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.
> 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.
This seems to be major selectivity bias. Let's call the development of the internet a major technological revolution. How many successful startups have emerged over the time since that revolution began? AOL was started in what, the early 90's? Yahoo was started in the mid-90's. Google was started in the late-90's. Facebook was started in 2004. Twitter, 2007? AirBnB, 2009? Stitch Fix, 2015 or so?
The idea that there's a small window to create a valuable startup right after a tech revolution has begun seems to make sense at first glance, but after more thorough investigation pretty much falls apart. There's never an easy time to create a company like that. It requires intelligence, connections, luck, execution, persistence, and a million other factors.
Put another way, if anyone could go back to 1995 knowing what they know now, I would bet that almost nobody could recreate Google or Facebook because of all the hidden difficulties of launching them that is glossed over now that we are 15+ years out from their launches.
Meanwhile, a guy like Bill Gates would probably have enormous success in pretty much any line of business (albeit not at the scale that Microsoft has had), but far greater than the average founder.
I think the fallacy isn't in the importance of timing, but the idea that there is one definite point in time in which a technology revolution happens, and if you happen to miss it, wups, sucks to be you.
Most technology revolutions have an "epicycles upon epicycles" structure, where the revolutionary technology spawns many other revolutionary technologies, sometimes decades later. The microcomputer, for example, was a revolutionary technology in 1975, and within a year had spawned two of the current tech giants (Microsoft and Apple). But whither Visicalc (1979) or Adobe (1982) in that narrative? It took time for the public to adopt microcomputers and the development platforms to stabilize before you could really build on them and create successful applications.
And then the microcomputer itself spawned the WWW, which actually was developed on workstations (1989) before microcomputers were powerful enough to run it, but gained adoption (Netscape, 1995) when consumer OSes started shipping a TCP/IP stack. A whole slate of massive web companies were spawned in 1995 (Netscape, Amazon, EBay, Yahoo, Google) because they were in a place to catch the technology revolution - but Facebook didn't get started until 2004 and AirBnB didn't take off until 2009, again because it took time for social practices to catch up to the technology.
The lesson for entrepreneurs, perhaps, is to pay careful attention to the world as it exists when you're founding your company, and look at where the trends are going. There are certainly worse times than others to found a company, and they're often towards the end of a technology wave: 2001/2002 was absolutely brutal to Web 1.0 companies, and I can't think of a single mobile startup founded in 2013-2015 that succeeded. But Ethereum, Consensys, Gemini, Brave, and other blockchain startups founded 2014-2015 are doing great; you just had to catch the next technology wave instead of the previous one.
Yes, as long as we don't mythologize Bill as having something innate only going for him. He has that but he also had Old Money and Family. Not trying to rain on anyone, just putting things in perspective. Bill's a super talented dude.
Bill Gates is indeed talented and hard working -- and generous in some ways. He also dumpster-dived to learn how to write good software from looking at other people's code without their explicit permission:
https://patch.com/california/losaltos/microsoft-co-founder-p...
"That phase of Allen's life involved taking the bus–sports coat, tie, leather briefcase and all—down to the offices of local computer gurus. "I would boost Bill into dumpsters and we'd get these coffee-stained texts (of computer code)" from behind the offices, grinned Allen.""
And MS-DOS is based in part on CP/M's design: "MS-DOS paternity suit settled: Computer pioneer Kildall vindicated, from beyond the grave" http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07/30/msdos_paternity_suit...
"Last week, a Judge dismissed a defamation law suit brought by Tim Paterson, who sold a computer operating system to Microsoft in 1980, against journalist and author Sir Harold Evans and his publisher Little Brown. The software became the basis of Microsoft's MS-DOS monopoly, and the basis of its dominance of the PC industry. But history has overlooked the contribution of Kildall, who Evans justifiably described as "the true founder of the personal computer revolution and the father of PC software" in a book published three years ago. In a chapter devoted to Kildall in Evans' They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine: Two Centuries of Innovators, Evans related how Paterson "[took] 'a ride on' Kildall's operating system, appropriated the 'look and feel' of [Kildall's] CP/M operating system, and copied much of his operating system interface from CP/M.""
If you want to get away with such things, it helps to start rich, of course: http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/ "William Henry Gates III made his best decision on October 28, 1955, the night he was born. He chose J.W. Maxwell as his great-grandfather. Maxwell founded Seattle's National City Bank in 1906. His son, James Willard Maxwell was also a banker and established a million-dollar trust fund for William (Bill) Henry Gates III. In some of the later lessons, you will be encouraged to take entrepreneurial risks. You may find it comforting to remember that at any time you can fall back on a trust fund worth many millions of 1998 dollars."
And to have free legal advice from his father (a lawyer).
Contrast all that with the hypocritical letter Bill Gates wrote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists "As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid Is this fair? One thing you don't do by stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. MITS doesn't make money selling software. The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free?"
