Mark Zuckerberg at 22: "Young people are just smarter."
My own experience: I did great work when I was in my 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s. The stuff I'm most famous for I did in my 40s. But the best software I've ever done was this week. I think that's pretty much been true all the way through. It all builds.
Some people stop growing. And some people never are that smart, at any age, even in their 20s. If you want to be creative, and you work at it, you don't stop growing.
It never gets easy. Which is one of the reasons I like what I do.
I don't expect the young people who have all the power in the tech industry to wake up one day and want to work with people who are the same age as their parents. That's not likely to happen.
But I do think it's possible to create new distribution systems for technology that don't have to flow through the channels they dominate. With different values that are appropriate to people who aren't trying to conquer the world, only make a modest contribution. That's something you come to appreciate with age. I don't think we'll have a lot of competition from younger technologists.