They got older.

MVP went from Minimum Viable Product to Maximum Viable Product, which takes time and more of your own resources before investors even take you seriously.

New paradigms on mobile, ML, tooling, etc favored young people with open minds and enough time to explore. Now the field is more mature and experience creates advantages

Lower barriers to entry in software led to saturation and paradoxically caused a favor for experience; pendulum swinging back into hardtech

Generally agree with @VitalikButerin here. 20 years ago, the greatest advantage you could have was NOT thinking tomorrow was going to look like yesterday. That environment favored fresh young minds. Today’s environment favors more seasoned and strategic thinkers.

The first people who ‘grew up’ with tech mainstream are now in mid 40s - early 50s. Tech is very new, I think you will find as time goes on many more 50+ founders, but also many more teen founders because there is clearly so much online material now appealing to a wider audience.

Maybe we are just the old timers now who don’t get it.

I think it’s quite simple: people are getting older.

I think a big part of it is the growth in the content-creation industry Pretty interesting to compare the most impressive tech founders of 10-20 years ago to the most impressive content creators of today: @MrBeast is 24 years old, @LoganPaul is 27, @KylieJenner is 25…

It very well could be that @ycombinator and other institutions have trained an army of entrepreneurs that understand best practices for Internet-enabled businesses. As these entrepreneurs mature, they still know how to build.