12 ms·

The mean age of high-tech founders is 43, economists say

226 points by GoldenMonkey 8y ago

justinzollars 8y ago
> the mean age of high-tech founders is 43.2, economists say I could see this. From the perspective of an Engineer I'm 36 and I have never been more qualified to start a company than today. People I work with in their 40s are great I've had the opportunity to learn from some excellent people in my career
- j45 8y ago
  This has been my experience as well. After seeing startup CEOs be swept aside for growth or scaling CEOs by their VC's, I decided I wanted to build lasting and transferable skills alongside the problem solving. In hindsight there was little harm spending my twenties gathering 20 years of experience in 10 years. This is less about age, than how one levels up. Putting in time helped understand problems at a greater breadth, depth and uncover inter-disciplinary connections, instead of the spitball ideation process. After 10 years (around age), having 20 years of experience on average puts you ahead of many of your contemporaries, leaving you in a better position to recognize opportunities, and areas needing improvement. If this is you, let's chat :)
  - wafflesindeed 8y ago
    On what basis are you quantifying this? You say you're ten years ahead ... Of what exactly? Compared to whom? Based on what?
    - j45 8y ago
      How would you quantify it? I measure it in part by pursuing a track record that is meaningful to me not aligned on income or titles alone, but the innovation/change I've been able to be part of that is remarkable and memorable for it's time. Sometimes I meet people who have a lot of experience/expertise (not a title) they have no business having at a particular age or experience level. They have really been able to extract a lot from their opportunities. Sometimes I get approached in this manner for senior, or leadership assistance while I'm young on the basis of my experience and track record. Quantifiably speaking, experience, expertise seems to be listened to the more experienced I get. Also helpful is where it's relevant participating in startups or small businesses that scaled from from 0-5M, 0-10M, and now 0-60M/year. A measure that I like is it by whether I can see opportunities early and recognize others who do the same and what I can learn from/with them.
  - yitianjian 8y ago
    What do you mean by getting 20 years of experience in 10 years? Do you mean in terms of putting in 2x the time or work, or looking for opportunities/experiences that are more cross-applicable? Or simply looking for the best growth?
    - j45 8y ago
      I pursued 20 years of experience in 10 years of living/work because I came out of university after the dot com crash and had to become recession proof, and deliver value no matter what. It was very fortunate that the world adopted the internet, technology, etc. If I couldn't see the future, I had to get up higher to see further ahead. Having the experience of a mid-senior technology exec 5-10 years earlier was not a career goal, but to gain a perspective to then see my own life and goals I could pursue. I had/have a lot of learning to do when it comes to business/people skills - outside of my technical abilities, and I'm sure I was inefficient at it. Today, my ability to deal with young techies is my most important skill. How that happens was largely inefficient... I don't worship the cult of working a lot of hours though, maybe learning from a lot of hours the long way while I was young and could afford the time. This meant generally working 6-7 days a week for probably close to 5-7 years between freelancing, contracting, consulting, and building products, straight out of school. I stayed on call 24/7/365 myself for a large number of those years, never flying more than 3 hours away from me due to obligations I let myself take on (and learn to handle much better - even though I was on call, I got good at building systems and processes that didn't need me). Your question seems to be looking for tactics, when it's not about tactics alone. Going to the gym alone doesn't make anyone an athlete who can compete at a high level. Getting better at your sport is really important, for me: 1) I got over having to work harder than I should have to. It means outworking, outlearning, and outgrowing everyone by a country mile not only among your similarly experienced/aged contemporaries, and those senior to you too. If I have to be 8x as good as everything around me to make up for the slack/mistakes/learning, I have a chance of being much better than I may have been. 2) The small opportunities along the way really do become larger and multiply in numbers over the years. You gotta love what you do, not the returns alone. You have to learn what your limits actually are. I know I can push myself in certain ways, but not others. 3) My key lesson was learning discipline before everything else, and then using that to be more efficient and effective. There's no finish line on that though, and you might need something else. 4) The most important part about getting 20 years of life experience in 10 is learning from others rather than wasting your time having to learn everything. We are not special, and no problems are special. Use your bandwidth to solve problems after getting insights from others, not all on your own. Being in the right place in the right time also means being places that no reasonable person would be, especially for outsiders. Happy to chat via email too, I didn't want to shortchange a reply to you.
  - bradenb 8y ago
    I appreciate what you're trying to say, but you can't just claim to have 20 years of industry experience after starting in that industry 10 years ago, right? Do you put 20 years of experience on your resume?
    - j45 8y ago
      It's similar to how Paul Graham compares like working really hard for a few years in a startup vs working slower at a traditional job. How hard one works in a compressed amount of time, and the results one achieve in the same amount of time can equate to something. I never would put 20 years of experience on my resume. Can't fake it till you make it in tech. :) Years of experience, again aren't the metric alone, its the quality of those years does matter. If someone has 10 years of experience, and their achievements and skillset are mature and are on par with someone at the top of the pile with 20 years of experience, that might be one way. Does that help clarify? Either way, I'm not sure where this new literal HN is coming from, and maybe I haven't done a very good job of explaining much.
      - bradenb 8y ago
        Thanks for the clarification. I get what you're trying saying. The point of confusion for me was how literally you used "20 years of experience" in your career. As you said, it's hard to pass that off literally, but I totally understand having compressed learning. I, myself, have been in the industry for 12 years now and I feel that number is fair, but I feel like almost all of my usable experience came in the last 6 years. So in a way I feel like I got 12 years of experience in 6 years.
        j45 8y ago
        Cool. Now having 20 actual years of experience, I think I was describing it in hindsight, vs looking to my future. I agree with your 12 yeaer experience. When I hire or am being hired we look for recent, relevant and hopefully experience that shows a higher level of mastery relative to other candidates. Still this is a nice reminder of how good HN has been at attracting new entrepreneurs/technologists, and the lowering the average age/experience level on HN. I see it as a positive.
- 3pt14159 8y ago
