Age before beauty before entrepreneurial chances of success?

Venture Capitalist and blogger Fred is in trouble with the online geriatric crowd because he seemed to suggest only young people come up with great online biz ideas.    I don’t think he meant that though.  e.g. His VC Fund is invested in plenty of middle aged peeps),  but Techmeme is abuzz with critics.

I noted at his blog that:

Reconciling the partial truth of what you have noted with the dissenting views is easy and you’ve started to do it in the final post:

* There are *many* more young people engaging in online biz ideas than there are older startup founders.

* Therefore if you look at successful online biz you’ll see more young people in charge of those companies.

However:

Age probably has no predictive power vis a vis successful internet business.

Because:

If you looked at all startups along with age of founders you would (probably) see that age is not correlated with success even though you’d find *more* winners and more losers in the young age category because there are so many more young founders.

Now, I have not done the research here but it seems like you could do a quick study by randomly selecting 50 or so startups and then looking at the age of the founders and seeing if age mattered in terms of success or failure of the startup.