I honestly can't understand why this would shock anyone with experience in engineering. As a senior developer, I'm vastly more able to realize ideas than I was even three years ago. I also know vastly more. I'm able to understand cutting-edge systems and language research that I couldn't before. I'm able to design systems quickly and more reliably. I'm able to separate good ideas from bad ideas more reliably. I'm better with people and managing my own ego, and therefore able to navigate interpersonal situations more reliably.
I'm also financially stable and have deep savings, so I'm able to take time off to pursue ideas more reliably.
After a few more years, particularly as I gain leadership experience, I expect to be even more effective.
There's literally no down-side to getting older in terms of my ability to bootstrap a successful company.
I think you're missing the bigger point. Most people work on problems that they've seen or experienced. For the young, it tends to be dating, social media, or some sort of e-commerce. They chase trends and hype. When you gain experience, you get exposed to an entirely different set of problems—problems with workflow, business processes, and general efficiency. Problems
where you can deliver real value.
This was brilliantly expressed in this blog post [1]. Both the young and the old, stand at a disadvantage. Experienced folks have a better idea about worthy problems, but they're shackled with liabilities and lack of time commitment. Young people have a lot more freedom, but they don't have a good idea about the problems that are worth it.
The youth buzz has nothing to do with engineering potential.
Young people tend to be more free of external responsibilities: marriage, children, job contracts, consumer debt, professional associations, expensive educational entanglements, and so forth. This makes young people more available to take giant risks with less apprehension (they have less to lose).
There is also giant marketing buzz when an uneducated 18 year old female creates something vaguely interesting, but nobody cares when a 45 year old man creates something absolutely revolutionary until they old it in their hands. Case in point: Elizabeth Holmes.
I used to think the same way but what I have witnessed over the years is that my entrepreneur friends who are married with children tend to be just as risk taking as young single ones.
I feel entrepreneurship is a mentality. Entrepreneurs will always take risk where they see opportunity. The risk just seems to become less foolhardy as they get older. No stats on this just an observation.
I don't think the poster is talking about propensity to entrepreneurship. I think the poster is talking about the propensity to generate media buzz. Young people make appealing subjects and it is exciting when they are smart and ambitious.
Maybe a valid rephrasing would be "This makes young people more able to take actions that older folks with more obligations would consider to be giant risks".
True, but ~45 may be a golden age again. By then your kids may be starting to becoming self sufficient, retirement is still 20 years off, and you've lived through a fair number of financial problems. Your retirement plans might be coming together and the world is starting to look more rosey. Plus, you find yourself feeling like you're nearing the end of your "youth"; you're aged but you still feel good. Perhaps you become less worried about the risk and you're well trained and ready to take on a complex challenge.
I more or less left full time work when I was 39 to pursue startups. The reasoning was exactly on the lines of what you have described. It's been 2 years and the journey has been fraught with failures. One, it's become really hard for me to find a co-founder. Almost none of the guys in my friend circle are willing to take the risks associated with startups. I've attended a pre-accelerator to find a co-founders but haven't had any luck in finding the right person.
Two, I'm just getting lazy because of the financial cushion. I mean, it's not much but still some sort of lethargy has set in since I don't have a pressing problem to solve. Until I get to the stage where things kick off, I bet this is going to be the norm.
On one hand I have a financial cushion, on the other I know that the cushion won't mean much in the next 10 years. So, I'm constantly thinking about self sufficiency down the line.
So, a combination of no cofounder + no exponential idea + procrastination = My life has become quite miserable. I mean, sure on the surface I project an image of it's all good, if you know what I mean.
Sorry to hear it, but thank you for sharing. It's likely people with your experience are less likely to share it than those who've been successful and I worry it gives a skewed view of the likelihood that a startup will make you happier.
One question - have you only looked at "exponential ideas"? Maybe there's a small but reasonably profitable endeavour out there - a lifestyle business?
I'm curious to know what are the things you've been thinking about working on? I've experienced the challenge of finding a co-founder in my immediate circle but looking beyond that, there are plenty of potentials.
I know a startup called Wagepoint that started with a co-founders from vastly different age groups.