  You're more qualified and so am I. The competition right now is crazy compared to what it used to be in fields like pure software. You're fully capable of starting a bio-computing or quantum computing startup, though. Something I think about constantly is if it would be better to just go back to university for a field I'm 50-80% certain is going to be huge and combine it with my strengths in software and physical engineering. The problem is that I didn't make a conscious choice to study software because of where the world was going. I just liked computers as a kid. How do you replicate that? I don't know enough about quantum to be sure that that's going to be the next field until I've already learned it, and the only proxy I can have that seems to be right about the general direction of any of this is DARPA, but they're usually unhelpful about timing. The one major problem I don't know how to solve, let alone make money from, is how to square capitalism with cybersecurity. The incentives point in other directions after a sigma or three.
  - sjg007 8y ago
    I mean there is a whole global market for cybersecurity products and services. You would square that by finding some product to sell. Selling traditional AV or network firewalls would probably be very competitive but providing next generation cloud based device security management is less so. And in fact this is where you see the current slew of startups.. each one offering a way to security the edge to the cloud since companies are migrating to the cloud and using less IT/infosec human resources to do so. Same with government departments as well. Govt is probably better especially when you need a security clearance because you can charge more operating in those environments.
- JimboOmega 8y ago
  Experience wise I feel the same. Managing and building a team is very non-obvious, and doing group projects in college will never get you that kind of experience. Technical skills are of somewhat less importance in my mind (and easier to learn very young) However, the older you get the more other commitments you tend to have. I fully believe you can found a company while having a life outside of work, but it is not the classic image of the hard-working, hard-drinking 20-something.
  - baccheion 8y ago
    Maybe when in their 40s, they've made enough to be effectively retired? Otherwise, given the commitments you mentioned, they'd likely never be in a position to branch out. Maybe some founders are younger because that's the window. They are old enough to be at the staff level (experience) and yet young enough to not quite be ready to have children. Whether they know it or not, startups usually fail within the first year and the most common difference between year acquired and year founded is 3. If they fail, they'd likely do it just in time to settle down and have children on schedule.
mikert5671 8y ago
Selection bias, if you're starting a company at age 43, you are risking your career and monetary stability. The type of person who can afford this is probably already part of an elite financially secure class. How misleading is this article? They are comparing apples to oranges, people starting companies in their 20s are not the same as people starting companies in their 40s. Take the set of people in their 20s who would be capable of starting a company in their 40s (meaning they have career success, a cushion of money, etc) and compare them to the entrepreneurs in their 40s, then you have a statistic. This is false otherwise.
- kown223 8y ago
  you are risking your career and monetary stability, at your 20s too, if you start a company and fail, you risk going homeless and having a huge gap on your cv.
  - DoreenMichele 8y ago
    I would like to see a citation for this assertion that, if your company fails, you are at high risk (or higher than normal risk) of homelessness. This doesn't fit with what I know for what puts a person at risk of homelessness. And there's no gap on your CV. You put down "Worked on launching x startup from X date to Y date. It sold, folded, whatever and I'm looking for a job now." Thank you in advance if you can come up with a cite.
    - ericand 8y ago
      My understanding is that failing is more of an issue outside the US. In the US, which is where the data is from, I tend to agree with DoreenMichele: Startup failure is fairly easy to recover from. You mostly risk opportunity cost (lost wages, lost promotion periods).
      - TomMarius 8y ago
        Actually cost of failure is much lower in Europe due to welfare state and generally lower cost of living.
saudioger 8y ago
Sure, I can see how this is a myth about founders... but what about employees? We can't all run startups. There's a lot of age bias in hiring.
- adventured 8y ago
  There's definitely a lot of age bias in the employment, particularly after ~40. The key is to move up the difficulty ladder. Your age-resistant employment prospects skyrocket if you move away from lower value skills - think PHP - and move up to (just for example) Java or Go et al. Or move away from low value front-end junk that turns over every three years (the latest JavaScript framework of the month), and to higher value serious programming. That's where long-term job security comes from. The difficulty acts as a barrier to entry against a flood of low skill labor that will constantly undercut you (both in regards to age and income). Master a high value, higher barrier to entry language or two and you can write a six figure ticket for the rest of your adult life. And as certain languages begin to themselves age off, the demand often only goes up for the dwindling supply of engineers that still know it well.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - jpindar 8y ago
    Any examples of those languages?
    - rohansingh 8y ago
      I almost agree with the poster above, but I think it's less about the languages than high-value skills or specializations. As long as you're defining yourself by a language, you're more limited than someone who's known for expertise in some specialty. Examples include distributed systems, realtime software, embedded programming, network programming, etc.
  - tluyben2 8y ago
    I feel my contribution is more in saving time by experience than anything purely programming language related. Instead of having ‘young people’ ‘iterate, move fast and break things’, I think up the basics and tell them that. It save stress not knowing what to do (in my opinion the iterating is just their way of figuring out what to do without that feeling you are wasting time; it is not a very efficient way as there is a limit on how fast you can iterate and in how many simultaneous areas) and less crappy software comes out as the iterating did not start in the completely wrong place.
aswanson 8y ago
I think the the younger folks are more likely to spot an outsize opportunity where no one was looking at all, whereas an older person might be more aware of an incremental change in an existing business model that presents a new opportunity.
- mindcrime 8y ago
  I think the the younger folks are more likely to spot an outsize opportunity where no one was looking at all, I hear variations of this refrain a lot. But I wonder, is there any particular evidence to support this, or even a reasonable sounding theory to explain why it is likely to be so?
  - aswanson 8y ago
    A lot of the more "visible" larger outcomes seem to be based on how people socially interact moreso than technical innovation. Older people generally aren't first wavers in new means of sharing their lives, e.g. facebook, twitter, snapchat etc were all just new ways of talking. I know thats ridiculously reductive in scope, but it just seems older folk are more dispositioned to attack problems that provide a clearer path to renumeration, while younger folks seem more focused on doing something cool that technology enables. I have 0 data to back up that armchair analysis.
- JangoSteve 8y ago
