It’s so sad. At least it is if you believe Vinod Khosla, who claims that no one over 45 has new ideas, let alone disruptive ones.

That doesn’t bode well for a new his new healthcare venture.

Amazon is forming a joint venture in healthcare aimed at employees with J.P. Morgan and Berkshire Hathaway, according to a company press release.

Obviously, Khosla and his groupies forgot to tell 54 year-old Jeff Bezos that he is dead in terms of new ideas and that his co-founders, Jamie Dimon, 62 and Warren Buffett, 87, are even deader.

Not only are his co-founders old-to-ancient, one of his first hires was a geriatrician (in case you don’t know, that’s a doctor that specializes in the Medicare crowd)

Must be those dead brain cells at work, since the tech crowd, who are disrupting healthcare with bio hacks and drop-in clinics, know that speed and convenience are what’s needed.

What is it that old guys can see — and the under-40 just don’t get?

If Amazon is looking to disrupt the healthcare industry, why start with geriatrics -— a specialty that hardly seems cutting-edge? But what tech experts don’t know, and what Amazon has figured out, is that to provide high-quality health care for seniors, physicians must be innovative — and disruptive.

Cutting edge IDEO figured that out in 2016.

Just as writers must use their life experience to write with any kind of authenticity, you can’t expect innovations from people who have never experienced or noticed the problem.

When your body, and those in your social circle, work as they should 99% of the time you are unlikely to have a handle on the difficulty of managing multiple, chronic diseases, especially with severely limited resources — financial and human.

So let’s hear it for the old crowd, may they focus their efforts on the problems and challenges of which their younger brethren are barely aware.

Hat tip to Emily White for sending the article.

Image credit: Stuart Richards

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

Over the years I’ve written about the value of reading books, most recently in a Golden Oldie just before Christmas. A few days later I was talking with a group of founders, all under 40, a couple of which follow this blog.

They took me to task for expecting them to have spare time to read. They said it was difficult enough finding the time to keep up with what was happening in their field and tech in general and that if they needed additional information on a subject they could google it.

When I commented that that kind of information didn’t lend itself to enlarging knowledge or encouraging thinking things got a bit heated. It was simpler to let them think I had backed down and change the subject than to subject the others to an argument.

And at that time I didn’t have the right ammunition to make my point, but now I do. Better yet, it’s courtesy of four of the most well-known thought leaders / influencers alive today.

“In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn’t read all the time — none. Zero.” — Charlie Munger, Self-made billionaire & Warren Buffett’s longtime business partner

Why did the busiest person in the world, former president Barack Obama, read an hour a day while in office?

Why has the best investor in history, Warren Buffett, invested 80% of his time in reading and thinking throughout his career?

Why has the world’s richest person, Bill Gates, read a book a week during his career? And why has he taken a yearly two-week reading vacation throughout his entire career?

Why do the world’s smartest and busiest people find one hour a day for deliberate learning (the 5-hour rule), while others make excuses about how busy they are?

Not only do they read, they read widely.

Successful people focus on both the tactical (daily) part of their business/lives, as well as the strategic (long(er)-term) part.

Blogs, media, conferences, etc., are tactical.

Books are strategic.

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Stephen Covey says, “We simply assume that the way we see things is the way they really are or the way they should be. And our attitudes and behaviors grow out of these assumptions.”And we, the people, did assume.

We, the people, assumed that the visions presented by the leaders on and off Wall Street were true.

We, the people, assumed that all those experts were correct when they lauded the Wall Street crowd.

We trusted them, even though it’s not the first time that the Wizards of Wall Street broke our hearts—and our economy.

Last year when I wrote about CEO pay I said, “If little girls are made of ‘sugar and spice and everything nice’ and little boys are made of ‘snakes and snails, and puppy dog tails’, then these CEOs are made of ego and greed and the skill to mislead.”

We, the people, have a short attention span and we’re lazy.

It’s so much easier to listen to the experts and then blame them when things don’t work out. Less painful than looking in the mirror and taking responsibility for our own contributions as passive followers.

But why should we? Our leaders take no responsibility.

President Bush pats us on the head, says he knows things are difficult, but doesn’t take responsibility.

Alan Greenspan, a great believer in deregulation, still thinks derivatives are good and puts the blame on the leaders who, he says, got greedy.

Whereas five years ago Warren Buffett called them “financial weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, are potentially lethal.”

But it’s so much easier, not to meniton comfortable, to listen to the experts who say everything is fine than to the experts sounding a warning.

Our leaders may have led us down the garden path, but we, the people, were happy to follow—being careful to keep our rose-colored glasses intact and firmly in place.

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