It’s hard enough to hire for startups, but a prominent investor thinks there should be another constraint — he believes startups shouldn’t hire people over the age of 30.
Keith Rabois, who’s an MD at Khosla Ventures and was an executive at PayPal, LinkedIn, Slide and Square, has said that startups shouldn’t hire people above the age of 30. Rabois gives an interesting reason as to why he believes this.
“So the most important lesson I ever learned from Peter Thiel when I joined PayPal was (that) you can’t hire anybody over 30,” Rabois says in a new YouTube series called The Art of Hiring. “He might not say that exactly the same way today, but basically what he was trying to say by that is by time you’re 30, everybody on the planet knows how to assess you pretty accurately, because there’s enough data points on your resume,” he added.
“Everybody can come to a consensus view about your abilities. But if you come to a consensus view about everybody’s abilities, guess what? Google is going to spend a lot of money on this person, or OpenAI is going to spend a lot of money on this person, or Meta is going to spend a lot of money on this person,” he continued.
“And when you’re a startup, you can’t outspend large companies that are very profitable or have infinite money like OpenAI. You need to be much more disciplined, much more frugal, and you may not even want to hire these people. The people who are motivated by that much compensation may not even be the right builders,” Rabois explained.
Rabois seemed to be saying that anyone over the age of 30 will be valued accurately by the market. As such, good people will likely have competing offers from top companies like Google and Meta, which would make it very hard for startups to match their compensation. Rabois seemed to be hinting that it’s easier for startups to hire younger people, who haven’t been accurately assessed by the markets — they are easier to afford for small companies.
Not everyone agreed with Keith Rabois’ views though. “He is just plain wrong. Almost the entire founding team of SpaceX was over 30. Over half of the founding team of Tesla was too,” Elon Musk said on X. His views were echoed by Tom Mueller, one of the most important employees of SpaceX. “I was 41 when when Elon hired me to help found SpaceX. In fairness, I was the oldest person in the company for over a year,” he said.
But what Keith Rabois seems to be saying is that it would be quite hard for startups to hire good people above the age of 30, because they would be courted by larger companies who’d look to woo them with perks, free meals, and larger compensation packages. As such he seems to believe that startups are best served by hiring younger people who are unproven, and are also sufficiently hungry to put in the hard work that’s required to get a startup to succeed.