  Are they though? Even looking at examples like Google and Facebook, it's not like the founders saw an opportunity where no one else was looking and went for it. In both cases, they built something that interested them with no eye toward opportunity (at least if the information we've been given about their early motivations is true), and then at some point down the road saw the same opportunity that everyone else already saw (in the sense that both search engines and social networks were already crowded spaces with companies that seemed to be the incumbent winners). If anything, it was less that they saw opportunity where no one else was looking, and more that they saw opportunity where _everyone_ else was looking and went for it anyway. Everyone else thought the opportunities were so obvious as to have already been solved. Search engines were already solved by Yahoo!, social networking was already solved by MySpace, book-selling was already solved by Borders and Barnes & Noble. Maybe younger people tend to do things that don't make rational sense from a business perspective, and those are usually the things that become outsize successes in the face of the status quo. Of course, they're also the things that fail way more often than they succeed. That could explain both phenomena, where younger people founded the giant success stories and older people founded more successful things on average.
baxtr 8y ago
On the other hand, many resources accumulate with age, including access to human, social and financial capital. Older entrepreneurs are likely to have more experience in managing development, finance marketing, sales, HR and other operations. I wonder why they didn’t look at prior startup experience. Could it be that those 44 yrs old had 2-3 other startups before that just didn’t work and so they knew how to do things?
- empath75 8y ago
  I think that’s implied by the article. Experience matters. It’s not like these guys were garbage men before.
- AmericanChopper 8y ago
  Even just regular work experience will help a lot. Some of the successful founders I know had a few failed startups under their belt. But you can learn a lot from just working with other people. I’ve learnt a lot about all sorts of things just by taking an interest in how my colleagues do their work, and most of it was stuff I’d have struggled to figure out by my self.
ashelmire 8y ago
The numbers are far more favorable for older founders than I expected. But that's also completely in line with my life experience. As you work, you learn how to manage yourself and others, and a lifetime learner accumulates knowledge of much greater depth and breadth than someone younger. This accumulated knowledge and management skill should provide advantages in startups.
ThomPete 8y ago
My take on it: "The youth have all the energy and time to spend, no obligations and no financial worries. But they have very little life experience and exposure to these hidden problems. So what they end up solving are the kind of problems primarily young people have. This certainly makes for some very amazing products, but I can’t help feeling a little disillusioned. The amount of time and energy that goes into fun, but ultimately useless ideas, rather than fixing some of these hidden problems is mind-numbing. On the other hand, the older generations are exposed (aware or unaware) to a lot of these hidden problems. They have experience on how to solve them because they understand them. Yet by that time, most of them have to provide for a family, pay of their mortgage, tuition fees, healthcare, yearly vacations and the 3 cars. They also often lack the imagination on how to solve things in a new technological paradigm."
ericand 8y ago
Great data, but I'm pretty disappointed with many of the other conclusions. In the opening line the article states that the 5 largest tech companies were founded by those age 30 and lower. Why? The article isn't very helpful here. It seems to say that they are anomalies, which is a little unsatisfying. > "one may reconcile the existence of great young entrepreneurs with the advantages of middle age by noting that extremely talented people are also extremely talented when they are young." So they destroy the myth of the young founder, by perpetuating the myth that these founders were superhuman (extremely talented is the word they used). As evidenced by valuations of their companies continuing to rise as they got older. I find Malcom Gladwell's conclusion more satisfying: When the internet was born, these people were closest to it in - in part because they were young. I'd extend Gladwell to argue: In once in a lifetime technology revolutions, the young may be advantaged in creating a handful of super valuable companies. And those companies are so central and their small head start is so so powerful, that those companies succeed, at times in spite of their founders. My conclusion: If you happen to be in college during a technological revolution, you won the lottery and should start a company. Otherwise, you are better off learning, accumulate resources, and founding late in your career.
- justinzollars 8y ago
  > If you happen to be in college during a technological revolution, you won the lottery and should start a company https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLCL6OYbSTw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLCL6OYbSTw
  - beamatronic 8y ago
    Now you tell me. My conceptual problem was back then I couldn’t imagine people paying a monthly fee to access the Internet. Apparently Americans have A LOT of disposable income.
    - sharemywin 8y ago
      If there is one thing I've learned it's never under estimate how frivolous people are with their money.
deleted 8y ago
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neonate 8y ago
http://archive.is/6aBOh http://archive.is/6aBOh
graycat 8y ago
For my startup, age is crucial: There's no way I could have done this work before I was 40, and similarly for would be competitors. I had to learn about: mainline business entrepreneurship startups venture capital, what it is good for and what isn't about people, especially in business -- vendors, employees, customers, investors, lawyers, management, organizational behavior, etc. quite a lot of pure math quite a lot of applied math and associated computing my original applied math The pure and applied math is Ph.D. stuff, and I do have that Ph.D. But some serious business experience is crucial. Just those two prerequisites rule out nearly anyone under 30. But, but, but, people over 40 are out of new ideas? Not in my startup!!! The user interface, user experience, some of the computing, and especially the crucial core enabling applied math are far out, wildly new, "radical, provocative" stuff. If I gave a lecture on the custom, internal ad targeting applied math, then nearly everyone in Silicon Valley, entrepreneurs and VCs, would soil the furniture and then, on the way to the restrooms, the carpet. Later they'd meet at a local bar, try to wash away the shock, and try just to f'get about that experience. Why? As I learned as a first year pure math grad student, there is little so intimidating, frustrating, confusing, and discouraging as a very nicely done, precise, fully correct, advanced, strikingly original, calm, lecture on pure math where understand only a key word now and then!!!!! I do owe a thanks to the author, Irving W-B: At one time he invited me to give, and I gave, a very simplified version of just such a lecture on some of my research to some of his people!!!! What I gave then a colleague had pronounced "radical, provocative". After my lecture, some of Irving's people and I had lunch, and on one small point agreed that I'd reinvented k-D trees, IIRC in Sedgwick. Think people over 40 can't be original? Ever hear Wagner's <i>Tristan und Isolde</i>?
- annywhey 8y ago
  In my early 30's now and I often muse on how poorly prepared I actually was, coming right out of school. Basically, society molds the young to fit an image. Then those young people all compete over that image, hopefully start to realize this is a terrible idea and there are better things, and start looking for a niche to exit to. And then perhaps 20 years later they've learned enough to successfully hit that niche!
