The 42-year-old serial entrepreneur Elaguizy, who sold his first company to Zynga in 2011, argues that being younger does not mean being more AI-native, citing his decades-long familiarity with AI, including emailing Geoffrey Hinton before Hinton joined Google. He views his age as a sign to investors of seriousness and persistence, noting that many of his peers are leaving retirement to launch AI startups, a shift he calls a "vibe shift." Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan echoed this, posting about an "age of the unc" and expecting a new class of unicorn founders in their 40s. This contrasts with Y Combinator's declining average founder age, which was 24 in a 2025 cohort. Michal Cieplinski, the 48-year-old founder of AI home manager HiJenny, described AI as a reset where all founders learned tools like Claude Code simultaneously, adding that age brings better taste and persistence. Founders pointed to AI lab CEOs Sam Altman, 41, and Dario Amodei, 43, as examples. Stanford University's Venture Capital Initiative found the average age of a unicorn founder was 39.9 in the 2020s, compared with 35 in a random sample, and up from 35.4 in the 2010s.