The Cult of the Wunderkind
The kids are our future. But there’s a reason most CEOs are old enough to remember the 90’s.
Charlie Jarvis. Sam Bankman-Fried. Elizabeth Holmes. Caroline Ellison. Trevor Milton. Martin Shkreli.
Forbes 30 under 30 alumns have made an undeniable impact on society. Unfortunately, none of it positive.
No, the reason they’ve all achieved notoriety outside of Forbes and Business Week is because of fraud. In a move that seems to shock business journalists and absolutely nobody else who has ever lived in the real world, many of the 26 year olds who’ve managed to raise billions of dollars in funding…maybe don’t actually have things together as much as they’ve led investors to believe.
I know. Shocking and unbelievable.
I mean, if business tycoons too young to remember the turn of the millennium can’t be trusted, who can?
After all, who hasn’t made his or her first billion by the age of 30?
Oh. Right.
Everybody.
…
When I was 30, my single greatest financial accomplishment was that I had planned and paid for a wedding.
Not like, a fancy wedding. The kind that regular people without crazy budgets have. And I didn’t actually end up paying for it myself—my mom covered the band. My dad wrote me a check for the reception that night. I was simply prepared to pay for the wedding myself.
As far as financial accomplishments go, that was it.
And the key thing to remember here is that I wasn’t a “loser” at 30.
I hadn’t spent my 20’s huffing paint and eating Tide Pods.
I wasn’t even one of the cliched millennials of my demographic, going out for mimosas and avocado toast every Saturday, and running by Starbucks each morning on my way to work. I was not blowing my paychecks on direct-to-consumer athleisure, meal subscription boxes, or even fresh produce.
I was an attorney. I was known for being an incorrigible tightwad. I had spent my 20’s jumping through every hoop, crossing every t, dotting every i, and following an approach to household budgeting that would have made Dave Ramsey himself scream. My pennies were being squeezed so hard that Abraham Lincoln’s cries of anguish could be heard three states over. There were people in Denver wondering how somebody could do that to ol’ Abe.
Moreover, I came from a relatively privileged background, myself. My in-laws paid for the house we were living in. They paid for my Volvo. I didn’t have a mortgage. I didn’t have a rent payment. I didn’t have a car payment.
I literally didn’t have to pay for the two biggest expenses most people have.
And all that I had to show for it was the ability to kind of sort of pay for a buffet at the local country club.
…
Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I also wasn’t like, the most successful attorney under 30. I wasn’t partner track in BigLaw or anything like that. I wasn’t just setting the legal world on fire.
I had plenty of former classmates who were making more money than I was.
And, of course, law isn’t the only way to make money.
There were analysts at Goldman Sachs who were already five or six years into their careers by 30. There were some dentists who were already practicing. There were those fluke types who had somehow bought a property to flip at 22 or whatever, and who were now seven or eight spec houses into residential real estate development. And, there was always a scattering of people who had simply gotten into unremarkable but well-paying jobs early on, and who managed the money well enough to build up a pretty solid nest egg.
But still.
To think of “success” as a jet plane trying to take off, one’s 20’s are a pretty short runway.
Best case scenario, the plane is achieving liftoff by age 30.
That’s simply how life works. No matter how well the plane is designed, no matter how ideal the runway, no matter how skilled the pilot, there is just only so much runway. There is only so much a person can reasonably accomplish between high school graduation and the age of 30.
Furthermore, neither society nor human development are really structured in such a way as to give some huge advantage to 27 year olds.
Neurologically speaking, the first half of a person’s 20s are a trainwreck.
The brain doesn’t fully mature until 25, and the last part to work out the kinks is the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is in charge of executive functioning. Until it matures, things like “planning for the future” and “thinking through consequences” are pretty wonky—this is why the average 22 year old will go through two cellphones and 406 phone chargers per year, and will act completely shocked when a night of binge drinking and staying out until 3 in the morning results in being tired the next day.
Although there are exceptions to everything in life, typically, it’s hard for people who haven’t yet mastered setting electronics down before diving into a pool to run just super successful companies.
That’s…not a slight to 22 year olds. I was 22 once. So was everybody currently over the age of 23.
It’s just how things work.
Society doesn’t do the under-30 crowd any favors, either.
For all of the attention paid to the supposed wunderkinds; for all of the “likes” tight bodies and unlined faces can garner on Instagram, it’s actually really hard to make money in one’s 20’s.
Companies like to see experience. They like to see some kind of proven track record. When I was applying for jobs in my 20’s, the running joke was that everybody wanted at least half a century of experience for entry-level. And shockingly enough, none of us elder millennials had that…you know, because of being under the age of 70 and all. That made it kind of hard to find any job, much less the kind of job that pays some massive salary and lets a person build up seven figures to invest in a new company.
Part of that was simply bad timing—my cohort graduated right into the worst of the recession, and it was quite a while before the job market became favorable to applicants.
