Younger, faster and better seems to be the new motto in Silicon Valley, with millions given to twenty-somethings with fresh ideas.
Mark Zuckerberg is old. Completely past it. He's 32 and in Silicon Valley, 20 is the new 30.
Mark Zuckerberg is old. Completely past it. He's 32 and in Silicon Valley, 20 is the new 30.
Take James Proud. The south Londoner started coding when he was nine, moved to California when he was 19, set up his company Hello at the age of 21, and now has 50 employees and £28m in funding.
Facebook, Google and Amazon are now the grown-ups of the tech world.
As the current crop of start-ups - think Uber, Airbnb and Snapchat - also grow into multibillion-dollar beasts, Silicon Valley is looking for the next big thing. And increasingly, the next big thing is the bright young things.
Alongside Proud, there's Brian Wong, a 25-year-old Canadian whose advertising network Kiip has £14m in funding, according to Crunchbase, and offices around the world.
Or, here in the UK, 27-year-old Kate Unsworth, whose company Vinaya is in the middle of smashing crowdfunding targets for its latest wearable product.
The youngest might be Shubham Banerjee, whose company Braigo Labs makes low-cost Braille printers. Banerjee is 14 years old.
What characterises younger founders? Perhaps it's a higher appetite for risk and uncertainty.
Mr Proud tells Sky News: "You should always take the highest amount of risk. And when you actually look at it: what is the true risk? And it's usually not really that risky.
"If you're going to do something and it fails, OK, you're not going to prison - it doesn't really matter… Especially when you're younger and you don't have as many commitments to other people."
That single-mindedness also characterises this generation of young entrepreneurs in another way.
Silicon Valley has always been fleet of foot - think of Facebook's motto: "Move fast and break stuff."
But this generation moves really fast: Sense, Hello's sleep sensor, went from sketch to on sale in just 11 months.
Experience and patience are still worth something. But many of this new generation can rely on a support network of older entrepreneurs - Mr Proud cites Max Levchin, a co-founder of PayPal, as offering invaluable advice.
Ms Unsworth can draw on the advice of UK veterans like Eileen Burbidge of Passion Capital and Michael Birch, who co-founded Bebo.
But this isn't just about making a quick buck.
"It's still very hard to build meaningful technology companies," Mr Proud says.
"There's always a shake out and it's people who went there to try and get rich quickly."
Robert Colville writes in his recent book, The Great Acceleration, that "Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page and Jeff Bezos ... are not just messianic but petrified. Petrified that something faster will come along and lure away their customers".
Zuck better watch out.
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