7 ms·

How Old Are Successful Tech Entrepreneurs? (2018)

100 points by spking 7y ago

gavanwoolery 7y ago
As someone who is nearing 40 and worked in many different areas of software (including at 3 startups), with about 10 failed "micro startups" (i.e. hobby projects) under my belt, I can confidently say that I still have not nearly figured everything out. But at least I am not quite as dumb as I once was. :)
- beat 7y ago
  After mastering a few skills, I can tell when I've mastered something when I hit that point where I feel like the more I learn, the less I know. There's a Zen saying for that (I know via Shunryo Suzuki)... Before you start zen, mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers. But once you learn some zen, mountains are no longer mountains, and rivers are no longer rivers. When you master zen, mountains are just mountains and rivers are just rivers again.
  - deconstructive 7y ago
    This is the process of deconstruction taking place. It's the act of internalizing the awareness of all of the moving parts of a dynamic, interactive process in motion. To understand with intuition, just as much as with observation, equalizing the cognitive substance of each with the other. A sometimes often related example is that of a bicycle. To look at a bicycle as a complete object, its integrity as a whole, represents a conceptual recognition of the noun it is known by. It is a mineral, a thing, a bicycle. To disassemble the bicycle to pieces, strewn across the concrete floor of a garage, is to render it unto its parts, and destroys the recognition of the original object. To scoop up all of those parts in a bag or bin, is to obscure the bicycle as we once knew it. The process of disassembly is a complex task, and so too, the act of reassembly. But to reassemble the bicycle, is to understand it more completely. To be able to repair one bike (or mountain, or river), or duplicate parts and fabricate many bicycles (mountain ranges, tributaries), from scratch, represents a greater power and command of the recognizable object. So now we have passed through all three stations. Discovery (learning to recognize a distinct phenomenon), disassembly (rendering the recognizable complex whole as the sum of its atomic pieces by destroying its recognizability), mastery (the ability to utilize an inventory of elements as a part listing, and create distinct recognizable things from them).
  - DougWebb 7y ago
    There are no mountains or rivers. There are only valleys. Some are bigger.
cheez 7y ago
Not clear to me if they're 45 when it's founded or when it becomes successful. Sounds like it's the latter.
- ajiang 7y ago
  I think the former: "Among the very fastest-growing new tech companies, the average founder was 45 at the time of founding."
- jgrahamc 7y ago
  Among the very fastest-growing new tech companies, the average founder was 45 at the time of founding. It says "at the time of founding"
  - cheez 7y ago
    I will chalk it up to my allergies.
lwb 7y ago
At least part of this is due to just simple statistics, right? A 40 year old has likely started more companies than a 25 year old, because they've had more time. I'd like to see more data comparing the success of a startup with the Nth attempt that it represents for an entrepreneur. For example, is it better for someone to try to start a bunch of little companies and hope one takes off, or to work on one company for a long time? Etc.
- ryanmarsh 7y ago
  I’m not wildly successful however I have no idea how I could have had success before 40. I still have much to learn.
- rossenberg79 7y ago
  No, it isn’t. And I’ve said this before, a 45 year old has a grip on life that an early 20 something can’t even conceive of, especially if they’ve just lived a fairly easy life sailing through school and college thus far. A 45 year old has a better idea of how life can be improved in ways that matter, and has the connections and skills to capitalize on it. Sorry kids, the big dogs will eat your lunch.
  - jshaqaw 7y ago
    I’m 43 for whatever that matters. I think the experience and gravity a 45 year old brings vs a 25 year old is incredibly valuable. That said, at this point in life I am no longer willing to give all my life to work. I have a family. I realize how previously brief life is (ah mid age) and want to savor enjoying it. I work hard but with definite limits. A 25 year old has no such burdens. So there is a balance.
    - m0zg 7y ago
      Yes, I know many a 25 year old who work really, really hard on things that either could be done much more simply or don't need to be done at all. They just don't know it.
    - neilv 7y ago
areoform 7y ago
We should be honest about ageism and what it really is, a yearning for the innocent and spirited world of youth. We look at the young as a foreign land, one that we have visited and (often) fondly remember. We believe that their foreignness makes them immune to our conventions and imbues them with new perspective. We chase after what we have come to see as exotic and tell ourselves that the young will do the impossible simply because they aren’t familiar enough with the customs of our land to know that it isn’t possible. And sometimes that’s true. Except when it’s not. But, for the true believers, the stories of the many don’t get in the way of the exotic few. It reminds me of the trope, Born Sexy Yesterday, where a (typically male) protagonist encounters an alien or displaced being who is highly attractive and yet extremely naive (i.e. born yesterday). The protagonist is uplifted by them and they serve as their introduction to the world. More often than not, it goes even further. The protagonist is the character’s world. Their reference point for the rest of humanity and they view the mundane protagonist as profound as they don’t know any better, transforming them both in the process. I believe youth plays the same role. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s what we want from the young. To be uplifted, seen as profound and transformed. We want to shape the young so that we can be shaped by them in turn. Someone old can see through this desire even if they see us profound. They have bitten the forbidden fruit of experience and simply know too much to be awed by our mundane inanities. And so we shun them. Because they have better boundaries and are mirrors that remind us of just how mortal we are. If the young are foreign strangers visiting our strange land, the old are our neighbors whom we’ve come to despise. We try to get away from them even though we are them. We all grow old. And yet we all despise ourselves for doing it. Humans are a schizophrenic lot.
