Of the ten V.C.s he met with in November, Stamos told me four seemed to be talking complete nonsense. In two of these meetings, the V.C.s were actively hostile. “They’d already made up their minds,” he said. “They were looking at their phones during the meeting. Not engaging, not looking me in the eye.” The other six expressed varying degrees of interest, but two seemed highly biased against Boston, insisting Stamos would have to move to California, which he said he was open to. Another two abruptly stopped returning his e-mails. “I think we’re left with two basically that we’re pursuing,” he told me.

Scheinman was also getting frustrated, though his view was a bit more nuanced. He has made a living off betting that older entrepreneurs can get funded—so long as they stamp out all the pretexts V.C.s use to say no. He worried Stamos had come up short. But he was convinced that Stamos’s age was the under-lying issue. “Substitute a twenty-eight-year-old ... and have Nick be the Cyrano to the twenty-eight-year-old, and we would have been funded at a crazy price. That much I believe,” he said.

No doubt there are valid reasons to prefer funding youngsters. If, for example, a company is in the market for teenage eyeballs, it probably makes sense to have a founder who’s not long from adolescence. Often these entrepreneurs turn out to be world-class programmers, having affixed themselves to a keyboard since long before puberty. “By the time they’re twenty-two, they’re already expert. They’ve put in the ten thousand hours,” says Marc Andreessen, who co-founded Netscape in his early twenties and is one of Silicon Valley’s most respected venture capitalists. “But it doesn’t happen in other fields. ... You can’t start designing bridges at age ten.”

Still, when you press Silicon Valley V.C.s on their tepid enthusiasm for older entrepreneurs, they tend to talk a lot about “disruption.” Everyone knows you change the world when you’re young and fearless, they say, and that you toil at the margins when you’re old and weary, too cynical to believe real change is possible.

But even if it’s true that the young are more innovative, it’s not entirely clear that we’d want to elevate them above the rest of us. For one thing, there’s something to be said for marginal improvements, which have worked out quite well in other countries. Ben Hammersley, a programmer and author who has advised the British government on creating a technology hub in London, points out that the incremental model largely explains Germany’s economic strength. “The majority of the German economy is light engineering. It’s family-owned businesses engaged in long-term planning,” he says. “ ‘We’re going to be around for another hundred years. What can we do to make a five percent improvement every year?’ ” By contrast, he says, economies that embrace the Silicon Valley model writ large—throwing massive amounts of money at highly speculative investments—are suspiciously bubble-prone.

And then there is the question of what purpose our economic growth actually serves. The most common advice V.C.s give entrepreneurs is to solve a problem they encounter in their daily lives. Unfortunately, the problems the average 22-year-old male programmer has experienced are all about being an affluent single guy in Northern California. That’s how we’ve ended up with so many games (Angry Birds, Flappy Bird, Crappy Bird) and all those apps for what one start-up founder described to me as cooler ways to hang out with friends on a Saturday night.

Or take a company called Outbox, which cooked up the idea of charging customers $4.99 a month to collect, scan, and deliver snail mail to their e-mail account, a proposition for which it raised $5 million in venture capital. “This company sends out humans in Priuses three days a week,” one fortysomething programmer groused to me last year. “It only works for people who come home at nine and go to work at ten and have everything else in life taken care of.” Which is to say, the most dynamic portion of the most dynamic sector of the U.S. economy has taken it upon itself to replicate a service the U.S. government already performs quite ably. At least up until Outbox folded in January.

When taken to its logical extreme, a tech sector that discriminates in favor of the young might produce an economy with some revolutionary ways of keeping ourselves entertained and in touch at all hours of the day and night. But it would be an economy that shortchanged other essential sectors, like, say, biotech or health care.

Before his thirtieth birthday, Mark Goldenson had already founded two tech start-ups, including an online game-show-playing company, for which he collectively raised more than $20 million. Both promptly failed. Finally, at age 30, he founded a company that helps people locate and receive psychiatric counseling online. It was an idea with potentially enormous social value in a country where millions have unaddressed psychiatric needs, but he never had more trouble raising money. “Sometimes investors ... paint with a broad brush,” he told me. “You’re more likely to make a hundred million dollars in another social network than taking a look at a weird tele-health thing.”

Alas, as Goldenson’s experience suggests, the whole premise of youthful innovation isn’t even true. It turns out older people have historically been just as “disruptive” as younger people. A 2005 paper by Benjamin Jones of the National Bureau of Economic Research studied Nobel Prize winners in physics, chemistry, medicine, and economics over the past 100 years, as well as the inventors of revolutionary technologies. Jones found that people in their thirties contributed about 40 percent of the innovations, and those in their forties about 30 percent. People over 50 were responsible for 14 percent, the same share as the twentysomethings. Those under the age of 19 were responsible for exactly nothing. One study found that even over the last ten years—the golden age of the prepubescent coder, the youth-obsessed V.C., and the consumer Internet app—the average age of a founder who could claim paternity for a billion-dollar company was a rickety 34.

