The Peachfuzz Billionaires.(The Technologist; TECHNOLOGIST)(young entrepreneurs)

Byline: Steven Levy

The myth of the peachfuzz billionaire has emerged. This new Horatio Alger typically launches his first start-up in middle school, and somewhere between the campus computer-science lab and a move to Palo Alto hacks up a Web site where users provide fun or useful content. The operation grows, "Sorcerer's Apprentice" style, and soon the fashion preferences and dating habits of this cohort are followed voraciously in tech mags and blogs as if they were '60s teen idols.

The poster boy for this movement is Mark Zuckerberg, the 23-year-old CEO of Facebook, which he created in a Harvard dorm when he was 19. Zuckerberg raised eyebrows last spring when he told an audience of would-be moguls to hire young people with technical skills. "Young people are just smarter," he said. Although Zuckerberg later apologized for the remarks, the speech seemed to fit the Valley's growing cult of youth based on "don't fund anyone over 30."

The reality is not that extreme. "There's a perception that when you're young you can swing for the fences," says venture capitalist Fred Wilson, partner in Union Square Ventures. But even though Wilson has invested in one company led by a 21-year-old, most of his founders are older by a decade or more. "I'm also really enjoying working with an entrepreneur in his late 50s," he says. Jim Breyer, a principal of Accel Partners and the guy who funded Facebook, says that although passionate entrepreneurs in their 20s are the ones who create "truly defining companies," he's also had huge deals from founders in their 30s, and is excited about ideas he's seeing from veterans of firms like eBay and Google.

Still, there's the suspicion that the young can see opportunities the older folks can't. "I genuinely believe that this generation is fundamentally different," says Union Square's Wilson. "They're the first generation that's had computers ...