The 20 year old entrepreneur is a lie | Hacker News Reader

The 20 year old entrepreneur is a lie

mitsloan.mit.edu

34 pointskNawade19 comments

Previous discussions about this study:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16794228 (241 points, 13 days ago)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16808737 (93 points, 12 days ago)

wonder if this warrants a [dupe] though. Different article, different thoughts, different authors.

It is easier to sell a story of a wunderkind than of some 42 year old person who has 20+ years of experience and (hard) work. It keeps alive the idea of "anything is possible". Of course that is true, but the probability of that to happen is far greater the older you get in general.

Factors like related experience, savings, peers etc all add into that.

Naturally, there are always exceptions to the rule. But this is confirmation bias, like when you drop out of college because some highly successful people also did.

What I want to say is this: if your first principles are right and you have the skills to build a product, you can do it, sure. But chances of you succeeding are probably higher when you are a bit more experienced.

For many decades society has told the smartest and most ambitious 18-25 year olds to go to college and climb the largely pre-defined ladder of success. What would happen if society told a bunch of them to pursue new innovations and ventures instead? I think we're headed in that direction and I'm excited to see how it unfolds.

I think you'd probably need to institute a programme to cope with quite a few 29 year olds with zero higher education and a failed startup behind them.

So?

Why do we feel the need to hard-code educational paths? If someone coming out of high school would like to pursue a startup idea now and attend university after that, I don't see a problem with that.

Saying that we need to "cope with quite a few 29 year olds with zero higher education" is like saying we need to cope with a ton of 18 year olds with no higher education. "Coping with people with no higher education" is precisely what higher education is for.

> Saying that we need to "cope with quite a few 29 year olds with zero higher education" is like saying we need to cope with a ton of 18 year olds with no higher education.

Is it really though? There's a whole system set up to service the former, not really the latter.

> Why do we feel the need to hard-code educational paths?

Because we have some idea of what the reliable paths to a stable career are. It's not a perfect understanding, but I'm confident that college is a better default choice than "found a startup."

> If someone coming out of high school would like to pursue a startup idea now and attend university after that, I don't see a problem with that.

Where are these high-school graduates going to get the money for a startup? "Found a startup" is an option chiefly for kids with connections to disposable wealth. Taking on real debt for such foolishness is an even worse idea than loading up on student loans to go to college.

Well, this is exactly what (a large part of) the society is telling them to do now. Look at popular culture, movies, the glorification of people like Zuckerberg. In certain circles you're almost pushed into creating a start-up. Many people are not careful enough and become victims of their own optimism (that, as they're being convinced by others, is indispensable if they want to be succesful.)

> What would happen if society told a bunch of them to pursue new innovations and ventures instead?

Probably something similar to if we told them to pursue gambling instead: a few will hit the jackpot, some more will do OK, and the vast majority will fail with little to show for it.

And I'm really skeptical that there are very many "new innovations and ventures" that 18 years olds could pursue en masse.

The average successful entrepreneur is in their 40s, but the founders of the absolute most massive tech companies were mostly in their teens or 20s (Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and in a previous generation companies like Dell and Compaq). There are several more founded by people in their 30s and 40s like Amazon and Netflix. The outlier exception is Qualcomm whose founder was 51.

My basic conclusion about this topic is this: There are many young entrepreneurs because the "risk" of founding is so low at a young age. If you "waste" 3-5 years you don't have to worry too much about your broader future. However, if you are 35+ AND have children, then you can't take that risk so easily anymore.

To the extent their claim is true - eg, the average age of all business founders, including barber shops and so on, is greater than 20 - I doubt anyone ever believed otherwise. And to the extent they're trying to refute a real, commonly-held belief, eg. something like "the average founder of venture-backed social media companies, weighted by valuation, is in their 20s", their data can't refute it because it's not fine-grained enough. The most detailed category they use is "Data Processing, Hosting, and Related Services", which covers quite a lot of ground.

I'd be interested to see a similar statistic where there were more than 1 founder, i.e. the average age of ALL founders. I am wondering whether the spread of ages is also a factor - in terms of familiarity with pop culture/current trends vs experience/skill etc.

Presumption: entrepreneurship is a skill(set). Data: entrepreneurial success hits strongly at 43 on avg. Wisdom: mastery takes serious time and effort Hypothesis: probably worth it to encourage the young lest avg age increases to 63

Can someone please change the clickbait title?

It might be clickbait, but that's the title of the article

That's alright. HN Guidelines allow you to edit the title if it's linkbate[1]:

... please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait ...

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

all these articles coming out actually make me feel better

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