However much age and experience may grind down the rest of us, it is simply impossible to generalize to that tiny fraction of people so brilliant and driven as to be capable of creating the next Google. “You’re searching for patterns among outliers,” says one skeptical V.C. “The whole exercise on its face is logically absurd.” It is far more apt to think of these freakish specimen as though they fall out of the sky rather than emerge from any predictable feature of human behavior. By definition, they are different from us in almost every way. There’s no reason to believe they would age like us.

On a Sunday morning in late February, I joined Stamos and Scheinman for breakfast at the W in San Francisco. Stamos was in town for a kind of world’s fair for the digital-security industry, and his spirits were relatively high. Two private investors from Florida had each committed to a million-plus dollar infusion, as had a small Massachusetts V.C. firm called Long River Ventures. Stamos was poised to raise $3 to $4 million by the end of March. But Scheinman felt it was important to keep at the Silicon Valley V.C.s. He believed the tech sector was in the later stages of an enormous bubble and that Stamos would need more capital to survive the inevitable blow-up.

Despite the promised funding, Stamos was still upset by the V.C.s’ cold shoulder. He seemed preoccupied with some of his competitors, whom he believed had inferior products but had had little problem lining up financial backers. The one that drove him completely nuts was called Ionic Security. Based in Atlanta and founded by a twentysomething who was recently featured in a Forbes “30 under 30” list, the company had somehow raised nearly $40 million from V.C.s, including a $9.4 million round in 2013 led by the storied firm Kleiner Perkins, and another $25.5 million this year. Stamos considered the company amateurish, shuffling from one concept to the next without fleshing any of them out. “If you can convince a brand name V.C. to back you, they won’t let you die,” he groaned. “They will throw good money after bad.”

As the week went on, Stamos became ever more consumed with Ionic, constantly bringing up the company in conversations. It stood for everything he considered unholy about Silicon Valley’s youth fetish. One evening, while we were walking toward the convention floor, he spotted an Ionic executive across the room and said to a friend, “Forty million dollars raised and they still don’t have a product.” (Steve Abbott, Ionic’s CEO, says the company has a product that came out last year, as well as six to twelve paying customers.)

I had to see for myself what $40 million in venture capital buys you. When I showed up at the Ionic booth—really more of a pavilion—I noticed several attractive women gathered off to one side. A sales manager dressed in black invited me to take a seat in one of the tank-sized massage chairs the company had wheeled in, then handed me an iPad and a set of headphones with the Ionic logo.

The iPad played an eleven-minute video, and I began jotting down some notes as the chair worked me over. Suddenly, the sales manager came back toward me and asked that I stop. “We’re still in stealth mode,” he explained apologetically. I didn’t quite understand his urgency because the video was wholly unremarkable and larded with marketing-speak. The only interesting part came toward the end, when Ionic’s young founder catalogued the inscrutable features of his product. “We’d like to show it to you under NDA [non-disclosure agreement],” he said. “We hope you come take a look.” At that moment, I found myself in perfect agreement with Stamos: Here was the future as the V.C.s would have it, and it was contentless and tacky.

Nick Stamos has no kids, few hobbies, and even fewer extravagances. He works all the time and is consumed by his company every second he’s away from it. For as long as he can remember, all he ever wanted to do was to build a start-up that would go public and send the stock tickers into tilt—the way Netscape did when he caught on to the start-up phenomenon back in 1995. He has already come close a few times. If Stamos can’t get Silicon Valley to give him the time of day, the problem isn’t him. It’s Silicon Valley.

On Wednesday morning, the second to last day of the conference, I met Stamos at the Starbucks in the lobby of his hotel. One of the V.C.s he’d met with at Sequoia back in the fall, a man named Aaref, had e-mailed him over the weekend asking if they could find a time to connect while he was in town. Stamos had invited me along, but when I showed up, I found him alone by the picked-over sugar and milk station. His voice had a slight edge and he was less keen on eye contact than usual. He told me Aaref had blown him off.

When the two finally met the following afternoon, Aaref bought Stamos a cup of coffee and gushed about nCrypted Cloud. “He was, ‘Rah rah rah, great, wonderful,’ ” Stamos told me. But Aaref never broached the possibility of funding. The encounter was just a professional courtesy, and after precisely 30 minutes, Aaref said, “I’m really sorry, my next meeting is here.” Stamos looked up and the person waiting for his seat was pimply and young.

Noam Scheiber is a senior editor at The New Republic. Follow @noamscheiber

