Are they though? Even looking at examples like Google and Facebook, it's not like the founders saw an opportunity where no one else was looking and went for it. In both cases, they built something that interested them with no eye toward opportunity (at least if the information we've been given about their early motivations is true), and then at some point down the road saw the same opportunity that everyone else already saw (in the sense that both search engines and social networks were already crowded spaces with companies that seemed to be the incumbent winners).
If anything, it was less that they saw opportunity where no one else was looking, and more that they saw opportunity where _everyone_ else was looking and went for it anyway. Everyone else thought the opportunities were so obvious as to have already been solved. Search engines were already solved by Yahoo!, social networking was already solved by MySpace, book-selling was already solved by Borders and Barnes & Noble.
Maybe younger people tend to do things that don't make rational sense from a business perspective, and those are usually the things that become outsize successes in the face of the status quo. Of course, they're also the things that fail way more often than they succeed. That could explain both phenomena, where younger people founded the giant success stories and older people founded more successful things on average.
If anything, it was less that they saw opportunity where no one else was looking, and more that they saw opportunity where _everyone_ else was looking and went for it anyway. Everyone else thought the opportunities were so obvious as to have already been solved. Search engines were already solved by Yahoo!, social networking was already solved by MySpace, book-selling was already solved by Borders and Barnes & Noble.
Maybe younger people tend to do things that don't make rational sense from a business perspective, and those are usually the things that become outsize successes in the face of the status quo. Of course, they're also the things that fail way more often than they succeed. That could explain both phenomena, where younger people founded the giant success stories and older people founded more successful things on average.