  - 8y ago
chadash 8y ago
My guess is that a lot of successful founders are people with experience in a given domain who founded a company to fill an unfilled need within that domain, and that most of these founders are on the older end. For example, I recently interacted with the founder of a $200 million company that sells infrastructure materials (e.g. fiber optic wire) to large telecommunications companies. To found a company like this, you need to know that the need exists in the first place and you are are at a huge advantage if you already have contacts in the industry. There are tons and tons of companies like this that you have never heard of because $200 million companies don't make the news. But they do make their owners very wealthy even if they aren't billionaires. Lacking domain experience and/or industry connections, many young people will often found consumer facing companies. These companies are often winner-takes-all and a tiny fraction of them will make their founders super wealthy. Plus, consumer companies by nature tend to be more well known because they advertise their brand and cater to consumers so they appear on the news more often. For example, AbbVie and Medtronic both have larger market caps than McDonalds, but they (intentionally) don't seek publicity, so you don't hear about them (and therefore their founders) much.
- jjeaff 8y ago
  Many times, these $200 million companies make their owners far wealthier than even unicorn founders. Because not only are they sometimes fully owned by the founders, but they are making cash flow from day one (gasp!) and paying out healthy distributions from the beginning.
  - Regardsyjc 8y ago
    Agreed. There are many business opportunities in "niches" . I met a founder who became a VC after she exited her company that did interior design for office buildings. I think I offended her when I called her 8-9 figure business a niche but I had never even imagined that that need could have possibly existed until she told me.
    - chadash 8y ago
      To be fair, that's a pretty big niche. There are hundreds of thousands if not millions of office buildings out there and they all need someone to design the interiors. But one thing that's kind of cool about it is that it doesn't scale beyond a certain point. Because it requires legs on the ground, this is the sort of business that isn't winner takes all. Sure you can get large, but there's always going to be room for boutique design firms.
sgt101 8y ago
Figure 3A is really interesting - post 40 founders are more successful.
siruncledrew 8y ago
> "“Young people are just smarter,” Zuckerberg told the audience of a 2007 VC conference, adding that successful startups should only employ young people with technical expertise." > "“People under 35 are the people who make change happen,” said VC Vinod Khosla at a 2011 conference. “People over 45 basically die in terms of new ideas” because they “keep falling back on old habits.” Entrepreneur and VC Paul Graham said in a 2013 interview that investors tend to be biased against older founders. “The cutoff in investors’ heads is 32… after 32, they start to be a little skeptical.”" I don't buy this, even as someone under 27. I could see an argument that younger people have more time to think creatively and catch on to new trends in technology since they likely have more time to do so than older people with families or greater responsibilities. However, I don't believe successful change is only limited to younger people. Heck, I have friends who are 25 that haven't even figured their own life out and don't know how to keep an apartment clean. Yet, they still must know better than a 35 year old with 10 years of industry experience? To be honest, I've had more enjoyment working for startups with founders over 30 than under 25 - partly because those over 30 have less time for bullshit. They treat it like work (which is it). It was also helpful to learn from older people who could pass on both technical and life advice to me as a younger person from a "things I wish I knew at your age" perspective. Younger founders could still be successful, but, in truth, working with a bunch of other young people my age could feel more like "hanging out" than getting work done. Sometimes young people don't actually know what to do in certain circumstances and have no one to ask, which can be good and bad depending on how you look at it.
- dredmorbius 8y ago
  Sampling / selection bias, discrimination effects, self-fulfilling prophecy.
- bsder 8y ago
  If you want a business that is effectively a VC lottery ticket, ie flame out or go big in 18 months, you want folks under 30. They're stupid enough to believe the VC's and sign up, energetic enough to do something, and silly enough to keep up with the lifestyle fads that might produce something that goes exponential. If you want a business that produces money, you want founders who know an industry, understand the holes and deficiencies, have a solid nose to avoid the bullshit and the swamps, keep tight control over their cashflow and realize that this will probably take about 5 years--that's someone 35+ and more probably 45+. However, 5 years is WAY outside the return window for the modern lottery ticket VC. Consequently, they are going to give you every excuse in the book to avoid investing in a company other than "I'm buying a lottery ticket, not a business."
jlgray 8y ago
I think an important aspect not mentioned in this article is the environment in which the computer and internet wunderkind founders got their starts. You had a perfect storm of brand new, super powerful tools (the internet providing dirt-cheap distribution, cheap computation, beginner friendly programming languages -- php for facebook, java and python for google, etc.). There was so much low-hanging fruit with relatively little competition. A very similar thing happened in physics in the early 20th century, and led to the same notion that genius is a fleeting trait concentrated in the young. To quote this BBC article: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37578899 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37578899 It was like discovering a new toolkit which could quickly yield discoveries. Or, less charitably, as one scientist said: "mediocre physicists could discover great physics".
replicatorblog 8y ago
I can't get past the paywall, but the info looks a lot like the survey that circulated this summer. In that study, the researchers went through tax data and used tech companies that hired at least one employee as their proxy for a "startup." This seems wildly flawed. It's the same methodological quirk that makes Kauffman data not so helpful. I'd like to do a study that looks at some of the more common metrics of success in the startup community. + Top 100 companies tracked by Gartner + Top 100 Apps on Apple Store + Top 100 Websites measured by Quantcast I've looked at sample that's pretty close to that and the average age is much closer to 30, and even artificially inflated by serial entrepreneurs who are on their third companies.
- dredmorbius 8y ago
  http://archive.is/6aBOh http://archive.is/6aBOh
joejerryronnie 8y ago
I think one big advantage of older founders is the wisdom not to be fooled by the first VC to come along dangling cash with major strings attached.
- GreeniFi 8y ago
  Good point. VCs are looking for outsize returns. Older founders, who can’t spread their risk like a VC, are pursuing more predictable businesses but which are therefore probably lower profile and lower return.
gremlinsinc 8y ago
Good, there's still hope for me... lol (38/dev/entrepreneur).
baccheion 8y ago
The most successful founders now would be in their early 30s, as that's the range that captures die hards that started just early enough to have the most thorough perspective while still being younger. On the other hand, any successes can only really come from "the chosen" (ie, whoever VCs decided to fund).

