Work With Older People

Age is not the variable

Alex Bouaziz describes a recurring life pattern of being the youngest person in the room and treating age as irrelevant, with skill and lived experience as the only variables that count. By his account this was both circumstance and design. He skipped two grades and finished high school at sixteen; at the Technion he was sixteen to twenty among classmates who were twenty-two and "here to get their life in order, get their stuff together"; at MIT his closest friends were thirty-eight to forty. He carries the pattern into Deel, where he says his CTO is in his fifties and has been with the company since its Series A, while his COO is around thirty.¹

Bouaziz separates two effects of this exposure. The first he frames as maturity by osmosis: older peers who are "significantly more serious, more in the details, work really hard" set a standard that pulls a younger person up, and "being around older people just makes you mature faster." The second, which he presents as the more surprising one, is a felt equality rather than deference. Proximity dissolved the intimidation: "they're not that much smarter than I am, I always felt equal." He treats that discovery as a confidence mechanism, arguing that the fastest way to stop being intimidated by impressive people is to spend enough time near them to see the gap is smaller than it looks.¹

The operating rule

The rule Bouaziz draws from the pattern is that hiring and co-founding decisions should score skill and experience directly rather than using age as a proxy for them: "Age is not a question, it's always about skills. Experience is different than age."¹ He is explicit that he respects experience, saying that if someone has "lived through things I can learn from, I want to work with you," but he refuses to let age stand in for it. In his framing that is why a CTO in his fifties and a COO around thirty can sit at the same table without, as he puts it, "a question of grey hair or not."¹

Bouaziz presents the stance as doing two jobs at once. As a hiring filter it discards a lazy proxy: most organizations, in his telling, read older as safer or younger as hungrier, whereas he tries to measure the underlying competence and drive directly. As a confidence mechanism for young founders it prescribes deliberately entering rooms above one's level, because the felt equality that removes intimidation is built by exposure rather than argued into existence. He also connects it to a common young-founder failure mode, the fear of not belonging because of age, which he says never stopped him from leading older reports because being the young one had long since become neutral for him.

He notes a guardrail against the obvious risk. Felt equality can tip into underrating a genuine experience gap, and his stated defense is that he keeps "not intimidated by age" separate from "experience doesn't matter," respecting the second even as he discards the first.¹