If this is true, maybe there's something particularly interesting about the '84/'85 generation.
These people were about 10 years old when the Web happened and 15 years old when Napster and digital cameras took off, so they probably haven't written too many snailmail letters, bought CDs or taken photos on film.
Perhaps that gives them a perspective that's more "digitally native" than older people, yet they have more experience than the '90s-born generation.
(I'm one of those "old" people I guess, being born in 1980...)
There probably is nothing unique about he '84/'85 generation.
There is an unconscious bias when reviewing applications (especially during interviews) to vote/side with people that look/act/know the same references/same point in life/etc like you. Since previous YC graduates both recommend and (some) decide who gets in, they match what they know.
So I was born in '84 and I've been following YC since it launched in 2005. I think there are actually a few unique things about this generation:
- Grew up reading Slashdot, steeped in the values and beliefs of the OSS community.
- Were coming of age during the golden age of blogging ('05-'06) when people with a lot of industry experience were making their insights widely available for the first time. E.g. during the beginning of college when we were all trying to figure out what to do with our lives, suddenly the knowledge of how and why to do a startup became available.
- Coming of age when not suddenly it became possible (but before it easy) to build software that reached a billion people and changed the world.
- Coming of age during the birth of marketing 2.0 -- The Cluetrain Manifesto, Seth Godin, Kathy Sierra, Hugh McCleod, etc.
- Coming of age during the birth of Web 2.0, when suddenly every web business needed to be rebuilt around new design principles, technology (AJAX), and promotional techniques.
- Around for the birth of Y Combinator and The Facebook.
- Impossible to get a job with any possible upward mobility when graduating.
Most of this was happening our sophomore/junior year in college, when suddenly we knew all of this really important world-changing stuff that almost no one with established careers was paying attention to yet.
So yeah, I'm sure our generation isn't unique and wasn't the only one affected by these things, but I do think they probably had a disproportionate impact on us.
My theory - people in this age group entered college at a very low point in the software development market. This was both because of the dot-com bubble crash, and because outsourcing had just begun and quality outsourcing was far cheaper than it is today. C, Java, and horrible APIs dominated at the time. Javascript and browser compatibility were a mess. It was a far less glamorous industry than it's become now over the past 15 years.
Few people who began training for a development career at this time were in it just for quick money.
These people were about 10 years old when the Web happened and 15 years old when Napster and digital cameras took off, so they probably haven't written too many snailmail letters, bought CDs or taken photos on film.
Perhaps that gives them a perspective that's more "digitally native" than older people, yet they have more experience than the '90s-born generation.
(I'm one of those "old" people I guess, being born in 1980...)