I'm a young engineer, and frankly I find it appalling that V.C.s don't recognize the value of experience. Most of my colleagues are over 30 (maybe even over 40), and the amount of knowledge and skill they sit on is something that no 20-something could even dream of.

Building large applications is hard. It's not obvious how one should engineer software unless one has a lot of experience to draw from. It's easy to make something that works; what's difficult is making something that works, and also has a good structural foundation to build on. I'm sure you've all noticed how much facebook sucks, and I've heard that their API is unbelievably bad. This is likely a consequence of the shaky foundation the company was built on.

My mind regularly boggles at the complexity I am faced with every day, and setting some young, arrogant hot shot like myself to organize it is simply foolish. The amount of things I've learned in less than a year seems huge to me, but it's obviously dwarfed by what my seniors have under their belt.

To undervalue their experience is a crime.