What I hear you saying is...

Fred Wilson caused a bit of a ruckus recently when one of his posts pondered the the ages of successful (or at least funded) entreprenuers:

But the facts are pretty eye opening. Nine of our eleven entrepreneurs are in their 30s. One is in his 20s, and one is in his 50s.

That says to me that prime time entrepreneurship is 30s. And its possibly getting younger as web technology meets youth culture.

Valleywag then published a cheat- sheet of successful founders and their ages. Pretty sobering for tech entrepreneurs in their 40s and up.

Mike, then posts an interesting follow-up observation:

...it makes sense that in consumer facing areas where the audience demographic tends to skew younger, younger entrepreneurs are more strategically positioned.

30-somethings? How about teenagers?
Zoli Erdos has a great post today about Anshul Samar -- a 13-year-old that is shopping his chemistry-related card game called "Elementeo" at the TiEcon conference.

A cursory look at the game reveals it is a cross between the popular Yugi-oh card deck and a periodic chart. And to draft off Mike's thoughts, I don't think even a 30-year-old (let alone a 45-year- old) game designer at Hasbro could have come up with this idea. And check out some of the game description from their site:

Your goal is to reduce your opponent's IQ (or life) to ZERO, Nada, Nil, None. You do that by harnessing the great power of elements and compounds, and by mixing them in mysterious ways....

...There are two ways to destroy your opponents IQ. One is through moving the cards to the last column of the battleground (mat), and directly attacking the opponent's IQ. After attacking, that card "teleports" into an empty space in the front row or goes to the toxic waste pile.

What's missing?
Where are the words "education" or "learning"? The entire web-site reads like a script from a SciFi channel mini-series. But when you consider how the game is played, it's clear that kids would pick up an incredible amount of chemistry-related concepts and terminology through the game play.

Of course, that's the beauty of young Anshul's game. What kid wants to play an educational game when s/he can play a Yugi-oh death match? To Mike's point, a 13-year-old is the most likely candidate to understand what motivates and interests other adolescents.

Checking Amazon, it appears that chemistry is still a reasonably popular theme for Toys and games. But the best-sellers are almost categorically lab kits. Not much use in when you're on that family road-trip, and probably much less successful in imparting the wrote-knowledge that one needs in a chemistry class.

I think he's got a winner :-)