Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Jean Hoerni, Eugene Kleiner, Jay Last, Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, and Sheldon Roberts tounded a new company, Fairchild Semiconductor, from which over time several other microchip companies spun off. Among the "Fairchildren" were Intel and AMD, but so were venture companies like Kleiner Perkins. Like the "PayPal Mafia" of the late 1990s, the "traitorous eight" were fairly homogeneous in their backgrounds, their age profiles, and their management styles. And they were the grandfathers of today's Silicon Valley. The VCs who funded their endeavors were very similar people: investor and inventor spoke the same language, specifically because they shared the same generational experience.

When compared to the "traitorous eight" or even the PayPal Mafia, the generation of founders and their backers that have dominated headlines and the contemporary image of Silicon Valley appears a bit more diffuse. Still, the age cohort remains a clearly identifiable phenomenon in the Valley, in particular since so many cofounders met in college. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are the same age; Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who met at Stanford, were both born in 1973. Mark Zuckerberg and the entire original inner circle of Facebook were the same age, which is the same age as Instagram's founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. It's not really true, as is sometimes said, that through tech our world is dominated by solitary geniuses. It is dominated by cliques of people who are more or less the same age.