Effective startups focus their innovation on a limited number of things. If you're really innovating in areas A and B, you pick the safe, boring choices in C-Z. That means that in C-Z, you benefit a lot from experience. The people with lots of experience are older. It can feel weird to turn over a lot of power to people who are much older, especially when a) the nominal progression to adulthood involves getting away from that, and b) it involves admitting there are important things you don't really understand, which is a hard admission for founders who have spent their lives mainly distinguished for being super smart.

That has to be uncomfortable, and so I admire Page and Brin for using humor to deal with uncomfortable truth rather than sweeping it under the rug.