Oldies go where youths fear to tread

Moving silently into the auditorium in London's Mermaid Theatre last month, I slid into the back row for the last session before lunch.

The event was BeyondBricks.com, the British government's DTI-sponsored initiative to energise the flagging internet industry, and two sages of the London scene were holding forth.

The "Beyond Bricks" phrase refers to the term "clicks and mortar", coined to describe the marriage of the internet with traditional business. It was allegedly minted by Microsoft researcher Kevin Scholfield or David Pottruck, co-chief executive at Charles Schwab in 1999, depending on whether you fall into the techie or business camp.

Beyond Bricks is less about "clicks and bricks" than it is about the now rather out-of-fashion process of setting up pure internet companies. At the event were some very persistent entrepreneurs, battling against a battle-scarred investment community and the withering scepticism of swathes of now-unemployed dotcommers who bought into the dream. Where it used to be a case of the bright young things accelerating past traditional businesses, it's now more a case of the slow old men filling the sneakers and chinos they left behind.

Jason George, the 30-something creative director of Brighton-based interactive firm Victoria Real, could still be considered a young man. Likewise Simon Waldman, head of the Guardian Unlimited websites. But at Beyond Bricks, they were lecturing a predominantly middle-aged business audience on such things as the future of wireless and the prospects for e-commerce.

Of course, age has nothing to do with it - both men have been working in the online industry since the early 1990s and have a wealth of experience. And there's nothing unusual about middle-aged businessmen per se. But I did wonder what greying businessmen were doing at an event aimed at internet firms in a marketplace which these days has more in common with the 1930s mid-western dustbowl than the San Franciscan goldrush.

When I was rattling around London at the beginning of the millennium, it was almost impossible to find anyone in any position of importance over the age of 35. At the extremes were people like 17-year-old Benjamin Cohen, whose Jewishnet was once valued at £5 million (€7.8 million) - needless to say it no longer exists. It was numbers like these which fanned the flames of the internet spending frenzy of spring 2000. As the autumn loomed, the burst economic bubble deflated all over the share values of the eponymous dotcoms, and a new fashion arose: bringing in the "grey hairs". These were going to be experienced (code for older and greyer) business people who could sort out the financial mess after the kids had played fast and loose with venture capitalists' money.

Even the most infamous dotcom, Lastminute.com, got its very own grey hair (or what's left of it) in the form of a balding Alan Leighton, former Asda chief, now head honcho at Consignia.

Unsurprisingly there are no definitive surveys of the numbers of "grey hairs" inside tech firms but two things seem to have happened during the economic route of the past 18 months. First, a significant number of the experienced business people have just upped and gone B2B (back to banking) or B2C (back to consulting). Second, a more belligerent breed seems to have stayed on, evidently hoping to ride out the lean years and get in early on the "second wave" of techs - as some spaced-out soothsayers predict.

Was this where all these portly businessmen had come from? Was the older generation venturing forth where the younger angels now feared to tread? That was the impression.

"I'm setting up a site which will allow you to build fully interactive Web and intranet sites without technical skills - quickly and accurately," beamed the businessman with the thinning hairline as he glad-handed me over coffee. Hadn't this been done before I asked, attempting to turn my jaundiced expression into one of interest. "Not the way we're doing it," he fired back. We were entering that special circle of hell reserved for the perpetually pitching IT salesperson and their unfortunate interlocutor - where old ideas are made new with more and more impenetrable twists of jargon.

As we filed out for lunch I couldn't help thinking the real action had gone back from whence it came, back to the beginning of the internet era. Back to the back bedroom where the older and wiser 17-year-olds have returned to lick their wounds and mass once more.