Age doesn’t matter anymore

In a digital age, everything changed.

Sitting in a meeting with the co-founder of Skype, Niklas Zennström, I was asked to talk a little more about myself and my team. “Our youngest team member is 14 years old. He’s leading our iPhone development.” I paused for a moment and looked up at the three faces in the boardroom, expecting a look of shock or surprise — but instead, they just smiled slightly and looked at me as if to say “continue”. Our oldest team member is 24. Both the youngest and oldest members of our team (and the ones in between!) are extremely talented in what they do, and can do their job better than somebody 10 or even 20 years older then them. Does age really matter anymore? Would the response have been different 10 years ago?

I learnt how to create my first website when I was seven. Admittedly, it was extremely basic and required very little—if any—knowledge of coding. But, I think starting young is important. In the meeting, Niklas’ associates reminded me that many of the big companies we know today (such as Skype, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Dropbox, Facebook etc) were started by people who had only just finished education.

I wish more employers and startups in general, based in Europe, would stop judging people based on their age, gender, race, looks etc. Sometimes it’s difficult to get people to open up their eyes and notice raw talent! It seems that employers and startups based in Silicon Valley got over this hurdle a while back.

“A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.”―Roald Dahl