I started working on recording meetings and converting the recordings to meeting minutes with actionable items. Not a trivial task. My idea was to build an iPhone app with ML in the cloud. I did some initial market survey and found no takers for this idea. I spoke to startups, mid-enterprises and even law firms. I got one positive response from a VC who said this could be useful in tracking the meetings he has with founders as most of them go untracked but I was not too convinced (perhaps I was wrong).
So dropped that idea and tried on some ideas around computer vision, prompted by the problems some of the customers were elucidating to while validating the above idea. "We don't really care about meetings but can you use machine learning to monitor people ? I am not a big fan of surveillance.
After this I have drifted quite a bit around the last year or so.
Current situation - no direction. Just having a side thought on doing something around high definition maps. Looked for a job to fill up some savings, but boy the interviewing phenomenon is nuts. I haven't interviewed in like 15 years. So got back to doing leetcode and Hackerrank.
Hmm, Wagepoint. I was involved in vetting the younger of the two to the older. They both had similar interests and the experience of the older complemented the energy and enthusiasm of the younger.
I don't have a current website yet. Thanks for pointing this out. I have a static page at callindra.com (works without the www) I have to fix the Godaddy DNS. Will do.
I'm 37 and absolutely cannot imagine myself working for the man for another 30+ years. I can't seem to last more than 2-3 years at any one job before becoming bored out of my skull. My present position, which I've been at for ~6 months, already has me mired deep in ennui (It was utterly unchallenging from day 1 - but the pay is great).
I want nothing more than to quit and strike out on my own, but financial obligations (kids, mortgage, etc.) are holding me back. My wife doesn't understand why I make a comfortable six-figure salary but am so discontented with my career. Maybe I feel like I'm running out of time?
On the flipside, kids can add immense motivation and drive. Also you can dictate your schedule more to spend more time with kids/family if you work from home more. I went independent/entrepreneur full on when my son was starting high school, I wish I had done it earlier and done more projects/products for myself earlier.
I can certainly concede that achieving "ramen profitability" while living off savings is substantially less exciting while trying to pay down a mortgage and save up for one's childrens' college tuition.
I don't really get this. I just recently bought a house. Paying down my mortgage is just a bit more expensive than renting my apartment was. Leases are a year long, I think I could sell my house within that period of time, and we wouldn't need to ask our landlord's permission. Why is a mortgage strictly worse for living off of savings?
> Why is a mortgage strictly worse for living off of savings?
It’s not strictly worse but I assume it feels like a bigger commitment with more disastrous consequences should anything go wrong?
Foreclose on your house, your biggest asset is gone. That thing you worked for for so long.
Get kicked out of rented place. Eh, wasn’t yours anyway. Find smaller one or in a worse location, which you can afford.
Either way in my case buying is strictly worse because I can’t afford the down payment so there’s really just one option. Well, one comfortable option. I could always go homeless I guess. Would save me a lot per month ...
> Paying down my mortgage is just a bit more expensive than renting my apartment was.
Unless you already have a substantial nest egg or took out an expensive mortgage, your life savings were substantially reduced by the down payment. In addition to a more expensive monthly payment there are property taxes, maintenance costs ($ and time), HOA fees, and other burdens depending on your region and property type.
Because university is a fantastically overpriced and surprisingly unconvoluted system for turning government-guaranteed un-dischargeable debt in to administrators' and football coaches' salaries via misery and virtual indentured servitude.
That is, a system that perpetrates upon people who have not gained the mental tools necessary to understand what they're agreeing to as a result of the US' staggeringly ineffective secondary schools, but who _have_ been convinced that not attending college is a guaranteed marker of social inadequacy by a marketing engine that pushes the message "You're a worthless person if you don't go to college" in to culture at every possible juncture?
Federal Direct Student Loans, available to undergraduate students at a relatively low fixed rate (but still higher than say, a decent mortgage on a house), only allow a student to take out about $6000/year.
But as college tuition skyrockets (mine is $70k/year, and increasing, and I have a brother at an equivalently priced institution too!), that wont cut it. The rest must either come from personal/family finances, be taken out from the federal government in solely the parent’s name (Federal Direct Plus Parent Loan, with a higher interest rate than direct student loans) or, if that’s not an option, a private lender (usually with an even higher rate).
