Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship
nber.org
nber.org
I'm also financially stable and have deep savings, so I'm able to take time off to pursue ideas more reliably.
After a few more years, particularly as I gain leadership experience, I expect to be even more effective.
There's literally no down-side to getting older in terms of my ability to bootstrap a successful company.
If you start a family you are likely to become more risk adverse, this would increase again as you approach retirement.
I can dream.
One question - have you only looked at "exponential ideas"? Maybe there's a small but reasonably profitable endeavour out there - a lifestyle business?
I know a startup called Wagepoint that started with a co-founders from vastly different age groups.
I want nothing more than to quit and strike out on my own, but financial obligations (kids, mortgage, etc.) are holding me back. My wife doesn't understand why I make a comfortable six-figure salary but am so discontented with my career. Maybe I feel like I'm running out of time?
I don't really get this. I just recently bought a house. Paying down my mortgage is just a bit more expensive than renting my apartment was. Leases are a year long, I think I could sell my house within that period of time, and we wouldn't need to ask our landlord's permission. Why is a mortgage strictly worse for living off of savings?
> Paying down my mortgage is just a bit more expensive than renting my apartment was.
That might depend on where you are and other factors.
> Why is a mortgage strictly worse for living off of savings?
Maybe it's not and people are just hedging their bets?
It’s not strictly worse but I assume it feels like a bigger commitment with more disastrous consequences should anything go wrong?
Foreclose on your house, your biggest asset is gone. That thing you worked for for so long.
Get kicked out of rented place. Eh, wasn’t yours anyway. Find smaller one or in a worse location, which you can afford.
Either way in my case buying is strictly worse because I can’t afford the down payment so there’s really just one option. Well, one comfortable option. I could always go homeless I guess. Would save me a lot per month ...
Unless you already have a substantial nest egg or took out an expensive mortgage, your life savings were substantially reduced by the down payment. In addition to a more expensive monthly payment there are property taxes, maintenance costs ($ and time), HOA fees, and other burdens depending on your region and property type.
Also, it seems that in the US, student loans are a pretty heavy burden to take on.
But as college tuition skyrockets (mine is $70k/year, and increasing, and I have a brother at an equivalently priced institution too!), that wont cut it. The rest must either come from personal/family finances, be taken out from the federal government in solely the parent’s name (Federal Direct Plus Parent Loan, with a higher interest rate than direct student loans) or, if that’s not an option, a private lender (usually with an even higher rate).
With circumstances like they are and pitiful stopgaps like these, it’s no wonder my parents waited so long to have children so that they could afford to send them to school. Unfortunately, that’s not an option for most families. The student loan crisis in America really is terrifying.
More generally, perhaps we'll finally see people question if college offers the best return on an investment of 100 grand+ and 4+ years of life.
That is, a system that perpetrates upon people who have not gained the mental tools necessary to understand what they're agreeing to as a result of the US' staggeringly ineffective secondary schools, but who _have_ been convinced that not attending college is a guaranteed marker of social inadequacy by a marketing engine that pushes the message "You're a worthless person if you don't go to college" in to culture at every possible juncture?
http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/17/1-the-american-fam...
This was brilliantly expressed in this blog post [1]. Both the young and the old, stand at a disadvantage. Experienced folks have a better idea about worthy problems, but they're shackled with liabilities and lack of time commitment. Young people have a lot more freedom, but they don't have a good idea about the problems that are worth it.
Young people tend to be more free of external responsibilities: marriage, children, job contracts, consumer debt, professional associations, expensive educational entanglements, and so forth. This makes young people more available to take giant risks with less apprehension (they have less to lose).
There is also giant marketing buzz when an uneducated 18 year old female creates something vaguely interesting, but nobody cares when a 45 year old man creates something absolutely revolutionary until they old it in their hands. Case in point: Elizabeth Holmes.
Is this a contradiction? How can there be risk if there's nothing to lose?
I feel entrepreneurship is a mentality. Entrepreneurs will always take risk where they see opportunity. The risk just seems to become less foolhardy as they get older. No stats on this just an observation.