- auggierose 7y ago
  Is that from Game of Thrones, Season 8, Episode 1?
  - nwatson 7y ago
    Sounds more like The Fifth Element. (EDIT: BTW, that was a great categorization of a movie sub-genre!)
ttul 7y ago
This article does not surprise me. Survivorship bias feeds the narrative that all breakaway successful companies are founded by 19-year-olds from Harvard - and it's true that many have been. But the truth is young people found a lot of horrible companies and a great deal of capital goes down the toilet in the process. My own startup experience over 20 years has taught me that there is a great deal of life and business wisdom to be gained between age 20 and 40. I'm less likely to make a wild-ass bet - one that is highly likely to fail, but might just succeed wildly - and more likely to make a very calculated bet that has a higher likelihood of pretty decent success. And because I'm already "old", the clock is ticking, so I'm going to be more serious about getting results. When I was young, I didn't care whether my business succeeded, because I had all the time in the world. Now, it matters.
jaden 7y ago
> successfully “exited” the market, either by getting acquired by another company or going public in an IPO > ...twice as likely to have a one-in-1,000 fastest-growing company Is fastest-growing or an IPO necessarily a good measure of success for a startup? For one, it excludes successful lifestyle businesses.
- jrimbault 7y ago
  Actually defining what "success" is should be the first step... What is "sucess" in the general sense ? I'm quite happy and successful, but I'm not an entrepreneur, nor do I want my revenues to rise exponentially. I'm sure for other people "success" is measured in the amount of money they get, but that seems really reductive.
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    Yes, this is exactly why I get a little nervous when the topic of "success" comes about. More often than not, "success" is used as a synonym for "wealth". Particularly in a study, where you really want to have something objectively measurable. Personally, I define "success" as "achieving your goals". For some, that may be to maximize wealth. For others, it may be to live a certain sort of life, or to have personal satisfaction, and so forth. There are probably as many definitions of "success" as there are people.
- aaavl2821 7y ago
  The main measure used in the article to define success is growth in employment. They say they also look at sales growth and exits but i dont see the data on this in the paper. I think there are major issues with relying on jobs growth as a success metric for a startup and thus think that while this is a nice addition to the literature on age and startup success it is far from "definitive" as it is described in the tagline on the summary article
aaavl2821 7y ago
I'd be careful drawing conclusions about tech entrepreneurship from this study. If you look at the actual paper (I somehow couldnt find a link to the paper in the summary article... its here [0]), the authors used growth in jobs as their metric for success. Employment growth is a very imperfect surrogate for startup success. The paper says they also looked at sales growth and IPO / M&A exits, but they dont show this data. Not sure how theyd get sales growth data for all these companies in the first place. I wonder why they didnt publish the analysis of age and sales growth, IPO and M&A exits? Maybe i missed it? Using employment growth as the success metric is biased towards high growth labor-intensive companies (like specialty manufacturing firms), and against high growth labor efficient companies (like tech and biotech). The summary article linked here is pretty intellectually dishonest imo, the tagline being "a definitive new study dispels the myth of the silicon valley wunderkind". If they published data on age and sales growth, exit, or returns, maybe they could say this is "definitive". I dont see how a study measuring startup success based on job growth can be definitive. There are other studies showing young founders do better, though they have their limitations as well. The truth is probably that you can succeed as a founder at any age I started looking at this study bc I was trying to find data on age bias in biotech, which is the opposite of in tech. In biotech startups, the conventional wisdom is that only experienced founders can succeed. But the data does not support that. More $10B+ biotech companies have been started by under 40 CEOs than over 40 CEOs, but most CEOs who get funded today are over 40 (or even 50). This doesnt mean young foudners are better in biotech, just that a bias towards "experience" is not supported by data [1] [0] https://www.ipr.northwestern.edu/publications/docs/workingpapers/2018/wp-18-11.pdf https://www.ipr.northwestern.edu/publications/docs/workingpa... [1] https://www.baybridgebio.com/blog/young_founders_1.html https://www.baybridgebio.com/blog/young_founders_1.html
neilv 7y ago
