--- title: "On Youth and Leadership" description: "Thoughts on leading a company before turning eighteen, and why age is a worse predictor of capability than people assume." date: 2025-12-07T00:00:00.000Z category: Career readingTime: "3 min read" --- The meeting was going well until someone asked how old I was. We had been talking for twenty minutes. Architecture decisions, scaling strategies, timeline estimates. The conversation was substantive. The people across the table were engaged, asking good questions, responding to my answers with follow-up questions that showed they were listening. Then one of them, in between topics, looked at me and said, casually, "So how old are you, if you don't mind me asking?" I told them. The room went quiet for about three seconds. Then someone said, "Right," in the way British people say "right" when they are processing something unexpected, and we continued. Those three seconds happen a lot. --- I founded HMD Corporation at fourteen. I have chaired it through an acquisition, the launch of four operating divisions, the hiring and management of a team that ships real software to real users. I did not need to be older for any of it. What I needed was to be competent. Those are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where most of the friction lives. People carry an instinctive model of leadership that correlates with age. A chairman should have grey hair, a firm handshake, a decade of industry experience. When reality diverges from the model, the brain scrambles to reconcile the two. Sometimes it succeeds. Sometimes it decides the model is more trustworthy than the person standing in front of it. Every new interaction has what I think of as a recalibration period. Someone reads my title, forms an image, meets me, and the image collapses. What happens in the seconds that follow determines the rest of the relationship. If the first substantive thing I say after the handshake demonstrates that I know what I am talking about, the age question fades. If I try to perform maturity, to act older, to use a lower voice or longer words, people see through it immediately and the credibility gap widens. The goal is not to seem older. The goal is to make age irrelevant by being obviously, boringly competent. --- "Pay your dues" is a phrase I heard a lot when I was starting out. It means: wait your turn. Work inside someone else's company first. Spend a decade learning before you lead. Reach some unspecified age before your opinions count. The phrase sounds like wisdom. It is, more often, a defence mechanism. If a teenager can do what someone spent twenty years building towards, that raises an uncomfortable question about the value of those twenty years. It is easier to tell the teenager to wait than to sit with that discomfort. I stopped waiting early. Not from arrogance, but from necessity. Nobody was going to give me permission to start a company at twelve, or incorporate a holding at fourteen, or make an acquisition the same year. Permission was never coming. The only option was to act and let the results speak for themselves. This is not a universal prescription. Most teenagers should not start companies. Most adults should not either. The point is narrower: age is one of the worst available predictors of whether someone is ready to lead, and building systems around it filters out capable people for no good reason. --- Youth does have actual failure modes. I should not pretend otherwise. Confidence and competence are easy to confuse, especially when every interaction requires you to prove your credibility. There is a pull towards sounding certain about things you only partially understand, because admitting uncertainty feels like surrendering ground you fought to gain. I have done this. I have spoken with authority on topics I knew shallowly, and I regretted it each time. Relationships are easy to undervalue when you are young and technically strong. It is tempting to believe that being right is sufficient. It is not. Business runs on trust, and trust requires time and consistency. I was slower to learn this than I should have been. The technically correct decision, delivered by someone nobody trusts, achieves nothing. Personal development is easy to neglect when the company fills every hour. The experiences peers have, socialising, wandering, making low-stakes mistakes, those experiences build the emotional range that separates adequate leaders from good ones. I have had to be deliberate about not letting HMD consume everything, and I have not always succeeded. --- The advantages of youth are more mundane than people expect. At fourteen, I had no mortgage, no dependents, no career equity to protect. The downside of failure was negligible. The upside was enormous. That asymmetry makes bold decisions rational in a way they may not be at forty. I did not need courage to start a company. I needed a laptop and an idea. The risk profile was laughably low. I never had to learn how people use apps in 2025. I grew up using them. The intuitions about UX, about platform behaviour, about the rhythms of digital life, those are built-in rather than acquired. This is a temporary advantage. In ten years the eighteen-year-olds will have intuitions I do not. That is fine. Advantages are meant to be used while they last. And there is the simple fact of energy. The schedule I keep would be harder to sustain two decades from now. I know this, so I use it while it is available, without pretending it proves anything about young people in general. --- I will not always be the young chairman. The "young" part has an expiry date. The skills that outlast it, strategic thinking, clear communication, the ability to build trust, those are the ones I spend most of my time developing. Being young and leading is not a personality. It is a phase. What matters is what you build during it, and whether the instincts you develop hold up when the distinguishing adjective no longer applies. For now, I accept the three-second pauses. They are getting shorter.