So wrote the millionaire dumpster diver who could afford to write free software his whole life -- but chose instead to resell an OS that ripped-off someone else's hard work (one reason IBM may have wanted to keep an arms-length distance from MS-DOS instead of buying it outright). Those are hypocritical words to anyone who knows more of the story, but brilliant marketing -- including the rhetorical deception about how much time free software developers might have (such as ones at universities or government labs or students like, then, Linus Torvalds).
To be clear: just because Bill Gates did stuff like that in his teens and 20s does not mean he would do stuff like that now. He many have grown as a person in many ways over the past few decades (e.g. the Gates Foundation).
The comments from that post about his best decision being born to a wealthy family are so moronic.
Sure, the connections probably helped him stay out of trouble, go to better schools, etc. But to say that he owes his success to his wealth is absurd. I would argue that extreme wealth for most people would inhibit ambitions, not enhance them.
I would also argue that today most entrepreneurs wouldn't peruse publicly available Github repos to learn how to code, let alone dumpster dive for printouts of code to study. Some might view that as playing dirty, I would say it shows an incredible amount of ambition and drive. After all, he could have been getting drunk at Harvard and studying pre-law like everyone else was there in the 70's.
> AOL was started in what, the early 90's? Yahoo was started in the mid-90's. Google was started in the late-90's. Facebook was started in 2004. Twitter, 2007? AirBnB, 2009? Stitch Fix, 2015 or so?
Which one, Stitch Fix? Because I'd disagree that a publicly-traded company worth over $4 billion that was started by two people in an apartment doesn't belong in the conversation of successful startups that used the development of the internet as the basis for their success.
I don't see Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos as counterexamples to the article's thesis.
Jobs specifically was a much, much better CEO in middle age than he was in his youth. I think the same is true for Bezos. These folks were outliers when they were young, and they were even more extreme outliers after decades of experience.
Also, Gladwell's conclusion is only true for 2 of the 5 companies mentioned.
Maybe it's that it's more expensive to do a startup as an older person (your time is more valuable since you've built up more skills, for example), so as a result startups that are founded by older people are the ones with unusually strong premises or reasons for being. It could be a selection effect.
I think it's even simpler than this: most people learn their primary skillsets when they are young, and start businesses when they see large opportunities for themselves.
Because most people learn their skills when they are young (and most don't pick up new technological skillsets after ~30), the logical consequence is that the young tend to be more tech-savvy.
As industries mature, the barriers to entry (and domination) increase. Again, as a logical consequence, the youngest industries (which have the youngest practitioners due to the above) has provides best opportunities for entrepreneurs.
As a result, would-be entrepreneurs of Google/Facebook/Amazon stature are going to skew young. And seeing as starting a Google/Facebook/Amazon requires as much (if not more) luck as it does entrepreneurial talent, it only makes sense that the group who holds the most lottery tickets is going to hold the most winning lottery tickets.
Notice that the above logic requires zero assumptions about the relative skill of older or younger entrepreneurs. It's mostly just a numbers game.
My suspicion is that, "per capita", older entrepreneurs who have kept up with the most recent technological advances are more likely to be successful than their younger counterparts... but I'll be the first to admit I'm just idly speculating.
> and most don't pick up new technological skillsets after ~30
That is not my experience with people close to 40. There have been so many changes in the last 10 years, so if they hadn't kept up, they would be out of a job.
In 2008 the typical webapp where hosted on a physical server with server side generated content for desktop users (old versions of IE was in the majority).
There has been such a shift in the required skills and mindsets that many underestimate how different the daily work of a developer is now.
I'd tweak that heuristic to say that you'll be entered into a lottery regardless, and as such it makes sense to figure out which revolution you're in the midst of.
In the 1960's you probably could have flipped a coin between tech and advertising.
I would also add that it's not easy to tell which revolution you're in the midst of (if any).
VR technology was also thought to be a revolution a decade back and it hasn't really delivered. Or take crypto for instance. Is it a financial revolution that will build a mega-corp like Amazon or Google in the upcoming decades or will it slowly fade away.
When has there NOT been a technological revolution?
From the 1970s to today:
Microsoft OS, Apple Macintosh, Dell PCs (a star that faded but was once dominant), Amazon shopping, Google web search, Facebook social network, plus all their competitors dotted in between.
The Islamic Golden Age has a nice name, but represented little actual scientific or technological progress relative to a 600 year time period.
For comparison the European dark ages had quite a bit of progress in algebra, farming etc, but again covered several hundred years so progress was slow.
Just no, and I don't understand what's the point in posting uneducated personal opinions here and stating them as facts.
The "European dark ages" had literally zero progress in algebra, it was Boethius's De arithmetica in the Quadrivium for six centuries until Fibonacci's Liber abaci introduced the hindu-arabic numbers, which he learned in what today we call Algeria. And then algebraic methods (BTW "algorithm" comes from the name of al-Khwarizmi, "algebra" comes from "al-jabr") were unknown in Europe until Robert of Chester translated Khwarizmi's "Hisab Al-jabr w'al-muqabala" to Latin from the original in Arabic. There was zero progress in algebra in Europe for six centuries because they had no algebra. After that (there was a bit of a divide between abacists and algebrists), people doing algebra in Europe used that book until the printed arithmetics/algebras of the 16th century. All of them do mention their sources: you can download them in google books and look it up.
