There was a time not so long ago when the conventional wisdom in the world of tech revolved around youth above all else. If you look back a decade to the dot-com bubble you'll see many companies whose management philosophy revolved largely around the belief that youth and inexperience were a key ingredient required for a successful tech startup. We now know that this philosophy was extremely flawed.  Age and experience do count for something when running a business. And anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool.

Fast forward to this week when I decided, for better or worse, weigh in on a very small controversy about a site called Teens In Tech. Teens In Tech is a WordPress MU powered group blog started by a teenager named Daniel Brusilovsky. I knew about Teens In Tech because it has received coverage on TechCrunch. Teens In Tech, according to TechCrunch, is a "startup...with a board of advisers that includes Robert Scoble and Loic Le Meur." Some pretty heavy hitters there as far as advisors go. More recently Daniel announced the addition of  a person named Louis Gray to his Board of Advisors. So we've got a startup covered by TechCrunch, a heavy hitting Board of Advisors and a young man with big dreams for his company. Could be a recipe for great success...or not. I took a look at it when I first heard about the site and I wasn't impressed. It was a standard WordPress MU install with very little content. Then I forgot about it.

In any case a blog post surfaced this week on a site called Net News Daily indicating that Teens In Tech had been hacked revealing in the process that activity on the site was quite anemic with something like 400 users, 150 of which didn't appear to be active. The writer of the article thought that didn't square with Daniel's assertion of "10,000 regular subscribers" to Teens In Tech on a YouTube video interview. I took a stroll over to the Teens In Tech site to see what was up and really didn't like what I saw. As I perused the site I noticed the lack of content, an "advertise with us" banner that links to the home page and just a general lack of community. Knowing that it was up to a 15-year old to maintain the site I could understand it. I was 15 once, trying all sorts of things with the limited computer technology that was available then. But then again I didn't call myself a CEO and I didn't have a board of advisors made up of the top Silicon Valley tech bloggers. I wondered what role the advisors played in the current state of the site.