226 points by GoldenMonkey 8y ago

> the mean age of high-tech founders is 43.2, economists say I could see this. From the perspective of an Engineer I'm 36 and I have never been more qualified to start a company than today. People I work with in their 40s are great I've had the opportunity to learn from some excellent people in my career

j45 8y ago
This has been my experience as well. After seeing startup CEOs be swept aside for growth or scaling CEOs by their VC's, I decided I wanted to build lasting and transferable skills alongside the problem solving. In hindsight there was little harm spending my twenties gathering 20 years of experience in 10 years. This is less about age, than how one levels up. Putting in time helped understand problems at a greater breadth, depth and uncover inter-disciplinary connections, instead of the spitball ideation process. After 10 years (around age), having 20 years of experience on average puts you ahead of many of your contemporaries, leaving you in a better position to recognize opportunities, and areas needing improvement. If this is you, let's chat :)
- wafflesindeed 8y ago
  On what basis are you quantifying this? You say you're ten years ahead ... Of what exactly? Compared to whom? Based on what?
  - j45 8y ago
    How would you quantify it? I measure it in part by pursuing a track record that is meaningful to me not aligned on income or titles alone, but the innovation/change I've been able to be part of that is remarkable and memorable for it's time. Sometimes I meet people who have a lot of experience/expertise (not a title) they have no business having at a particular age or experience level. They have really been able to extract a lot from their opportunities. Sometimes I get approached in this manner for senior, or leadership assistance while I'm young on the basis of my experience and track record. Quantifiably speaking, experience, expertise seems to be listened to the more experienced I get. Also helpful is where it's relevant participating in startups or small businesses that scaled from from 0-5M, 0-10M, and now 0-60M/year. A measure that I like is it by whether I can see opportunities early and recognize others who do the same and what I can learn from/with them.
- yitianjian 8y ago
  What do you mean by getting 20 years of experience in 10 years? Do you mean in terms of putting in 2x the time or work, or looking for opportunities/experiences that are more cross-applicable? Or simply looking for the best growth?
  - j45 8y ago
    I pursued 20 years of experience in 10 years of living/work because I came out of university after the dot com crash and had to become recession proof, and deliver value no matter what. It was very fortunate that the world adopted the internet, technology, etc. If I couldn't see the future, I had to get up higher to see further ahead. Having the experience of a mid-senior technology exec 5-10 years earlier was not a career goal, but to gain a perspective to then see my own life and goals I could pursue. I had/have a lot of learning to do when it comes to business/people skills - outside of my technical abilities, and I'm sure I was inefficient at it. Today, my ability to deal with young techies is my most important skill. How that happens was largely inefficient... I don't worship the cult of working a lot of hours though, maybe learning from a lot of hours the long way while I was young and could afford the time. This meant generally working 6-7 days a week for probably close to 5-7 years between freelancing, contracting, consulting, and building products, straight out of school. I stayed on call 24/7/365 myself for a large number of those years, never flying more than 3 hours away from me due to obligations I let myself take on (and learn to handle much better - even though I was on call, I got good at building systems and processes that didn't need me). Your question seems to be looking for tactics, when it's not about tactics alone. Going to the gym alone doesn't make anyone an athlete who can compete at a high level. Getting better at your sport is really important, for me: 1) I got over having to work harder than I should have to. It means outworking, outlearning, and outgrowing everyone by a country mile not only among your similarly experienced/aged contemporaries, and those senior to you too. If I have to be 8x as good as everything around me to make up for the slack/mistakes/learning, I have a chance of being much better than I may have been. 2) The small opportunities along the way really do become larger and multiply in numbers over the years. You gotta love what you do, not the returns alone. You have to learn what your limits actually are. I know I can push myself in certain ways, but not others. 3) My key lesson was learning discipline before everything else, and then using that to be more efficient and effective. There's no finish line on that though, and you might need something else. 4) The most important part about getting 20 years of life experience in 10 is learning from others rather than wasting your time having to learn everything. We are not special, and no problems are special. Use your bandwidth to solve problems after getting insights from others, not all on your own. Being in the right place in the right time also means being places that no reasonable person would be, especially for outsiders. Happy to chat via email too, I didn't want to shortchange a reply to you.
- bradenb 8y ago
  I appreciate what you're trying to say, but you can't just claim to have 20 years of industry experience after starting in that industry 10 years ago, right? Do you put 20 years of experience on your resume?
  - j45 8y ago
    It's similar to how Paul Graham compares like working really hard for a few years in a startup vs working slower at a traditional job. How hard one works in a compressed amount of time, and the results one achieve in the same amount of time can equate to something. I never would put 20 years of experience on my resume. Can't fake it till you make it in tech. :) Years of experience, again aren't the metric alone, its the quality of those years does matter. If someone has 10 years of experience, and their achievements and skillset are mature and are on par with someone at the top of the pile with 20 years of experience, that might be one way. Does that help clarify? Either way, I'm not sure where this new literal HN is coming from, and maybe I haven't done a very good job of explaining much.
    - bradenb 8y ago
      Thanks for the clarification. I get what you're trying saying. The point of confusion for me was how literally you used "20 years of experience" in your career. As you said, it's hard to pass that off literally, but I totally understand having compressed learning. I, myself, have been in the industry for 12 years now and I feel that number is fair, but I feel like almost all of my usable experience came in the last 6 years. So in a way I feel like I got 12 years of experience in 6 years.
      - j45 8y ago
        Cool. Now having 20 actual years of experience, I think I was describing it in hindsight, vs looking to my future. I agree with your 12 yeaer experience. When I hire or am being hired we look for recent, relevant and hopefully experience that shows a higher level of mastery relative to other candidates. Still this is a nice reminder of how good HN has been at attracting new entrepreneurs/technologists, and the lowering the average age/experience level on HN. I see it as a positive.
3pt14159 8y ago
You're more qualified and so am I. The competition right now is crazy compared to what it used to be in fields like pure software. You're fully capable of starting a bio-computing or quantum computing startup, though. Something I think about constantly is if it would be better to just go back to university for a field I'm 50-80% certain is going to be huge and combine it with my strengths in software and physical engineering. The problem is that I didn't make a conscious choice to study software because of where the world was going. I just liked computers as a kid. How do you replicate that? I don't know enough about quantum to be sure that that's going to be the next field until I've already learned it, and the only proxy I can have that seems to be right about the general direction of any of this is DARPA, but they're usually unhelpful about timing. The one major problem I don't know how to solve, let alone make money from, is how to square capitalism with cybersecurity. The incentives point in other directions after a sigma or three.
- sjg007 8y ago
  I mean there is a whole global market for cybersecurity products and services. You would square that by finding some product to sell. Selling traditional AV or network firewalls would probably be very competitive but providing next generation cloud based device security management is less so. And in fact this is where you see the current slew of startups.. each one offering a way to security the edge to the cloud since companies are migrating to the cloud and using less IT/infosec human resources to do so. Same with government departments as well. Govt is probably better especially when you need a security clearance because you can charge more operating in those environments.
JimboOmega 8y ago
Experience wise I feel the same. Managing and building a team is very non-obvious, and doing group projects in college will never get you that kind of experience. Technical skills are of somewhat less importance in my mind (and easier to learn very young) However, the older you get the more other commitments you tend to have. I fully believe you can found a company while having a life outside of work, but it is not the classic image of the hard-working, hard-drinking 20-something.
- baccheion 8y ago
  Maybe when in their 40s, they've made enough to be effectively retired? Otherwise, given the commitments you mentioned, they'd likely never be in a position to branch out. Maybe some founders are younger because that's the window. They are old enough to be at the staff level (experience) and yet young enough to not quite be ready to have children. Whether they know it or not, startups usually fail within the first year and the most common difference between year acquired and year founded is 3. If they fail, they'd likely do it just in time to settle down and have children on schedule.

