Of what value is youth?

If you don’t spend a lot of time reading venture capitalist blogs, you might have missed what was less a feud and more a dialectic between two men who make lots of money when startups succeed.

There were many points of polite disagreement between the blog posts of Jared Friedman, from Silicon Valley startup incubator Y Combinator, and Bruce Booth, of the Boston-based biotech VC Atlas Venture. But one particularly interesting facet was this: How much does experience matter?

Friedman’s point was that it is now nearly as easy to start a biotech company as it to start a tech one, and one of the results is that straight-out-of-school founders can build biotech firms from scratch instead of relying on the now-dominant venture creation model employed by the likes of Atlas. Those startups will “look like tech companies,” Friedman wrote, which means “instead of being run by VCs and hired execs, they’ll be run by the founders who care about their ideas, and who will sustain that passion building companies they love and that change the world for the better.”

Perhaps deliberately ignoring the implication that “VCs and hired execs” don’t “care,” Booth’s blog zooms in on one particular trait of straight-out-of-school founders who’ve never worked in biotech: the fact that they’ve never worked in biotech. Experience goes a long way, Booth writes, and “the idea that a recent Ph.D. or post-doc who has studied a narrow piece of biology for five-plus years is ready to run a multi-disciplinary drug R&D organization powered with $10 million in their first job out of academia seems far-fetched.”