Hacker News Reader

Comment by georgewsinger | Hacker News Reader

Studies like this often ignore the power law. Consider the most valuable tech companies:

1. Apple: $570.7B.

  - Jobs: 21

  - Wozniak: 26

2. Alphabet: $560B.

  - Larry & Sergey: 25ish

3. Microsoft: $434B.

  - Gates: 19ish

  - Allen: 22ish

4. Amazon: $365B.

  - Bezos: 30ish

5. Facebook: $354B.

  - Zuckerberg: 19

What matters are the power law companies, not the average company. My guess is that your ability to create an incremental company that is profitable increases linearly as you age, but your ability to create a power law company decreases exponentially as you get older.

View on HN

Jobs basically reinvented Apple when he came back. The "power law" company that you're talking about was created by a person in his 40s. Before that it was a has-been that had to be bailed out by its biggest competitor.

Leaving that aside, can give any more detail as to why you think power law companies matter and "average" companies don't? There's a lot of "average" companies out there that are making tidy profits for lots of folks.

Salesforce, LinkedIn, SpaceX, Tesla, heck Intel... I suspect the conclusions one draws from "power law companies" will depend on which companies one includes for consideration.

> What matters are the power law companies, not the average company.

Depends on your viewpoint. Average company can be pretty good for most personal goals that most people have.

Uber- 30 years- Travis Kalanick Twiter- 30 years -Jack Dorsey. So i guess 30 is upper limit.

Agreed.

Unfortunately, delusions of grandeur and a unicorn VC culture convince average young people into believing themselves to be power law founders with power law ideas. Thankfully that has changed a bit and it looks like the miracle men are moving into blockchain. In reality, billion dollar+ ideas are rare, and clever, delusional, and young people are a great fit for the helm.

When you're older, you have domain knowledge, leadership experience, and want to take linear risks, not "sacrifice one of the remaining chapters in my life for that chance".

“Nothing defines humans better than their willingness to do irrational things in the pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs. This is the principle behind lotteries, dating, and religion.” (Scott Adams)

Nothing more true than that. Except I'll add that people become a bit more disillusioned by experience and willingness to take risk as they get older - at least maybe with dating and startups, maybe not lotteries and religion

Reply on news.ycombinator.com