But also, no matter how tight the job market, 23 year olds with no experience, no practical skills, and no idea how to do anything just aren’t that hot of a commodity. And again, that’s not a slight to 22 year olds. The simple reality is that school doesn’t do much to prepare a person for the workforce. It can’t. That’s not its place. The best a school can do is give a person the tools and discipline to figure out how to become a valuable employee. The rest is on the recent graduate and his employer.
And, if it’s hard to land a super high paying job at 23, it’s even harder to secure the funding to start a new business.
That same risk-averse mentality that makes employers want to see some kind of history of accomplishing something before handing out a bunch of six-figure jobs?
Yeah.
That’s even more applicable when applying for bank loans.
Banks really like to see assets. Collateral. Things that unemployed 23 year olds don’t have.
I don’t care how good the posts look on Instagram, I don’t care how fantastic the presentation deck is, J.P. Morgan is not interested in handing out seven figures to “good ideas”.
The only people dumb enough to throw money at businesses run by kids are VC investors, and the only reason they’ll do it is because VC money isn’t real money. Or, more accurately, it is real money, but not the money of the person investing it.
No individual is betting his own retirement on a business dreamed up by some kid with an impressive presentation deck and leftover acne. No bank is betting its financial solvency and regulatory approval on the idea. No sane person is actually putting skin in that game voluntarily.
Instead, venture capitalists figure out how to sell the promise of what they’re doing to private equity, and then private equity guys figure out how to sell the deal to state pension funds, and at every turn, the deals are structured to offload as much risk as possible onto other people. And even with this strategy, the bet isn’t that companies run by 22 years olds are inherently good ideas; the bet is that the 22 year old is in an industry that’s currently generating short-term profits for the majority of players.
The bet is that a little bit of money can be printed before the whole thing implodes. And the VC plans to take that printed money and run out before the shrapnel starts flying.
That’s like, the best case scenario. That’s the scenario VC tries to sell to PE, and that PE then tries to sell to institutions and pension boards.
Literally, the most faith that anybody has in the ability of 25 year olds to run successful companies is “The market might be favorable enough to prop this stupid idea up for a year or two so that I can make a couple of dollars before it all crashes and burns”.
And yet, somehow, the media can’t get enough of the wunderkind fantasy.
Somehow, despite having most likely spent their own 20’s eating ramen noodles and Totino pizzas, journalists of a certain type can’t stop clinging to the belief that these 20-somethings are changing the world. That these 23 year olds know something the rest of us didn’t at that age.
I get it. It’s a nice fantasy.
Anyone who has spent time in the real world has seen that it can kind of suck sometimes. The endless drab office parks. The endless meetings. The endless out-of-touch bosses who have no idea what it’s like to try to juggle normal life with normal obligations on a normal salary.
It’s nice to think the youths will change all of that. That they know something the rest of the world doesn’t.
But also…that’s not fair to anybody.
It’s not fair to 22 year olds to expect them to fix things that the last 200 generations haven’t been able to figure out. It’s not fair to 27 year olds to tell them that this is the height of their competence—that if they haven’t achieved anything world-changing by 30, then sorry bro, guess it’s off to the glue factory. It’s not fair to make people think that who and what they’ve accomplished at 24 is all that will ever count in life.
It’s also not fair to everyone over 30. It’s not fair to discount the wisdom gained from experience. It’s not fair to pretend that all of those years slogging away at normal tasks don’t count for something; that some kid with an MBA and a $400 hoodie knows more than the guy who has been doing the same job for a decade and a half. It’s not fair to discount all of the people going grey; to pretend that they all peaked at 22, and are now just taking up space that could be better used by a kid named Khyden with cauliflower hair.
And, it’s certainly not fair to investors. It’s not fair to tell the guy with $600 and a Robinhood account that Khyden is a better bet than an index fund. It’s not fair to bet the retirements of state workers on the hope that private equity can pull out before Khyden jumps into the pool with his cell phone and $700M. It’s not fair to tell people that this is the path to financial success—that a good presentation deck is worth more than actual assets, and actual collateral, and an actual track record of getting things done. That “good ideas” and “good vibes” count for more than a few views on TikTok.
The kids are our future.
It’s important for companies to invest in training. It’s important for companies to invest in the next generation of talent. It’s important not to dismiss the youngest members of the workforce; important not to close them out of the conference rooms on the idea that none of their thoughts have merit.
It’s also important to encourage entrepreneurship.
Small businesses help drive innovation. Small businesses provide economic opportunity at every level for people whose resumes would never make it onto the desk of an actual human being at MegaCorp, but who still have ideas that will move the economy forward. Working for a small company is a great way to wear a lot of hats—to build an incredible number skills in relatively little time.
The world needs startups. The world needs young people, and the world needs for those young people to be sitting in on meetings and going to conferences. The youngest workers need to be heard, and they need to be respected. That’s not a wishy washy thing, either—the economic future depends on those people. Nurturing talent in today’s 22 year olds means that there will still be somebody to run the show when everybody my age and older is dead and gone.
But it’s also important to remember that 22 year olds are our future.
To forget that is a good way to get taken for a ride nobody wants to go on.