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Comment by dchuk | Hacker News Reader

I've always believed that some of this "playing house" is fueled by the fact that a lot of startup founders are young and lack years of direct experience with the various problems industries face (I say this as a 28 year old).

Of course a bunch of twenty somethings gravitate repeatedly to social apps; one of the core focuses of their lives to that point, whether they know it or not, is to learn how to be a social creature.

As you get older and more experienced, you start to unearth the "real" problems in the world oftentimes in some niche you could have never predicted you'd be involved in your younger years.

I could be completely wrong, just something I've always pondered when seeing so many of these ridiculous startups that keep churning out of VC land.

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The problems faced by businesses aren't actually any more "real" than social apps, they're more differentiated. What tends to happen as you get older is you start digging deeper into specific fields. Instead of looking at everything from the glossy overview perspective, you end up looking at the details, and finding specific tasks that can be done more efficiently.

I suspect this is why younger entrepreneurs tend to build bigger companies, but have a lower chance of success. The size of an eventual company comes from the size of the market it's serving. Basic needs - food, socializing, sex, information, transportation - are shared by nearly everyone, and so the markets are huge. But everyone can see any problems that arise in those areas, and so the competition to win the market is intense.

Building something like software for petroleum geologists working in undersea basins is a much tinier market, but many fewer people have the requisite domain knowledge to even understand what the problems are. So your chances of success are higher, but you aren't going to strike it big like Facebook.

Yep. I'm currently solving problems experienced by senior/lead engineers on large enterprise systems. I know about the problem because I've been that engineer, and know a whole bunch of my peers have the same problems. If you haven't been a lead engineer on a big system, it's not part of your experience - it's not something some fresh grad would work on, period.

Even better startups come from deep business knowledge. Not necessarily unicorns, but great lifestyle and niche businesses that make the founders rich. And really, do you need to buy two Lear jets?

Personality type might also be a factor. Not all young founders "play house".

There's always been silly startup ideas, but that's mainly because a lot of people are silly. The "playing house" thing seems to be a different phenomenon: over the last few years I came across people who were very smart, very driven, but completely focused on other people's opinions. They like winning contests and climbing ladders. Now that startups are becoming a respectable career path, more and more of these people are trying to start startups.

In the corporate world, you can always focus on the next presentation, the next interview, the next hurdle, and gradually iterate upwards. To build a company you need to think in terms of fundamentals, to think long-term, and to think independently: members of this type can be very good at producing polished and sensible-sounding market analyses but distinctly bad at those three.

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