When PG was first promoting having very young people do startups, IIRC, the rationale included things like fewer obligations, more time to spend grinding crazy long hours, willingness to live&work crammed into an apartment with a few other people working crazy long hours. Maybe it also included the perceived possible narrow opportunity window for early dotcom funding, during the initial gold rush (which would be part of the rationale for PG once encouraging interrupting college to do a startup). You had to be there to appreciate how much of a race it was -- anyone who could type the most rudimentary HTML could get funded or get hired by a startup. There was much more "visionary" posturing than technical competence, and a lot of displays of funding wealth (e.g., lavish offices and launch parties). You didn't need to be good; you needed to grind hours, and/or strut confidently. Teens/20yos were perfect for both. PG's version was more merit-oriented and modest, with no Herman Miller furniture, but still with emphasis on grinding huge hours. Later, other people played up myths about the youngest having all the ideas and insight and vision and brains. IME, these people were usually trying to sell something, or to get cheap labor. It was often not that different from a TV commercial for a canned beverage, coddling and suggesting an attractive lifestyle and identity, to get a targeted demographic to buy what you're selling. And of course we want to believe we're special, we're getting external validation, and we don't know what we don't yet know, so this meme has traction.
- gdilla 7y ago
  The story we hear the most is of young CEOs. We don't hear about the 100x failures of those who try the same. PG supports youth doing it because cost of family/personal obligation is lower, which is true, but at the same time, at the time he was talking about low capital software startups, the kind he was interested in when YC started. But the flip side of the coin, is having 20 years of experience and domain knowledge, and a rolodex of potential customers (and relationships) to milk with an idea you know will solve a need. It could be a capital intensive endevor, and not a unicorn, but still good. We don't hear a lot about those as celebrated stories in the media.
  - neilv 7y ago
    When learning from a successful young CEO icon, we need a healthy balance of humility and skepticism, so that we benefit from the good stuff (e.g., sincere bits they learned by virtue of their unusual experiences and access), but so that we aren't taking investment advice from a lottery winner. Nor do we want to be buying nutritional supplements ("vision", "smarts") pitched by a fitness influencer who actually used steroids ("family money/connections", "terrific luck", "backstabbing").
Dowwie 7y ago
Link to the study: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3158929 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3158929
JohnFen 7y ago
A lot of this depends on how you define "success". By my own definition, my first successful venture happened when I was 25 years old, but it was a rather painful process largely due to my inexperience in business specifically and my inexperience in life generally. I've had a couple of successful ventures since then, in my 30s and 40s, and each time it has been easier because I've learned a lot, in both business and life, since then.
3xblah 7y ago
"The researchers find that, contrary to popular thinking, the best entrepreneurs tend to be middle-aged. Among the very fastest-growing new tech companies, the average founder was 45 at the time of founding. Furthermore, a given 50-year-old entrepreneur is nearly twice as likely to have a runaway success as a 30-year-old." If you are a VC who would you rather be negotiating with? Why?
cerealbad 7y ago
explanations for success are post-hoc and wrong. otherwise we would build it into machines and scale.
wildermuthn 7y ago
Age is just a number that happens to correlate with obligations, health, energy, ambition, etc. But whether these are weak or strong correlations, what truly matters isn’t a number, but what kind of person you are. As far as I know, YC doesn’t see any significant correlation between age and success, most likely because their criteria for acceptance focuses on real character traits rather than proxies like age. Using age to judge anyone — whether young or old — is just lazy thinking. Having said that, at the extremes of age, it makes sense to be lazy in a virtuous way. A four-year-old would make a poor CEO. So would a 110-year-old. There is a spectrum where you can make assumptions based on age. Where does one draw the line in making assumptions based on age? 15? 20? 60? 80? YC has already identified for us what matters when it comes to startup success: a team of insanely determined founders who have the right mix of intelligence and boldness. Age, given those qualities, is irrelevant.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  > what truly matters isn’t a number, but what kind of person you are. I'm actually not entirely sure what you mean by this, so my comment here may be agreeing with you. I don't think that "age is just a number". Age inevitably brings experience. The older you are, the more situations you have encountered and the more experience you have gained. I think discounting that is a mistake. However, it's not like there's a linear or directly comparable relationship here. People are different. One 50 year old can have a very different amount of experience (or, more accurately, has learned more from their experience) than another, and I have met 20-somethings that have learned more from life than most middle-aged people. That said, if you look at a person in their 20s and compare with the same person in their 50s, the 50-year-old version is most likely wiser and more knowledgeable than the 20-year-old version.
dang 7y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17405997 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17405997

