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Comment by georgewsinger | Hacker News Reader

These studies often ignore the power law. The vast majority of value generated in tech is powered by a tiny number of companies. Here are the five most valuable tech companies as of 2017 vs. the age of the founders:

1. Apple: $570.7B explained

  - Jobs: 21
  - Woz: 26

2. Alphabet: $560B

  - Larry/Sergey: 25ish

3. Microsoft: $434B

  - Gates: 19
  - Allen: 22

4. Amazon: $365B

  - Bezos: 29

5. Facebook: $354B

  - Zuckerberg: 19

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I am not sure it ignores it.

For someone who is 18 and very creative, the facts you posted could be helpful to say that they have a chance to be insane lucky if they have the aprox 1 in a billion set of skills and timing required to make it to market.

On the other hand, the stats in the article point out that for someone in their 30s or 40s, they have 1/(10? 50?) chance to be able to found a successful startup, for some definition of the word startup. This in general seems a much more useful message to push.

A similar story is around education. Some of the richest people in the world did not attend college. However, for 99.9999% of the people - going to to college and getting a science or other hard degree is going to lead to a much nicer life then to go straight from high school to the working world.

Cool to look at the 1 in a billion case, it is not always as useful for a case study.

Lady Gaga worked hard and got rich and famous. But you’re probably not Lady Gaga.

It’s funny that we understand this hit-based reality for music, tv, movie, and sports stars, but can’t seem to grasp it when it comes to startups.

Going the other way around is interesting too. If you look at how early many of them started working hard it doesn't quite seem as random. Say, Taylor Swift, by the time she was 12 or 13 it was pretty apparent she was dead set on making it in the music industry. And no, she didn't hit it right-off, did plenty of not-so-notable work for a while.

Just an FYI on Taylor Swift, she is not an "aww shucks" country music girl that cut her teeth by playing at malls and smaller venues. Her wealthy father purchase part of a record label which then signed her. The image that is portrayed is propaganda.

It's like the "Bill Gate's mom was on the board of IBM, so he's a phony" story. Just as in tech, successful people in other industries tend to have supportive parents.

How does hard work make me have these wealthy parents?

Surely it's understood.

The difference is that far, far fewer people have a moderately successful entertainment career compared to the many people who have successful software development careers.

With startups the distribution would be less like software developers but still not as extreme in terms of outcome as for entertainment. Ff you have a company that you sell for 5M or whatever that you own a quarter of you've done very well by normal standards but barely feature in value with the huge tech companies.

It's also common for people to write pop stars like Lady Gaga off as no-talent hacks who are totally run by their handlers, which is of course nonsense.

Who is "we". I get it ;)

The first incarnation of Apple is hardly the same Apple that the mature Jobs basically re-created from scratch with a different line of products.

At this point these companies are really just an amalgamation of hundreds of companies that all have created value. So the big ones may have younger founders, but they are also composed of many smaller companies that had older founders.

The distribution of ownership would tend to disagree that they are "just" an amalgamation.

Sure, I could believe that young people have a better chance of founding a $100B business. But I (and almost everyone else thinking about founding a startup) isn't going for the $100B moonshot, just becoming your "everyday" successful entrepreneur with a <$100M exit is quite enough, and I find it very plausible that 45 year olds are much, much better at building those.

Salesforce: $111B

  - Benioff: 35

Oh well.

Netflix: $147B

- Reid Hastings: 37

Oh well pt II

These are once in a life time exceptions - all these people were there at the exactly right point in place, history and time. A lot of people have done very well for themselves who were there at the exactly the same point time ("millionaire good").

In the majority of all other cases - experience combined with additional ingredients leads to success.

Jobs was 49 when iPhone development began.

And before the mid 90s, Apple was in constant peril of being wiped out.

> And before the mid 90s, Apple was in constant peril of being wiped out.

People always seem to forget this fact!

These are all consumer tech companies. The article takes this into account.

There is chasm between a small business and a $570b business and all of it is still success.

These are outliers (as unicorn companies are, in general).

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