mikert5671 8y ago

Selection bias, if you're starting a company at age 43, you are risking your career and monetary stability. The type of person who can afford this is probably already part of an elite financially secure class. How misleading is this article? They are comparing apples to oranges, people starting companies in their 20s are not the same as people starting companies in their 40s. Take the set of people in their 20s who would be capable of starting a company in their 40s (meaning they have career success, a cushion of money, etc) and compare them to the entrepreneurs in their 40s, then you have a statistic. This is false otherwise.

kown223 8y ago
you are risking your career and monetary stability, at your 20s too, if you start a company and fail, you risk going homeless and having a huge gap on your cv.
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  I would like to see a citation for this assertion that, if your company fails, you are at high risk (or higher than normal risk) of homelessness. This doesn't fit with what I know for what puts a person at risk of homelessness. And there's no gap on your CV. You put down "Worked on launching x startup from X date to Y date. It sold, folded, whatever and I'm looking for a job now." Thank you in advance if you can come up with a cite.
  - ericand 8y ago
    My understanding is that failing is more of an issue outside the US. In the US, which is where the data is from, I tend to agree with DoreenMichele: Startup failure is fairly easy to recover from. You mostly risk opportunity cost (lost wages, lost promotion periods).
    - TomMarius 8y ago
      Actually cost of failure is much lower in Europe due to welfare state and generally lower cost of living.

saudioger 8y ago

Sure, I can see how this is a myth about founders... but what about employees? We can't all run startups. There's a lot of age bias in hiring.

adventured 8y ago
There's definitely a lot of age bias in the employment, particularly after ~40. The key is to move up the difficulty ladder. Your age-resistant employment prospects skyrocket if you move away from lower value skills - think PHP - and move up to (just for example) Java or Go et al. Or move away from low value front-end junk that turns over every three years (the latest JavaScript framework of the month), and to higher value serious programming. That's where long-term job security comes from. The difficulty acts as a barrier to entry against a flood of low skill labor that will constantly undercut you (both in regards to age and income). Master a high value, higher barrier to entry language or two and you can write a six figure ticket for the rest of your adult life. And as certain languages begin to themselves age off, the demand often only goes up for the dwindling supply of engineers that still know it well.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- jpindar 8y ago
  Any examples of those languages?
  - rohansingh 8y ago
    I almost agree with the poster above, but I think it's less about the languages than high-value skills or specializations. As long as you're defining yourself by a language, you're more limited than someone who's known for expertise in some specialty. Examples include distributed systems, realtime software, embedded programming, network programming, etc.
- tluyben2 8y ago
  I feel my contribution is more in saving time by experience than anything purely programming language related. Instead of having ‘young people’ ‘iterate, move fast and break things’, I think up the basics and tell them that. It save stress not knowing what to do (in my opinion the iterating is just their way of figuring out what to do without that feeling you are wasting time; it is not a very efficient way as there is a limit on how fast you can iterate and in how many simultaneous areas) and less crappy software comes out as the iterating did not start in the completely wrong place.

aswanson 8y ago

I think the the younger folks are more likely to spot an outsize opportunity where no one was looking at all, whereas an older person might be more aware of an incremental change in an existing business model that presents a new opportunity.

mindcrime 8y ago
I think the the younger folks are more likely to spot an outsize opportunity where no one was looking at all, I hear variations of this refrain a lot. But I wonder, is there any particular evidence to support this, or even a reasonable sounding theory to explain why it is likely to be so?
- aswanson 8y ago
  A lot of the more "visible" larger outcomes seem to be based on how people socially interact moreso than technical innovation. Older people generally aren't first wavers in new means of sharing their lives, e.g. facebook, twitter, snapchat etc were all just new ways of talking. I know thats ridiculously reductive in scope, but it just seems older folk are more dispositioned to attack problems that provide a clearer path to renumeration, while younger folks seem more focused on doing something cool that technology enables. I have 0 data to back up that armchair analysis.
JangoSteve 8y ago
Are they though? Even looking at examples like Google and Facebook, it's not like the founders saw an opportunity where no one else was looking and went for it. In both cases, they built something that interested them with no eye toward opportunity (at least if the information we've been given about their early motivations is true), and then at some point down the road saw the same opportunity that everyone else already saw (in the sense that both search engines and social networks were already crowded spaces with companies that seemed to be the incumbent winners). If anything, it was less that they saw opportunity where no one else was looking, and more that they saw opportunity where _everyone_ else was looking and went for it anyway. Everyone else thought the opportunities were so obvious as to have already been solved. Search engines were already solved by Yahoo!, social networking was already solved by MySpace, book-selling was already solved by Borders and Barnes & Noble. Maybe younger people tend to do things that don't make rational sense from a business perspective, and those are usually the things that become outsize successes in the face of the status quo. Of course, they're also the things that fail way more often than they succeed. That could explain both phenomena, where younger people founded the giant success stories and older people founded more successful things on average.