The former sells more clicks and hence advertising dollars - it conjures the notion that anyone can do it. The latter suggests at least a decade of work experience, probably an education and some money.
It's clear which story is going to end up trending on the news and the public's consciousness.
*Translates to: "someone made a lot of money + no effort required!"
> 'middle aged, well educated person with good savings makes billions'.
Do we know if anyone has A/B test these two headlines?
Finding fault with middle-aged-well-educated-person-with-good-savings*, who became a billionaire in under 10 years, shouldn't be too hard for the media, and therefore plenty of things to whip up a scandal about.
The fact is, technology doesn't really matter that much to the success of a business. Business sense, ability to spot what's next, and a fair bit of risk taking attitude are what matters. Older engineers don't fare better than younger engineers in starting a business not because they're worse at engineering, but that after a certain point engineering skills simply don't matter.
SAP, Adobe, IBM, all have terrible engineering culture, but rake in money. Facebook started with janky PHP. There are only rare instances where the technology itself was the differentiator in business. Maybe if you're working on advanced AI or weapon design or something
Advanced AI usually depends on finding a business model, which requires experience. And places like Deep Mind were started by researchers who had been at it a few decades.
War was always the thing that connected humanity to physical reality - 2+2 may very well be 10000 on the procurement document, but it'd better equal 4 when you're trying to aim your cannons at the invading forces. With no war, effectiveness (and thus good engineering) is no longer a strong criterion for success of a weapon design.
https://www.iposcoop.com/last-100-ipos/
Only 19 of the 100 most recent IPOs are classified as "technology" companies. The rest are in categories like "health care" and "oil and gas."
There are a lot of high-growth companies that are not startups in the classic sense of starting from nothing and winning by building a better mousetrap. E.g. pharmaceutical companies commercializing research, where the founder is a PI and probably a tenured professor who's at least 40.
B2C have smaller chance of success, but the success is bigger. Ideal B2C founder is young. Most of enormous tech successes (e.g. Facebook, Google) are B2C companies founded by founders before 30.
B2B have higher chance of success, but the success is smaller. Ideal B2B founder is middle-aged. There are more succesfull B2B startups than B2C starups, what increases the total mean.
It makes sense to me that older (successful) founders likely leverage their own experience and network to a greater extent, but this isn't necessarily what seed stage investors are looking for. I think investors are more in the game of betting on people/teams, injecting their own experience and network as leverage. Older founders have less need, therefore less leverage- and older founders without these support networks are poorly positioned anyway.
Theres a big difference between running a successful small business and architecting a tech startup.
Now that I'm in my mid-40s I'd be much more comfortable taking on the task. Wide life experience, learning to interact with and observe human tendencies, and learning to overcome internal and external obstacles seems like fertile ground for business success.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5536734
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=517039
PG's comment suggests that you shouldn't trust self-reported data on HN but it's interesting that polls taken in 2009 and 2013 are at least "eyeball correlated" (the top 5+ age brackets are in the same order). I have a few more thoughts that are probably more like wild guesses (since you can't assume an even distribution of start-up founders over that population) but my gut is telling me that if you're here you're more likely to be a founder than say Slashdot.
Since the last poll was so long ago, here's an updated one for 2018 with categories for founders versus non-founders in each age bracket:
Would be interesting to know how many of the successful older founders were unsuccessful younger founders previously.
EDIT: Page was 25 and Brin was 24: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Page
Microsoft, Google, and Facebook indeed were started by young founders. Twenty years later Google might be the only meaningful one standing. Time will tell.
It's been more than 20 years and Microsoft is still right there.
Trying to start a successful business is much easier when you know how to get stuff done, have access to people who can get stuff done in areas you can't, and have enough money to buy time, help and resources to get stuff done.
Young people typically are lacking in one or more of those areas but sometimes it works out.
Oh well. Already kind of knew I’m a failure.
https://readwrite.com/2013/09/27/jimmy-wales-to-silicon-vall...