I would imagine the startup life skews young in general because older age tends to mean more responsibilities, and at some point if you haven't been successful with a startup you'll tend towards a more traditional position for those reasons? "Startup Veteran" is kind of an amusing phrase.
I disagree. I'd say older people have more networks, more experience and more resources, hence will find less comparative benefit in giving away precious equity to YC (etc) than young people who need all the above.
It could be said that YC and other startup incubators have done a stellar marketing job in taking ~6% equity off organisations by turning the tables on funding and making companies "apply" to give their equity away. From YC's perspective they have nothing to lose and everything to gain from this arrangement, versus the founders who are in pretty much the opposite position.
Youre confusing concepts. You can skip an incubator like YC while still intending to not bootstrap. There is also no such thing as a 'YC-style' startup, YC was set up to target startups, so can't have invented them.
YC used to only give a tiny amount of equity that any vaguely successful person could match ($16k?). It filled the gap between starting and series A.
Bootstrapping means avoiding getting a series A.
Basically, YC didn't invent startups, it invented a new, more accessible route to starting one.
When I picture a "Startup Veteran", I picture someone who's worked with one or more companies to a large and successful exit. Someone like that is likely fairly wealthy, and so doing a startup doesn't have the same amount of risk as someone doing it for the first time has.
I would expect that with a fairly even distribution such as ages, the median and mean would be similar. Medians are primarily useful for data sets with large outliers and I doubt there are many 400 year old YC alumni :)
Not sure, but if there are a bunch of 40s years old, this would already start shifting the average upwards compared to the mean even if the data is rather centered in the mid 20s.