With circumstances like they are and pitiful stopgaps like these, it’s no wonder my parents waited so long to have children so that they could afford to send them to school. Unfortunately, that’s not an option for most families. The student loan crisis in America really is terrifying.
At some point enrollment at public universities should fall off a cliff (the prestigious institutions that serve mostly wealthy families will be fine, I'm sure). One would think...
I went to college on an ROTC scholarship, so that's another option (of course, you're an indentured servant to Uncle Sam for 8 years after graduating - that may or may not be worse than obligating yourself to lenders via student loans, depending on your perspective).
no, there isn't. I personally paid my way with loans and work, but I wouldn't mind paying a portion of a public university education for my children. Remember you generally end up cosigning loans, so if your kid flakes out, you're on the line anyway.
Maybe the young risk too much. In that case, being more risk averse could be statistical advantage. There seems to be persistent underlying assumption that more risk taking is always better, that is unlikely to be true. Optimal risk taking amount is not necessary "highest possible".
One thing to note is that 'young college drop out makes billions' is a more compelling story than 'middle aged, well educated person with good savings makes billions'.
The former sells more clicks and hence advertising dollars - it conjures the notion that anyone can do it. The latter suggests at least a decade of work experience, probably an education and some money.
It's clear which story is going to end up trending on the news and the public's consciousness.
> 'middle aged, well educated person with good savings makes billions'.
Do we know if anyone has A/B test these two headlines?
Finding fault with middle-aged-well-educated-person-with-good-savings*, who became a billionaire in under 10 years, shouldn't be too hard for the media, and therefore plenty of things to whip up a scandal about.
I think there's a little bit of confirmation bias mixed with a bit of jealousy toward younger developers.
The fact is, technology doesn't really matter that much to the success of a business. Business sense, ability to spot what's next, and a fair bit of risk taking attitude are what matters. Older engineers don't fare better than younger engineers in starting a business not because they're worse at engineering, but that after a certain point engineering skills simply don't matter.
SAP, Adobe, IBM, all have terrible engineering culture, but rake in money. Facebook started with janky PHP. There are only rare instances where the technology itself was the differentiator in business. Maybe if you're working on advanced AI or weapon design or something
I think the point was there aren't a lot of young developers/entrepreneurs working on how to make the property casualty preferred vendor relationships work better. Because that type of business would take years of time in that industry to both understand the problems and make the contacts.
Weapon design is all about government contracts, which generally require experience. Even Iron Man was using his dad’s existing corporate vehicle.
Advanced AI usually depends on finding a business model, which requires experience. And places like Deep Mind were started by researchers who had been at it a few decades.
I have the feeling weapons design & manufacturing looks the way it looks because the advanced countries aren't really fighting and expecting to fight any serious war with each other. This makes it safe for the contractors to suck excessive amounts of money from the government while delivering very little, and for the whole endeavour to become one big political battlefield.
War was always the thing that connected humanity to physical reality - 2+2 may very well be 10000 on the procurement document, but it'd better equal 4 when you're trying to aim your cannons at the invading forces. With no war, effectiveness (and thus good engineering) is no longer a strong criterion for success of a weapon design.
Only 19 of the 100 most recent IPOs are classified as "technology" companies. The rest are in categories like "health care" and "oil and gas."
There are a lot of high-growth companies that are not startups in the classic sense of starting from nothing and winning by building a better mousetrap. E.g. pharmaceutical companies commercializing research, where the founder is a PI and probably a tenured professor who's at least 40.
I would like to see the data broken down by startup profile. I suspect that the ideal age differs between B2B and B2C startups.
B2C have smaller chance of success, but the success is bigger. Ideal B2C founder is young. Most of enormous tech successes (e.g. Facebook, Google) are B2C companies founded by founders before 30.
B2B have higher chance of success, but the success is smaller. Ideal B2B founder is middle-aged. There are more succesfull B2B startups than B2C starups, what increases the total mean.
As I've gotten older (ironically) I've felt this should be the case; key decisions have such an impact on the success or failure of a startup, it's much more likely you make the right key decisions the more experience and wisdom you have.
PG has written about that. He made the point that, in 1998, the people with experience and wisdom all agreed that the world had enough search engines already.
