Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

[Commentary] Companies like Intel post disappointing earnings reports and others like Snapchat turn down billion-dollar offers.

The rapid consumer-ification of tech, led by Facebook and Google, has created a deep rift between old and new, hardware and software, enterprise companies that sell to other businesses and consumer companies that sell directly to the masses.

On their face, these cleavages seem to be part of the natural order. As Sanjit Biswas, co-founder of Meraki, which sold to Cisco for $1.2 billion, pointed out, “There has always been a constant churn of new companies coming in, old companies dying out.” But the churn feels more problematic now, in part because it deprives the new guard as well as the old -- and by extension, it deprives us all. In pursuing the latest and the coolest, young engineers ignore opportunities in less-sexy areas of tech like semiconductors, data storage and networking, the products that form the foundation on which all of Web 2.0 rests.

[Yiren Lu is a graduate student in computer science.]