100 points by spking 7y ago

As someone who is nearing 40 and worked in many different areas of software (including at 3 startups), with about 10 failed "micro startups" (i.e. hobby projects) under my belt, I can confidently say that I still have not nearly figured everything out. But at least I am not quite as dumb as I once was. :)

beat 7y ago
After mastering a few skills, I can tell when I've mastered something when I hit that point where I feel like the more I learn, the less I know. There's a Zen saying for that (I know via Shunryo Suzuki)... Before you start zen, mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers. But once you learn some zen, mountains are no longer mountains, and rivers are no longer rivers. When you master zen, mountains are just mountains and rivers are just rivers again.
- deconstructive 7y ago
  This is the process of deconstruction taking place. It's the act of internalizing the awareness of all of the moving parts of a dynamic, interactive process in motion. To understand with intuition, just as much as with observation, equalizing the cognitive substance of each with the other. A sometimes often related example is that of a bicycle. To look at a bicycle as a complete object, its integrity as a whole, represents a conceptual recognition of the noun it is known by. It is a mineral, a thing, a bicycle. To disassemble the bicycle to pieces, strewn across the concrete floor of a garage, is to render it unto its parts, and destroys the recognition of the original object. To scoop up all of those parts in a bag or bin, is to obscure the bicycle as we once knew it. The process of disassembly is a complex task, and so too, the act of reassembly. But to reassemble the bicycle, is to understand it more completely. To be able to repair one bike (or mountain, or river), or duplicate parts and fabricate many bicycles (mountain ranges, tributaries), from scratch, represents a greater power and command of the recognizable object. So now we have passed through all three stations. Discovery (learning to recognize a distinct phenomenon), disassembly (rendering the recognizable complex whole as the sum of its atomic pieces by destroying its recognizability), mastery (the ability to utilize an inventory of elements as a part listing, and create distinct recognizable things from them).
- DougWebb 7y ago
  There are no mountains or rivers. There are only valleys. Some are bigger.

