Valentin Saportas

The age of the 40-year-old founder is back. Bryant Chou spent 12 years as CTO of Webflow, which now powers something like 1.5% of the entire internet. He's back in the current YC batch with Ploy, an AI marketing platform, and he describes himself as "a bit of a boomer, double the age of the YC founders." But over 13% of his batch is already using his product, within months of launch. There is a side of the argument which destroyed one of the main edges young founders have, which was being faster and cheaper at building.... speed is everyones game. If what's left is knowing what to build this is more likely to come from spending 15 years watching an industry up close, collecting the thousand small frustrations that tell you where the real problem is. Bryant can build an anti-slop website tool because he spent over a decade learning exactly why websites are slop. So I'm updating. I don't think it's young vs. old. I think AI rewards whoever has the most domain knowledge to point it at, and only sometimes is this younger founders who are thinking outside of the box...