[steveklabnik]

Of course, as I say above, all generalizations are false. However, when you're asking about a general trend, broad strokes are appropriate. The number of people of that age that fit into startup culture are much smaller than the number of people that are younger.

Even though this thread sounds like "Why don't I get hired?" that's not what he actually asked.

[JoeAltmaier]

Well, change the pronouns and it is: "Why don't young startup founders hire more experienced programmers?"

[hga]

Or at least one? See my comment to jhg.

To make a more general point, you need balance, at least as soon as you can afford it. You don't necessarily need to make an experienced programmer a lead, but you ought to listen to him when he says "If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will..." (i.e. help you see how much technical debt it will incur).

And then there are the things that just won't work at all: you don't need an experienced per se programmer, but you're likely to be very unhappy if you don't have one who knows big O notation and regularly does the math, so you aren't e.g. trying to get 100x or more the max peak transaction rate out of your database, exceed the bandwidth of your systems, etc.