baxtr 8y ago

On the other hand, many resources accumulate with age, including access to human, social and financial capital. Older entrepreneurs are likely to have more experience in managing development, finance marketing, sales, HR and other operations. I wonder why they didn’t look at prior startup experience. Could it be that those 44 yrs old had 2-3 other startups before that just didn’t work and so they knew how to do things?

empath75 8y ago
I think that’s implied by the article. Experience matters. It’s not like these guys were garbage men before.
AmericanChopper 8y ago
Even just regular work experience will help a lot. Some of the successful founders I know had a few failed startups under their belt. But you can learn a lot from just working with other people. I’ve learnt a lot about all sorts of things just by taking an interest in how my colleagues do their work, and most of it was stuff I’d have struggled to figure out by my self.

ashelmire 8y ago

The numbers are far more favorable for older founders than I expected. But that's also completely in line with my life experience. As you work, you learn how to manage yourself and others, and a lifetime learner accumulates knowledge of much greater depth and breadth than someone younger. This accumulated knowledge and management skill should provide advantages in startups.

ThomPete 8y ago

My take on it: "The youth have all the energy and time to spend, no obligations and no financial worries. But they have very little life experience and exposure to these hidden problems. So what they end up solving are the kind of problems primarily young people have. This certainly makes for some very amazing products, but I can’t help feeling a little disillusioned. The amount of time and energy that goes into fun, but ultimately useless ideas, rather than fixing some of these hidden problems is mind-numbing. On the other hand, the older generations are exposed (aware or unaware) to a lot of these hidden problems. They have experience on how to solve them because they understand them. Yet by that time, most of them have to provide for a family, pay of their mortgage, tuition fees, healthcare, yearly vacations and the 3 cars. They also often lack the imagination on how to solve things in a new technological paradigm."

ericand 8y ago

Great data, but I'm pretty disappointed with many of the other conclusions. In the opening line the article states that the 5 largest tech companies were founded by those age 30 and lower. Why? The article isn't very helpful here. It seems to say that they are anomalies, which is a little unsatisfying. > "one may reconcile the existence of great young entrepreneurs with the advantages of middle age by noting that extremely talented people are also extremely talented when they are young." So they destroy the myth of the young founder, by perpetuating the myth that these founders were superhuman (extremely talented is the word they used). As evidenced by valuations of their companies continuing to rise as they got older. I find Malcom Gladwell's conclusion more satisfying: When the internet was born, these people were closest to it in - in part because they were young. I'd extend Gladwell to argue: In once in a lifetime technology revolutions, the young may be advantaged in creating a handful of super valuable companies. And those companies are so central and their small head start is so so powerful, that those companies succeed, at times in spite of their founders. My conclusion: If you happen to be in college during a technological revolution, you won the lottery and should start a company. Otherwise, you are better off learning, accumulate resources, and founding late in your career.

justinzollars 8y ago
> If you happen to be in college during a technological revolution, you won the lottery and should start a company https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLCL6OYbSTw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLCL6OYbSTw
- beamatronic 8y ago
  Now you tell me. My conceptual problem was back then I couldn’t imagine people paying a monthly fee to access the Internet. Apparently Americans have A LOT of disposable income.
  - sharemywin 8y ago
    If there is one thing I've learned it's never under estimate how frivolous people are with their money.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

neonate 8y ago

http://archive.is/6aBOh http://archive.is/6aBOh

graycat 8y ago

For my startup, age is crucial: There's no way I could have done this work before I was 40, and similarly for would be competitors. I had to learn about: mainline business entrepreneurship startups venture capital, what it is good for and what isn't about people, especially in business -- vendors, employees, customers, investors, lawyers, management, organizational behavior, etc. quite a lot of pure math quite a lot of applied math and associated computing my original applied math The pure and applied math is Ph.D. stuff, and I do have that Ph.D. But some serious business experience is crucial. Just those two prerequisites rule out nearly anyone under 30. But, but, but, people over 40 are out of new ideas? Not in my startup!!! The user interface, user experience, some of the computing, and especially the crucial core enabling applied math are far out, wildly new, "radical, provocative" stuff. If I gave a lecture on the custom, internal ad targeting applied math, then nearly everyone in Silicon Valley, entrepreneurs and VCs, would soil the furniture and then, on the way to the restrooms, the carpet. Later they'd meet at a local bar, try to wash away the shock, and try just to f'get about that experience. Why? As I learned as a first year pure math grad student, there is little so intimidating, frustrating, confusing, and discouraging as a very nicely done, precise, fully correct, advanced, strikingly original, calm, lecture on pure math where understand only a key word now and then!!!!! I do owe a thanks to the author, Irving W-B: At one time he invited me to give, and I gave, a very simplified version of just such a lecture on some of my research to some of his people!!!! What I gave then a colleague had pronounced "radical, provocative". After my lecture, some of Irving's people and I had lunch, and on one small point agreed that I'd reinvented k-D trees, IIRC in Sedgwick. Think people over 40 can't be original? Ever hear Wagner's <i>Tristan und Isolde</i>?

