to be unkind. I’m not interested in being crueler than the truth; I’m interested in not pretending. You don’t have to agree with a word of this to want what I’m building — but it’s part of what drives me to build it, so here it is, plainly.
1. The myth we were sold
We bought a story in bulk: the boy genius. The twenty-two-year-old who sees what the greybeards can’t, drops out, and builds the future from a dorm room. It’s a great story, and as a matter of plain fact it’s false.
The data isn’t close. The average founder of a high-growth company is about forty-five — someone who worked in an industry long enough to understand it. The economists who actually counted (Azoulay, Jones, Kim, Miranda, on Census data) found the most successful founders skew older. The dorm-room prodigy is the survivorship-biased exception the industry agreed to photograph, not the pattern.
So the real question isn’t whether young founders are geniuses. It’s why we manufactured and worshipped a story we knew wasn’t true.
2. It was never about competence
Because it was never about competence. The boy-genius cult is a fantasy about not having to grow up, and it found a culture starving for exactly that.
A youth-obsessed, mortality-averse culture wanted to believe the young could do anything — it kept the believer close to their own lost twenties. VCs pattern-matching on “the next Zuckerberg” weren’t spotting talent; they were buying proximity to youth. The press ran it because “experienced person succeeds through years of judgment” doesn’t sell. And so an entire industry’s incentives conspired to crown the boy and keep him boyish — because the myth only works if he never has to become a man.
The result is a specific kind of person: enormously powerful, and arrested — frozen at the point where capital first insulated him from consequence. He never had to grow up, because growing up is what happens to people the world is allowed to say no to, and the world stopped being allowed to say no to him around nineteen.
3. Why it isn’t just an insult
If this were only contempt I’d keep it to myself. It isn’t, and here’s what’s actually at stake: these men are remaking the world in the shape of their own unfinished adolescence.
Ask why the dominant technologies of the era feel the way they do — engineered to harvest attention, manufacture status anxiety, reward the dunk, keep people performing for a crowd. That’s what gets built by someone who never had to develop past the part of life where being seen, being envied, and winning the room are the only things that matter. The feed is a popularity contest with a market cap. The dysregulation economy isn’t a mystery — it’s the inner life of its builders, externalized at scale. A grown-up would have built something else, because a grown-up wants different things. And that “something else” is the whole of what I’m trying to build instead.
4. I’ll say it plainly
So, without the hedging:
These are not serious grown-up men. They are stunted, and they are in charge, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise to be polite. I’m punching up — at people with more power than most governments, on nothing but their own public conduct, which they perform on purpose for applause. That’s fair game, and arguably a duty: the one thing the emperor’s new clothes needs is a crowd too well-mannered to mention the draft.
And yes — if someone pushes me on it, I’ll say it again without flinching: I think Mark looks like a douchebag. I think a lot of them do. I stand by it. Not because it’s clever to be cruel, but because I’m done pretending I don’t see it.
You can think I’m completely wrong about every one of these men and still want everything I’m building, and that’s fine — none of it is required. But I’d rather tell you what’s under the hood than pretend there’s nothing there. There is. I mean every word of it.