Facebook Inc.'s move to the public markets will be accompanied by plenty of superlatives. But no aspect of the company is as exceptional as the age of its founder and chief executive, 27-year-old Mark Zuckerberg.

Mr. Zuckerberg will become the youngest CEO at a Fortune 1000 company once Facebook goes public, according to an analysis conducted for The Wall Street Journal by recruiters Korn/Ferry International.

Only four executives under the age of 40 took command of Standard & Poor's 500 companies between 2004 and 2008, according to a study by recruiters Spencer Stuart. In 2010, the average age of incoming CEOs at S&P 500 companies was 52.9, down from 54.7 in 2006, the Conference Board, a business-research group, says.

The technology business has ushered a number of young executives into their company's top job in recent years, including 38-year-old Google Inc. CEO Larry Page. Eight of the 42 technology and Internet companies that held initial public offerings in the U.S. in 2011 were led by CEOs who were under 40 at the time, according to a review of data from capital-markets data firm Dealogic.

They include Andrew Mason of Groupon Inc. who was 30, and Spencer Rascoff of online real-estate site Zillow Inc. who was 35. Gary Wei Wang was 38 when Chinese online-video provider Tudou Holdings Ltd. went public last year.

Their ascension is airing anew arguments about the value of youth in corporate decision-making. The debate typically pits the benefits of creativity and familiarity with emerging technologies against the need for disciplined decision making and experience dealing with hard times.

Management theorist Vivek Wadhwa argued in a recent essay that Silicon Valley's obsession with youth may help explain the venture industry's recent rash of poor returns. He drew that conclusion after studying more than 500 technology and engineering companies that had more than $1 million in sales and at least five employees.

Mr. Wadhwa found that the average age of the founders of those successful companies was 39, and that twice as many founders were older than 50 as were younger than 25. Experience, he concluded, trumps youth more often than many believe. 'Age provides a distinct advantage,' he wrote.

Ben Horowitz of the venture firm Andreessen & Horowitz laid out the counterargument in a long post in 2010 on his firm's website. In it, he explained that he would prefer to bet on companies led by founders, who tend to be younger, because they are better at finding innovative products. They are worse than experienced CEOs at squeezing money out of those products, he conceded, but he argued that skill is easier to teach.

James W. Breyer, a director of Facebook who works closely with Mr. Zuckerberg, said age matters less and less. 'Skills, passion, intensecuriosity and extremely high IQ are more important,' he added.

Once Facebook goes public, shareholders will also be focusing on Mr. Zuckerberg's maturity. The CEO's youth showed at times in the company's early years.

When users responded negatively to Facebook's 2006 launch of 'News Feed,' a product that aggregates all user activity and was likened to 'virtual stalking,' Mr. Zuckeberg, in comments on the company's blog that many saw as condescending, told users to 'calm down' and 'breathe.' He has since learned from those mistakes, apologizing to users after subsequent gaffes and assuring them he is committed to respecting their privacy.

A Facebook spokesman declined to comment.

Mr. Zuckerberg has tried to grow up in more obvious ways as well. He has traded in his trademark Adidas flip-flops for Brooks running shoes and put on a coat and tie when President Obama visited in April. From his earliest days in Silicon Valley, he has also sought introductions to more seasoned CEOs, including Intel Corp.'s Paul Otellini and Microsoft Corp.'s Bill Gates, for advice on how to run a company.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal in October, Mr. Zuckerberg said the biggest lesson he has learned from running Facebook for the past eight years is how to manage teams and incentivize employees. 'We're getting really good at figuring out what types of people are going to be able to do different types of things,' he said. 'That's not something I had any experience doing when we were scaling up from a company of 50 to 100 people to where we are now.'

The debate over youth at the top isn't limited to the technology industry. Michael Reger used $3 million raised from friends and family to cofound Northern Oil & Gas Inc. in 2006 at the age of 30. His plan was to drill for oil in the Bakken formationrunning under North Dakota and Montana. The field was on the fringes of the world oil industry at the time, but output soared the following year as scrappy wildcatters using new technologies cracked open vast oil reserves previously deemed too hard to tap.

Mr. Reger's father strongly discouraged him from going ahead. He had seen the family's business leasing mineral rights flattened in the early 1980s. What Michael did 'was unheard of and too risky for us old-timers,' the elder Mr. Reger said. But the young executive, just seven at the time of the '80s oil bust, didn't have the same aversion to gambling.

'It turned out to be one of our greatest advantages,' Mr. Reger said of his youth. 'We had no fear about deploying our capital in the fields, because we had never been busted before by the oil cycle.'

Youth does bring its challenges. While Groupon's Mr. Mason was on a roadshow last fall asking investors to buy hundreds of millions of dollars in company stock, the picture on his Twitter account showed him in his boxer shorts and T-shirt gleefully unwrapping a Nintendo Wii videogame console.

Young CEOs often need help from more sober executives. Josh James was 32 when he took Web analytics company Omniture Inc. public in 2006. To cover gaps in his own experience, Mr. James brought in a seasoned sales executive who had managed $40 million in business and a chief financial officer who had run a company with $150 million in sales.

Northern Oil recently hired its first employee over 40