annywhey 8y ago
In my early 30's now and I often muse on how poorly prepared I actually was, coming right out of school. Basically, society molds the young to fit an image. Then those young people all compete over that image, hopefully start to realize this is a terrible idea and there are better things, and start looking for a niche to exit to. And then perhaps 20 years later they've learned enough to successfully hit that niche!
- 8y ago

chadash 8y ago

My guess is that a lot of successful founders are people with experience in a given domain who founded a company to fill an unfilled need within that domain, and that most of these founders are on the older end. For example, I recently interacted with the founder of a $200 million company that sells infrastructure materials (e.g. fiber optic wire) to large telecommunications companies. To found a company like this, you need to know that the need exists in the first place and you are are at a huge advantage if you already have contacts in the industry. There are tons and tons of companies like this that you have never heard of because $200 million companies don't make the news. But they do make their owners very wealthy even if they aren't billionaires. Lacking domain experience and/or industry connections, many young people will often found consumer facing companies. These companies are often winner-takes-all and a tiny fraction of them will make their founders super wealthy. Plus, consumer companies by nature tend to be more well known because they advertise their brand and cater to consumers so they appear on the news more often. For example, AbbVie and Medtronic both have larger market caps than McDonalds, but they (intentionally) don't seek publicity, so you don't hear about them (and therefore their founders) much.

jjeaff 8y ago
Many times, these $200 million companies make their owners far wealthier than even unicorn founders. Because not only are they sometimes fully owned by the founders, but they are making cash flow from day one (gasp!) and paying out healthy distributions from the beginning.
- Regardsyjc 8y ago
  Agreed. There are many business opportunities in "niches" . I met a founder who became a VC after she exited her company that did interior design for office buildings. I think I offended her when I called her 8-9 figure business a niche but I had never even imagined that that need could have possibly existed until she told me.
  - chadash 8y ago
    To be fair, that's a pretty big niche. There are hundreds of thousands if not millions of office buildings out there and they all need someone to design the interiors. But one thing that's kind of cool about it is that it doesn't scale beyond a certain point. Because it requires legs on the ground, this is the sort of business that isn't winner takes all. Sure you can get large, but there's always going to be room for boutique design firms.

sgt101 8y ago

Figure 3A is really interesting - post 40 founders are more successful.

siruncledrew 8y ago

> "“Young people are just smarter,” Zuckerberg told the audience of a 2007 VC conference, adding that successful startups should only employ young people with technical expertise." > "“People under 35 are the people who make change happen,” said VC Vinod Khosla at a 2011 conference. “People over 45 basically die in terms of new ideas” because they “keep falling back on old habits.” Entrepreneur and VC Paul Graham said in a 2013 interview that investors tend to be biased against older founders. “The cutoff in investors’ heads is 32… after 32, they start to be a little skeptical.”" I don't buy this, even as someone under 27. I could see an argument that younger people have more time to think creatively and catch on to new trends in technology since they likely have more time to do so than older people with families or greater responsibilities. However, I don't believe successful change is only limited to younger people. Heck, I have friends who are 25 that haven't even figured their own life out and don't know how to keep an apartment clean. Yet, they still must know better than a 35 year old with 10 years of industry experience? To be honest, I've had more enjoyment working for startups with founders over 30 than under 25 - partly because those over 30 have less time for bullshit. They treat it like work (which is it). It was also helpful to learn from older people who could pass on both technical and life advice to me as a younger person from a "things I wish I knew at your age" perspective. Younger founders could still be successful, but, in truth, working with a bunch of other young people my age could feel more like "hanging out" than getting work done. Sometimes young people don't actually know what to do in certain circumstances and have no one to ask, which can be good and bad depending on how you look at it.

dredmorbius 8y ago
Sampling / selection bias, discrimination effects, self-fulfilling prophecy.
bsder 8y ago
If you want a business that is effectively a VC lottery ticket, ie flame out or go big in 18 months, you want folks under 30. They're stupid enough to believe the VC's and sign up, energetic enough to do something, and silly enough to keep up with the lifestyle fads that might produce something that goes exponential. If you want a business that produces money, you want founders who know an industry, understand the holes and deficiencies, have a solid nose to avoid the bullshit and the swamps, keep tight control over their cashflow and realize that this will probably take about 5 years--that's someone 35+ and more probably 45+. However, 5 years is WAY outside the return window for the modern lottery ticket VC. Consequently, they are going to give you every excuse in the book to avoid investing in a company other than "I'm buying a lottery ticket, not a business."

jlgray 8y ago

I think an important aspect not mentioned in this article is the environment in which the computer and internet wunderkind founders got their starts. You had a perfect storm of brand new, super powerful tools (the internet providing dirt-cheap distribution, cheap computation, beginner friendly programming languages -- php for facebook, java and python for google, etc.). There was so much low-hanging fruit with relatively little competition. A very similar thing happened in physics in the early 20th century, and led to the same notion that genius is a fleeting trait concentrated in the young. To quote this BBC article: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37578899 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37578899 It was like discovering a new toolkit which could quickly yield discoveries. Or, less charitably, as one scientist said: "mediocre physicists could discover great physics".

replicatorblog 8y ago

I can't get past the paywall, but the info looks a lot like the survey that circulated this summer. In that study, the researchers went through tax data and used tech companies that hired at least one employee as their proxy for a "startup." This seems wildly flawed. It's the same methodological quirk that makes Kauffman data not so helpful. I'd like to do a study that looks at some of the more common metrics of success in the startup community. + Top 100 companies tracked by Gartner + Top 100 Apps on Apple Store + Top 100 Websites measured by Quantcast I've looked at sample that's pretty close to that and the average age is much closer to 30, and even artificially inflated by serial entrepreneurs who are on their third companies.

dredmorbius 8y ago
http://archive.is/6aBOh http://archive.is/6aBOh

joejerryronnie 8y ago

I think one big advantage of older founders is the wisdom not to be fooled by the first VC to come along dangling cash with major strings attached.

GreeniFi 8y ago
Good point. VCs are looking for outsize returns. Older founders, who can’t spread their risk like a VC, are pursuing more predictable businesses but which are therefore probably lower profile and lower return.

gremlinsinc 8y ago

Good, there's still hope for me... lol (38/dev/entrepreneur).

baccheion 8y ago

The most successful founders now would be in their early 30s, as that's the range that captures die hards that started just early enough to have the most thorough perspective while still being younger. On the other hand, any successes can only really come from "the chosen" (ie, whoever VCs decided to fund).