I said something on the record I have mostly kept to private conversations. When I moved to San Francisco after business school and started interviewing for associate and principal VC roles, I was grateful that nobody could tell how old I was. My genes bought me cover. I needed it, because I heard over and over something I called the rule of 27. If you had not done something exceptional by 27, why would a top tier firm take you.
I do not think I was wrong that the rule existed. I was wrong about what it measures.
Santosh opened by asking whether there is a sweet spot age for a high functioning VC. I swapped the word almost immediately. Not age. Lifestyle. This work feels a lot like life. You meet people and nothing comes of it. You back people and it goes to hell or heaven. What the job asks for is room to think and the willingness to keep showing up, and both of those track with age without being caused by it.
Then he brought numbers that cut against the folklore. Across roughly three million U.S. founders the mean age is 42. Among the highest growth one in a thousand it is 45. Founders at 50 and over are twice as likely to deliver a top tier outcome. The industry that invented the rule of 27 writes its checks to people who are, on average, fifteen years past it.
An aging curve is a population object and we keep using it to price a person. Basketball solved this a while ago. The curve says a wing declines after 30. LeBron at 40 does not refute the curve. He is the residual, and the residual is the whole business. I said on air that the goal is to be an exception that invests in exceptions. You are trying to be the weird dot on the chart, the one that should not be there. If that is the job, a hiring band is a strange instrument to run it through.
Three things I took.
Risk tolerance may be inherited rather than aged into. Santosh gave the standard version. You will never be more risk seeking than right out of school, because responsibility becomes liability. I pushed on where that belief comes from. We were raised by boomers, personally and professionally, and that generation was handed a world that mostly went up and to the right. Some of what they taught us was true then and is not true now. I am not sure the risk curve is a fact about human beings. It may be a fact about one fifty year run.
Staying too long is a franchise cost before it is a personal one. Santosh is the youngest of four partners at Dynamo and the firm is coming up on eleven years. He looks at other professions carrying partners at 65 and 75 and 85 and sees damage. "It doesn't matter if your name's on the door," he said. "That's still net negative for you and your legacy if you're a founder of a firm." He raised Jordan going to the Wizards and was honest that ego sits underneath the whole question. LPs ask him how many funds he has left in him. It is a rude question and it is the right one, asked badly.
Experience might be the depreciating asset. I did not walk in with this one, and it went against me. NVCA data shows the share of partners at their current firm ten years or more has risen over the last four or five years. I offered the flattering read. Founders want expertise, pattern recognition compounds, the market is finally paying for people who have seen a few cycles. Santosh agreed that every firm benefits from someone who has seen multiple cycles, because history rhymes. Then he kept going. "Experience alone, I don't think, will be valuable because in the age of intelligence, you can tap into experience in a non-humanistic way that's still sufficient."
I have been sitting with it since. If experience is retrievable, the ten year tenure number stops being evidence of compounding and becomes a question about what those ten years still buy.
Where I am not settled. I still believe pattern recognition compounds. What I can no longer defend is the assumption that it compounds faster than it commoditizes. That is the same clock Santosh put on every other venture advantage on episode four, and I did not notice he had turned it on us.
I wrote in Everyone Shoots Threes Now that a weakness is a hiring problem and not a prompting problem. The other half of that showed up here. Knowing precisely what you spike at beats being adequate at three things. When you are young you try to spike at all of them and dilute the one you are actually good at.
There is no perfect age. There is a weird dot, and the work is getting yourself onto it.
Listen here.
with gratitude,
earn