There’s been a concerning trend of less and less young, successful founders. Where is the modern Zuck, Gates or Patrick Collison?
I say good on OP for putting themselves out there and keep pushing. We need young people to come up with great ideas and if that comes with them pointing out how young they are, I’m totally fine with it.
I think there have been fewer young technology founders because I think technology has become less and less accessible. There is so much more to sift through to get from an idea to a project or product than there was 10-20 years ago.
I'm saying this as someone who is relatively young, so keep that in mind.
For some parts of the landscape like mobile app development, yes. Its hard to say if they are doing it with hidden intention, or if they sincerely believe enforcing their "best practices" on everyone yields greater good. Probably a bit of both.
The part where you build a demo/prototype showcasing if an idea works, I believe it should be much easier than before as long as you postpone understanding/deciphering the implementation. In those major ecosystems there are huge collections of single-purpose libraries doing a subset of what you want to do, all you need might just be a reasonable amount of python to string them together.
However, ensuring the correctness and actually deploying them for planet-scale mandates following a reasonable subset of "best practices" which is very overwhelming, but doable. People doesn't usually build planet-scale product 10-20 years ago.
> However, ensuring the correctness and actually deploying them for planet-scale [...]
I think this is specifically a big part of the problem. Not everything needs to be planet scale to be good. People didn't focus on being planet scale 10 years ago. 20 or so years Mark was worried about getting The Facebook available at one or two schools.
Worrying about getting things working for the world has made it way harder for us to get things working for indoviduals or small groups.
I say good on OP for putting themselves out there and keep pushing. We need young people to come up with great ideas and if that comes with them pointing out how young they are, I’m totally fine with it.