cheez 7y ago

Not clear to me if they're 45 when it's founded or when it becomes successful. Sounds like it's the latter.

ajiang 7y ago
I think the former: "Among the very fastest-growing new tech companies, the average founder was 45 at the time of founding."
jgrahamc 7y ago
Among the very fastest-growing new tech companies, the average founder was 45 at the time of founding. It says "at the time of founding"
- cheez 7y ago
  I will chalk it up to my allergies.

lwb 7y ago

At least part of this is due to just simple statistics, right? A 40 year old has likely started more companies than a 25 year old, because they've had more time. I'd like to see more data comparing the success of a startup with the Nth attempt that it represents for an entrepreneur. For example, is it better for someone to try to start a bunch of little companies and hope one takes off, or to work on one company for a long time? Etc.

ryanmarsh 7y ago
I’m not wildly successful however I have no idea how I could have had success before 40. I still have much to learn.
rossenberg79 7y ago
No, it isn’t. And I’ve said this before, a 45 year old has a grip on life that an early 20 something can’t even conceive of, especially if they’ve just lived a fairly easy life sailing through school and college thus far. A 45 year old has a better idea of how life can be improved in ways that matter, and has the connections and skills to capitalize on it. Sorry kids, the big dogs will eat your lunch.
- jshaqaw 7y ago
  I’m 43 for whatever that matters. I think the experience and gravity a 45 year old brings vs a 25 year old is incredibly valuable. That said, at this point in life I am no longer willing to give all my life to work. I have a family. I realize how previously brief life is (ah mid age) and want to savor enjoying it. I work hard but with definite limits. A 25 year old has no such burdens. So there is a balance.
  - m0zg 7y ago
    Yes, I know many a 25 year old who work really, really hard on things that either could be done much more simply or don't need to be done at all. They just don't know it.
  - neilv 7y ago

areoform 7y ago

We should be honest about ageism and what it really is, a yearning for the innocent and spirited world of youth. We look at the young as a foreign land, one that we have visited and (often) fondly remember. We believe that their foreignness makes them immune to our conventions and imbues them with new perspective. We chase after what we have come to see as exotic and tell ourselves that the young will do the impossible simply because they aren’t familiar enough with the customs of our land to know that it isn’t possible. And sometimes that’s true. Except when it’s not. But, for the true believers, the stories of the many don’t get in the way of the exotic few. It reminds me of the trope, Born Sexy Yesterday, where a (typically male) protagonist encounters an alien or displaced being who is highly attractive and yet extremely naive (i.e. born yesterday). The protagonist is uplifted by them and they serve as their introduction to the world. More often than not, it goes even further. The protagonist is the character’s world. Their reference point for the rest of humanity and they view the mundane protagonist as profound as they don’t know any better, transforming them both in the process. I believe youth plays the same role. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s what we want from the young. To be uplifted, seen as profound and transformed. We want to shape the young so that we can be shaped by them in turn. Someone old can see through this desire even if they see us profound. They have bitten the forbidden fruit of experience and simply know too much to be awed by our mundane inanities. And so we shun them. Because they have better boundaries and are mirrors that remind us of just how mortal we are. If the young are foreign strangers visiting our strange land, the old are our neighbors whom we’ve come to despise. We try to get away from them even though we are them. We all grow old. And yet we all despise ourselves for doing it. Humans are a schizophrenic lot.

auggierose 7y ago
Is that from Game of Thrones, Season 8, Episode 1?
- nwatson 7y ago
  Sounds more like The Fifth Element. (EDIT: BTW, that was a great categorization of a movie sub-genre!)

ttul 7y ago

This article does not surprise me. Survivorship bias feeds the narrative that all breakaway successful companies are founded by 19-year-olds from Harvard - and it's true that many have been. But the truth is young people found a lot of horrible companies and a great deal of capital goes down the toilet in the process. My own startup experience over 20 years has taught me that there is a great deal of life and business wisdom to be gained between age 20 and 40. I'm less likely to make a wild-ass bet - one that is highly likely to fail, but might just succeed wildly - and more likely to make a very calculated bet that has a higher likelihood of pretty decent success. And because I'm already "old", the clock is ticking, so I'm going to be more serious about getting results. When I was young, I didn't care whether my business succeeded, because I had all the time in the world. Now, it matters.

