Hacker News Reader

Comment by webwatch | Hacker News Reader

It's strange to me that people seem to want the average age of the start-up founder to be low...why is it more fun if the founder is young than if they are in their 40s?

As a side note, there are some insightful comments that point out the differences in the two data sets that the writer is referring to (a study vs. anecdotal evidence from VC Fred Wilson). But it's an interesting read, none the less.

View on HN

"want the average age of the start-up founder to be low"

Then they must be brilliant. If a 40 year old was brilliant, then why didn't he do this 20 years ago? (They tend to forget that it wasn't like this 20 years ago.)

plenty of companies got started more than 20 years ago. What would have prevented you from starting a company when MS or Apple started?

Having a grandfather worth $20 million.

Seriously, don't kid yourself. It was a VERY DIFFERENT world back then. You graduated college and hoped you could find a job. There was no www and you needed 5 to 10 grand just for hardware and proprietary software. It's utterly stunning how easy it is to get started today compared to then.

(Bill Gates and Paul Allen went to the private Lakeside School which had a privately donated PDP-11 in 1968. Imagine being 13 years old and having access to the same computing power as Stanford University. The other 99.99% of us had to wait another 10 years for access to a computer.)

Software was a lot harder to write when I was in high school.

Also, entrepreneurship wasn't encouraged.

Which means there was a lot less competition.

Mindset and almost no open source + internet/Arpanet infrastructure. (Internet changes marketing and distribution to the advantage of young entrepreneurs.) Twenty years ago, kids didn't have a long list of successful role models who made it big while young. Now, that's all you see in the media.

Lack of physical existence for one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com