Mark Zuckerberg turned 30 today, which means he is too old to matter within the Silicon Valley boy-worship culture he largely helped found around himself.

Ever since one gangly white boy dropped out of Harvard to eventually run a company with a market cap of over $150 billion, venture capitalists have assumed The Next Mark Zuckerberg was just waiting inside a similar awkward, very young, caucasian child.

This is partially because Zuck told them to. From a VentureBeat story on a speech Zuckerberg gave at Stanford in 2007:

"I want to stress the importance of being young and technical," he stated, adding that successful start-ups should only employ young people with technical expertise. (Zuckerberg also apparently missed the class on employment and discrimination law.)

"Young people are just smarter," he said, with a straight face, according to VentureBeat. "Why are most chess masters under 30?" he asked. "I don't know...Young people just have simpler lives. We may not own a car. We may not have family."

But now Mark Zuckerberg has a family, a complicated life, a car, and thirty years under his belt. He now ceases to be, by his own calculus, "just smarter" than everyone else.

Photo: Mark Zuckerberg's earliest tagged photo, October 12, 2005