The Morning Download: Why One Startup Values Experience Over Youth

Good morning. Tech startup culture often lionizes the youthful founder. But in some cases, experience matters more than the raw energy and boundless optimism that often characterizes younger entrepreneurs.

As Snowcap Compute CEO Mike Lafferty launched his startup last year in Palo Alto, he explicitly looked for team members tempered by decades of experience. The average age of the team is over 50. The company, which is looking to bring high-performance superconducting technology from the laboratory into the computing mainstream, can’t afford the move-fast and break-things mentality prevalent in software startup culture. The physics of hardware engineering demands a more calculated approach to risk, according to Lafferty.

I met with him at the offices of investor Playground Global in Palo Alto, Calif. and he explained the principles behind staffing his team, which now includes 18 people. Below, highlights of that conversation:

A core of four people operate out of the Palo Alto office, and the rest of the group is distributed, a necessity when hiring senior people who often have a harder time relocating on a whim. People in their fifties often have families, mortgages, and established roots, so Lafferty hires them where they live. To maintain cohesion, he gets the entire team together in one location every few months.

"A lot of startup startup culture starts off with software-heavy types of design, where they get very quick feedback on what they're doing. In the hardware design space, it can be seven to nine months at a time to get feedback on your designs and as a startup that's death, if one of those don't work,” Lafferty said. “The critical thing for what we're building, and staying on budget on schedule... is a team that has actually seen and felt enough pain in their life to know what's safe and what's not.”

In chip design, engineers can’t simulate the physics of the real world perfectly so they rely on approximations of reality. In his view, younger, less-experienced engineers may be more prone to trusting these models without understanding their boundaries. Veterans, or those who have been "in the trenches," tend to have an intuitive sense of where the models diverge from reality.

Lafferty said he isn’t looking for engineers with perfect track records, as a lack of failure often indicates a lack of risk-taking. But he is wary of engineers who repeat the same mistakes or become paralyzed by past failures. The ideal candidate is someone who has failed, understands why that happened, and learned how to navigate those risks without avoiding them.

Snowcap hires only about one in 80 candidates, using AI to analyze interview transcripts to correct for biases in the selection process, guide follow-up questions and identify qualities such as resilience and depth. Still, mistakes happen and he is quick to address them by parting ways with people who aren’t a good fit.

“If it's not, we'll let you go fast and we’ll be clear on it,” Lafferty said. “Just as important as having the right skill set, you do need to have enough of the right kind of personality that you don't become a toxic individual. That will drag the entire team down and make them not effective, in any field.”

How do you balance youth and experience on your team? Drop us a line and let us know.

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The WSJ CIO Journal Team is Steven Rosenbush, Isabelle Bousquette and Belle Lin.

The editor, Tom Loftus, can be reached at thomas.loftus@wsj.com.