I don't think this is surprising, but I'm also not surprised that VCs and accelerators still trend toward younger founders.
It makes sense to me that older (successful) founders likely leverage their own experience and network to a greater extent, but this isn't necessarily what seed stage investors are looking for. I think investors are more in the game of betting on people/teams, injecting their own experience and network as leverage. Older founders have less need, therefore less leverage- and older founders without these support networks are poorly positioned anyway.
Theres a big difference between running a successful small business and architecting a tech startup.
Venture capital is a hits business, and if you want to invest in an entrepreneur there is benefit towards getting them the first time. Marc Benioff has 13 years of Oracle experience when he started Salesforce, and he already had plenty of access to capital and expertise.
In art the term for this is “young geniuses and old masters”. We are all familiar with the trope of a ‘young genius’ but I think it says something that art, a field older than any language or building, has a specific category carved out for those who reach distinguished success in old age...
This aligns with my observation and current impulse. I've been extremely hesitant to do my own startup- imposter syndrome maybe, but more likely healthy skepticism about the odds for success.
Now that I'm in my mid-40s I'd be much more comfortable taking on the task. Wide life experience, learning to interact with and observe human tendencies, and learning to overcome internal and external obstacles seems like fertile ground for business success.
PG's comment suggests that you shouldn't trust self-reported data on HN but it's interesting that polls taken in 2009 and 2013 are at least "eyeball correlated" (the top 5+ age brackets are in the same order). I have a few more thoughts that are probably more like wild guesses (since you can't assume an even distribution of start-up founders over that population) but my gut is telling me that if you're here you're more likely to be a founder than say Slashdot.
Since the last poll was so long ago, here's an updated one for 2018 with categories for founders versus non-founders in each age bracket:
Or moderator successful younger founders. Using the first startup as a launching point is even easier when you clear a few million than when you “fail”.
4 of 5 of the biggest tech company founders were in their early 20s. So the biggest ideas clearly slanted towards young visionary founders, but the statistics do skew back towards older founders for all but the largest companies.
One also expects the most variance at the tail-end of the success curve, because the sample size is so small. Give it a few centuries and we'll have some data about that part of the spectrum of success stories.
This seems to redefine the question away from "what does a successful entrepreneur look like" in an attempt to maintain the narrative that "young visionaries" are the most successful.
That is only if you think only 'tech' companies are big and they are the biggest ideas and they are the majority in Fortune 2000, but it's not. There are lot of companies that have much smarter ideas and are clearly big enough to be considered as 'successful', they are mostly skewed towards older founders.
Apple's true success came with Second Steve i.e. mature Steve, not first Steve. Amazon, Oracle, Intel founders weren't in their 20s.
Microsoft, Google, and Facebook indeed were started by young founders. Twenty years later Google might be the only meaningful one standing. Time will tell.
As I mentioned elsewhere, Bezos was 29 when he quit his full time job and 30 when he wrote up the business plan for Amazon. I think that's close enough for this argument.
I think this is very important, basically that if you look at the data by something like market cap it would probably skew very young. E.g. AirBnB and Dropbox are (IIRC, may have changed by now) the majority of total valuation for ycom, and those companies were both started by early 20-somethings.
YC itself skews young, at least in part I'd say because the sort of help it provides is something that is more needed the younger you are. It's vanishingly unlikely that I will need YC's money, connections, or imprimatur for a startup at this stage in my life. When I was 24 starting a company, it would have been hugely helpful.
Short answer: becoming experts at their craft, building business relationships and filling their coffers.
Trying to start a successful business is much easier when you know how to get stuff done, have access to people who can get stuff done in areas you can't, and have enough money to buy time, help and resources to get stuff done.
Young people typically are lacking in one or more of those areas but sometimes it works out.
I'm 37. I constantly remind myself that Craigslist, Wikipedia, Salesforces, Intel, etc. were founded by someone >=35 years of age[0], and that, since I live a healthy lifestyle have at least 30 great years ahead of me (on average).
I'm also financially stable and have deep savings, so I'm able to take time off to pursue ideas more reliably.
After a few more years, particularly as I gain leadership experience, I expect to be even more effective.
There's literally no down-side to getting older in terms of my ability to bootstrap a successful company.