People 55 and Older Start Own Businesses in Growing Numbers

Sadly, none will be featured on Techcrunch in articles that basically say 16 year old makes website that would be nothing special except it was made by a 16 year old

Nice article. Older people (I speak from experience since I am in my 50s) have some real advantages in starting businesses: likely to already have some degree of economic independence, have many business and social contacts, usually children are independent so little financial responsibility for others, and possibly have more empathy with potential customers.

Much of this is due to the fact that many companies are now hiring contractors instead of full-time employees.

In many cases, the contractors were previously full-timers at the same company and either started their own firm in order to bill their time or banded together in order to bid on work.

Laid-off workers, especially those who knew each other professionally, are discovering it's better to collaborate than to compete for the same job and it's no accident they have leveraged Linked-In and Skype.

I don't believe this is a short-term phenomenon but a long-term paradigm shift. And there's a valuable lesson in this for the current 16-35 year-olds reading HN.

Today's 35-65 year-olds are scrambling to raise kids, pay mortgages, taxes, healthcare, college tuitions, etc., all the while working to rebuild what's left of their retirement accounts.

There's an enormous amount of angst and creative energy going into this right now of which entrepreneurship is playing a part. A means to the end if you will.

A true worldwide economic recovery (the movement of goods and services) will be born of individual initiative based upon need and self-interest. Age is irrelevant.

My father spent about 40 years managing a lab in a University and as soon as he was retired participated in starting a business doing the exact same thing. For one thing, the layers of red tape disappeared completely and instead of wrestling with people who didn't care about what he did he was out actually doing science. For another, he certainly wasn't ready to just hang around the house pruning the bushes for the next 30 years.

I founded my company together with my dad. He is almost 60, but he's having tons of fun working from home doing QA for the latest web technologies, as opposed to his last job, where he was QA'ing 30 year old COBOL bank applications.

My parents are in their 70s and 80s.

One of the things I've noticed is that a lot of older people get together in large retirement communities, especially in Florida. People come and stay mostly for the winter months.

While they're there, there are all sorts of activities: woodworking, singing, crafts, etc. It's the hobbies that many of them have had in their life, and now they have time to fully explore them in a cooperative setting with lots of other people who are also interested in their hobby.

It doesn't take a genius to recognize that in another 20 years or so, a typical "hobby" is going to be web programming, application creation, or online business.

It's not going to happen soon, but at some point 20-40 years out we're going to see an explosion of highly-educated older people with lots of time on their hands and lots of life experience competing with the 20-something startups. That should be very interesting to watch.