In the Wall Street Journal, Christopher Mims has written a whip-smart profile of 18-year-old venture-capital analyst Tiffany Zhong, and now I want to punch the whole world in the eye.

Just kidding. I love when people get to use their talents, regardless of age. As Mims reports, Zhong, daughter of a tech CEO, is only somewhat unusual in that precocious ecosystem, many Soylent-slurping startup founders no older than or only slightly senior to the Binary Capital wunderkind. It’s become an accepted part of business because of the mythologizing of Jobs and Gates, but it really can’t be stressed how unusual this Silicon Valley arrangement is, with the youngest becoming the leaders, the pyramid turned on its point.

An excerpt:

In a business in which relationships are all-important, Ms. Zhong has already managed to accumulate a set of contacts that would be the envy of anyone charged with finding the next hot consumer-tech startup—the only kind in which Binary Capital invests. Her mentors include Stewart Butterfield, chief executive of Slack, and Steve Sinofsky, former head of Windows at Microsoft Corp. and a board partner at venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

But even more important for Ms. Zhong’s “deal flow”—the startups she finds that Binary Capital, which manages $125 million, will invest in—are the young entrepreneurs with whom she is connected. One of her advantages with the freshest crop of startup founders in the Bay Area is that many of them are the same age as she is, or even younger.

“I’d show you where I live, but they don’t allow journalists there any more,” says Ms. Zhong, as she finishes her dinner at Mau, a noodle shop in San Francisco’s hip, rapidly gentrifying Mission district. Her abode, called Mission Control, is just across the street, and as a sort of high-price commune for extremely young hackers—the oldest resident is 22, she estimates—it has been the subject of many profiles.•