PS: Now they where not building the kind of great feats of engineering that gets you geometry progress, but their accounting systems got really complex.
You may want to go do some reading on these topics because pretty much everything you said is incorrect. There was almost no scientific or technological progress during Europe's Early Middle Ages (the so-called "Dark Ages").
I mostly agree on science, but technology is a different story. There where real advancements in farming technology resulting in higher crop yields for example. Warfare saw the most obvious improvements but it was not alone.
It's been a fairly consistent trend from ~1825 to present, with some hotter and cooler periods, as well as shifts in focus. 1875-1925 was especially potent.
Hewlett and Packard fit this pattern. Arguably Robert Noyce also.
You can't really do stats on outliers without binning stuff into a histogram. The 5 sigma entrepreneurs were probably young just out of survivor bias. The guy who cofounds Fairchild semiconductor and gives it his name (Sherman Fairchild) doesn't count as the world's greatest semiconductor entrepreneur because he died significantly before his cofounders did.
I also want to point out that the research paper doesn't DEFINE success as purely market cap/company valuation. (It makes for some nice opening drama/reader intrigue by the WSJ, though.)
Instead, SUCCESS is defined by the following:
"Our primary outcome measures include
(a) employment growth,
and (b) sales growth,
while we also consider (c) exit by acquisition and
(d) initial public offerings.
In the main text, we will emphasize employment growth, denoting a high-growth new venture as one that achieved a given threshold of employment 5 years after founding. We examine employment thresholds based on the Top 10, 5, 1, or 0.1 percentile."
A lot of it boils down to different priorities at different ages. If I had started Facebook at 19 and Yahoo offered me $1 billion for it, I probably would have made the same decision Zuckerberg did and say that running Facebook is more fun than having $1 billion. If I founded Facebook today, I’d take the first offer that put >$10 million and run off to play with my kids, and you’d never have heard of Facebook again.
For more, if want to do a startup with the advantage of some original research that is not yet a fad or hot topic, research you are likely the only who will do it, there's no rush, under 30 won't have the prerequisites. The problem to be solved doesn't have to be new, hot, or a fad but in whole or in significant part so far just solved poorly or not at all and where some good research can get the first good or a much better solution.
Such research is not the well worn path down Sand Hill Road to $1 T, but so far not even Sand Hill Road has such a well worn path. There are only a few $1 T cases or candidates so far; the patterns are not attractive; and from elsewhere, especially US national security, research has a much more promising track record. Uh, for Silicon Valley, how old was Shockley? How old was Tukey when he did the FFT? How old is Irving?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> "“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.
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."
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
I'd actually argue the opposite. If you sacrifice retirement savings in your 20s, it's going to hurt a lot more than sacrificing some contributions in your 40s.
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.
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.
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).
What is career stability now days anyways? Guys working at amazon right now are scared to death everyday they will get fired. I know people who lost jobs at almost every FANG company due to politics.
Not sure the difference anymore of working for the man and losing your job or doing a startup and failing.
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>?
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!
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.
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.
I might just know the wrong people and read the wrong press but I do not see proof of this anywhere. People generally copy and improve, including almost all success stories. Everything they did was done, they just did it better and/or bigger. There are surely counter examples, but, as far as I can find, those are a minority.
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?
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.
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.
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
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".
However my preference, and it seems the preference at the companies I've worked with, is to have a mix of folks have recently been exposed to something new (often recent graduates but not always) and people who have made lots of mistakes on other peoples' dimes (boy, have I made many over the decades).
In fact in my most recent startup we did a SWOT analysis just when we decided to get going and one of the strengths was "old farts" (5 of us ranging in ages 45-55). One of the benefits was all the mistakes we'd all made (and successes), one was that each of us had already worked with at least one of the others before, one was the depths of our networks, and because of the years of doing weird shit, we didn't have to try for "cultural fit" -- you couldn't guess from the outside that we might have (no stereotypical cultural fit; we include a hippy and a prepper/gun-nut, Americans and immigrants) it yet we all get along like a house afire.
And we'll be looking for the same in people we hire: do they know their shit and do they know what it means to screw up? Sometimes you find that in a recent graduate, but you're more likely to find it in someone who's been forcibly humbled.
Reminds me of some years ago, when I worked with a very talented and ambitious young tech manager, who was impatient and constantly frustrated by the hangups of corporate development. A couple of us old farts were talking about him one day, and one said that what he needs is a proper Death March.
There's something very sobering about being trapped onboard a sinking project, with everyone panicking and overworking, knowing that it's doomed and there's not a damned thing anyone can do about it. Teaches you that rushing doesn't help.
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.
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.
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.
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).
"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."
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.
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.
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.