Older Entrepreneurs Do It Better

This just in: People who have some experience doing things in general tend to be better at doing those things.

In my experience of working at startups they are generally too focused on "disruption" and tend to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Sometimes existing industries do things for valid reasons that you just don't understand yet and you need to in order to change them. Instead the community looks up to those fortunate (often just lucky) enough to be successful and tries to derive a signal about why they succeeded in the first place that doesn't really exist.

Experience in business or an industry gives you understanding of things it might take years to learn and helps you avoid making simple mistakes that can ruin your company.

Older entrepreneurs are much less willing to sacrifice their health for the change of making someone else rich. They’re generally harder to push around and intimidate too, making them much less attractive targets for investment.

Overall, I agree with the premise (seeing all the silly mistakes the younger folks - including myself earlier in life - do), but it also differs by area.

"Hip" stuff, B2C, is an area where the younger folks may fare better because they know the segment of the market which is willing to spend more (namely, other younger folks).

On the other hand, B2B requires an extensive network of connections, knowing the corporate bureaucracy, and a lot of patience. It's very unlikely under-30s will have advantage here.

All in all, us old farts are less likely to play by the VCs' destructive narrative of "all or nothing" and aim at the more realistic "much or something". Seriously aiming to be a Facebook or a Google is like including a lottery win in your budget.

And, of course, bullshit radars honed by experience never get obsolete.

I believe this is true for businesses in general, but that doesn't mean it's true for startups. Startups are a tiny proportion of businesses, and things work very differently in that world.

Exactly how and why they work differently is a fascinating (and very useful) topic. And yet instead of exploring that interesting topic, reporter after reporter goes for the easy debunk-the-young-hotshot-myth article, using an argument based on conflating startups with businesses in general.

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This is just semantic confusion. A local restaurant is not a highly scaleable technology company. They're both "new businesses" but radically different in every other way. It's an apples and oranges comparison.

One good definition of a Silicon Valley "startup" is Paul Graham's:

"A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to work on technology, or take venture funding, or have some sort of "exit." The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth."

http://paulgraham.com/growth.html