jaden 7y ago

> successfully “exited” the market, either by getting acquired by another company or going public in an IPO > ...twice as likely to have a one-in-1,000 fastest-growing company Is fastest-growing or an IPO necessarily a good measure of success for a startup? For one, it excludes successful lifestyle businesses.

jrimbault 7y ago
Actually defining what "success" is should be the first step... What is "sucess" in the general sense ? I'm quite happy and successful, but I'm not an entrepreneur, nor do I want my revenues to rise exponentially. I'm sure for other people "success" is measured in the amount of money they get, but that seems really reductive.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  Yes, this is exactly why I get a little nervous when the topic of "success" comes about. More often than not, "success" is used as a synonym for "wealth". Particularly in a study, where you really want to have something objectively measurable. Personally, I define "success" as "achieving your goals". For some, that may be to maximize wealth. For others, it may be to live a certain sort of life, or to have personal satisfaction, and so forth. There are probably as many definitions of "success" as there are people.
aaavl2821 7y ago
The main measure used in the article to define success is growth in employment. They say they also look at sales growth and exits but i dont see the data on this in the paper. I think there are major issues with relying on jobs growth as a success metric for a startup and thus think that while this is a nice addition to the literature on age and startup success it is far from "definitive" as it is described in the tagline on the summary article

aaavl2821 7y ago

I'd be careful drawing conclusions about tech entrepreneurship from this study. If you look at the actual paper (I somehow couldnt find a link to the paper in the summary article... its here [0]), the authors used growth in jobs as their metric for success. Employment growth is a very imperfect surrogate for startup success. The paper says they also looked at sales growth and IPO / M&A exits, but they dont show this data. Not sure how theyd get sales growth data for all these companies in the first place. I wonder why they didnt publish the analysis of age and sales growth, IPO and M&A exits? Maybe i missed it? Using employment growth as the success metric is biased towards high growth labor-intensive companies (like specialty manufacturing firms), and against high growth labor efficient companies (like tech and biotech). The summary article linked here is pretty intellectually dishonest imo, the tagline being "a definitive new study dispels the myth of the silicon valley wunderkind". If they published data on age and sales growth, exit, or returns, maybe they could say this is "definitive". I dont see how a study measuring startup success based on job growth can be definitive. There are other studies showing young founders do better, though they have their limitations as well. The truth is probably that you can succeed as a founder at any age I started looking at this study bc I was trying to find data on age bias in biotech, which is the opposite of in tech. In biotech startups, the conventional wisdom is that only experienced founders can succeed. But the data does not support that. More $10B+ biotech companies have been started by under 40 CEOs than over 40 CEOs, but most CEOs who get funded today are over 40 (or even 50). This doesnt mean young foudners are better in biotech, just that a bias towards "experience" is not supported by data [1] [0] https://www.ipr.northwestern.edu/publications/docs/workingpapers/2018/wp-18-11.pdf https://www.ipr.northwestern.edu/publications/docs/workingpa... [1] https://www.baybridgebio.com/blog/young_founders_1.html https://www.baybridgebio.com/blog/young_founders_1.html

