The magic of young ambition - by Mitchell Hughes

Too often, young founders are overlooked, misunderstood, and underestimated. Investors will conflate youth with inexperience, inexperience with risk, and risk with rejection. This is unexamined first-order pattern matching. It is true that by the nature of age, young founders typically face innate disadvantages. But investors have a responsibility to look past surface-level proxies like age and interrogate the traits that reduce inherent risks. At NextGen, instead of following linear heuristics, we take the time to look for the following underlying founder traits that neutralise or override these disadvantages: Lack of industry experience or deep understanding of the problem space → overcome by being customer-obsessed, measured by their proximity to and frequency of engaging with customers, and having fast iteration loops based on their learnings Lack of general startup experience → compensated by having an incredibly high rate of learning, often coming through pairing humility with hu

Too often, young founders are overlooked, misunderstood, and underestimated. Investors will conflate youth with inexperience, inexperience with risk, and risk with rejection. This is unexamined first-order pattern matching. It is true that by the nature of age, young founders typically face innate disadvantages. But investors have a responsibility to look past surface-level proxies like age and interrogate the traits that reduce inherent risks. At NextGen, instead of following linear heuristics, we take the time to look for the following underlying founder traits that neutralise or override th