Immigration got harder

No one over 28 was into tech.

Higher barrier of entry. You need more knowledge than before to be able to compete with established companies and that takes time. Being a genius programmer is no longer enough as your software needs to do 100 things to be competitive.

Not a wild west environment anymore? More of a regulated and administered terrain?

The 28 year old founders got older and did not stop being founders. Guilty as charged

You got older 😅

One theory is that influence and money is concentrated around successful founders. Why take the risk of funding a first time founder when there are more and more second and third time founders with a proven track record? Or more founders are ex-Uber etc instead of newly grads?

That suggests the pre 94 demographic cohort is more productive — which is prior to internet native being the default cultural upbringing. Perhaps the utility of straddling multiple cultural realities makes for more capable founders.

People being increasingly aware that era was simply a bunch of wealthy folks cultivating bright young workaholics. They transplanted the finance model to tech, and moved the cult of personality to the founder.

20-30 years ago, building tech used to be relatively simple compared to today. i.e. solutions didn’t have huge amounts of functionality, the UI wasn’t pretty, security wasn’t a huge problem, no need for 24/7 uptime. Modern solutions require much more time, effort and resources.