neilv 7y ago

When PG was first promoting having very young people do startups, IIRC, the rationale included things like fewer obligations, more time to spend grinding crazy long hours, willingness to live&work crammed into an apartment with a few other people working crazy long hours. Maybe it also included the perceived possible narrow opportunity window for early dotcom funding, during the initial gold rush (which would be part of the rationale for PG once encouraging interrupting college to do a startup). You had to be there to appreciate how much of a race it was -- anyone who could type the most rudimentary HTML could get funded or get hired by a startup. There was much more "visionary" posturing than technical competence, and a lot of displays of funding wealth (e.g., lavish offices and launch parties). You didn't need to be good; you needed to grind hours, and/or strut confidently. Teens/20yos were perfect for both. PG's version was more merit-oriented and modest, with no Herman Miller furniture, but still with emphasis on grinding huge hours. Later, other people played up myths about the youngest having all the ideas and insight and vision and brains. IME, these people were usually trying to sell something, or to get cheap labor. It was often not that different from a TV commercial for a canned beverage, coddling and suggesting an attractive lifestyle and identity, to get a targeted demographic to buy what you're selling. And of course we want to believe we're special, we're getting external validation, and we don't know what we don't yet know, so this meme has traction.

gdilla 7y ago
The story we hear the most is of young CEOs. We don't hear about the 100x failures of those who try the same. PG supports youth doing it because cost of family/personal obligation is lower, which is true, but at the same time, at the time he was talking about low capital software startups, the kind he was interested in when YC started. But the flip side of the coin, is having 20 years of experience and domain knowledge, and a rolodex of potential customers (and relationships) to milk with an idea you know will solve a need. It could be a capital intensive endevor, and not a unicorn, but still good. We don't hear a lot about those as celebrated stories in the media.
- neilv 7y ago
  When learning from a successful young CEO icon, we need a healthy balance of humility and skepticism, so that we benefit from the good stuff (e.g., sincere bits they learned by virtue of their unusual experiences and access), but so that we aren't taking investment advice from a lottery winner. Nor do we want to be buying nutritional supplements ("vision", "smarts") pitched by a fitness influencer who actually used steroids ("family money/connections", "terrific luck", "backstabbing").

Dowwie 7y ago

Link to the study: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3158929 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3158929

JohnFen 7y ago

A lot of this depends on how you define "success". By my own definition, my first successful venture happened when I was 25 years old, but it was a rather painful process largely due to my inexperience in business specifically and my inexperience in life generally. I've had a couple of successful ventures since then, in my 30s and 40s, and each time it has been easier because I've learned a lot, in both business and life, since then.

3xblah 7y ago

"The researchers find that, contrary to popular thinking, the best entrepreneurs tend to be middle-aged. Among the very fastest-growing new tech companies, the average founder was 45 at the time of founding. Furthermore, a given 50-year-old entrepreneur is nearly twice as likely to have a runaway success as a 30-year-old." If you are a VC who would you rather be negotiating with? Why?

cerealbad 7y ago

explanations for success are post-hoc and wrong. otherwise we would build it into machines and scale.

wildermuthn 7y ago

Age is just a number that happens to correlate with obligations, health, energy, ambition, etc. But whether these are weak or strong correlations, what truly matters isn’t a number, but what kind of person you are. As far as I know, YC doesn’t see any significant correlation between age and success, most likely because their criteria for acceptance focuses on real character traits rather than proxies like age. Using age to judge anyone — whether young or old — is just lazy thinking. Having said that, at the extremes of age, it makes sense to be lazy in a virtuous way. A four-year-old would make a poor CEO. So would a 110-year-old. There is a spectrum where you can make assumptions based on age. Where does one draw the line in making assumptions based on age? 15? 20? 60? 80? YC has already identified for us what matters when it comes to startup success: a team of insanely determined founders who have the right mix of intelligence and boldness. Age, given those qualities, is irrelevant.

JohnFen 7y ago
> what truly matters isn’t a number, but what kind of person you are. I'm actually not entirely sure what you mean by this, so my comment here may be agreeing with you. I don't think that "age is just a number". Age inevitably brings experience. The older you are, the more situations you have encountered and the more experience you have gained. I think discounting that is a mistake. However, it's not like there's a linear or directly comparable relationship here. People are different. One 50 year old can have a very different amount of experience (or, more accurately, has learned more from their experience) than another, and I have met 20-somethings that have learned more from life than most middle-aged people. That said, if you look at a person in their 20s and compare with the same person in their 50s, the 50-year-old version is most likely wiser and more knowledgeable than the 20-year-old version.

dang 7y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17405997 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17405997