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Comment by runawaybottle | Hacker News Reader

With 8 billion people in the world, what we hope to see is that founders come from all age brackets.

Over correction is a real thing, and when young tech founders hit it big it defied the idea of the super senior decision makers in large companies who were the paragons of leadership.

We shifted to the idolization of the young entrepreneur. This is just as bad. Been doing a little Theranos reading lately, and the adoption of the woman founder paradigm was set to take off with Elizabeth Holmes (and she was peddling the full package stereotype of the Ivy League dropout). New narratives help break strangleholds, but damn do they also have a way of unjustly defining stereotypes.

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I'm not so sure it's that bad. I'm getting 40 and not planning to create a startup, as I don't have as much energy/health as before. At the same time I'm always looking for companies to invest my money into.

If you don't have energy at 40 it's not because of your age. You can win a championship in any major sport at that age.

Exactly. As a counterexample, I'm approaching 40 in the best physical and mental shape of my life. You simply have to take responsibility for your own health, especially if your job involves sitting on your ass for extended hours every day.

Congratulations, you won the generic lotto. Health prevention improved a lot in our lives, but there are still illnesses that you can't prevent and just come at 30-40 already.

True, but I'd still go as far as to say the majority of illnesses western people in their 40's are suffering from could have been avoided with different lifestyle choices.

If I hadn't kept fitness and eating healthy as a priority for the last 15 years, my health would've been in complete shambles by now. I was pretty lazy and self-destructive through my early adolescence, and in my early twenties I was in terrible shape physically and had a lot of severe mental problems that I no longer struggle with. I'm extremely grateful to my 22-year old self that decided to try and turn things around, it didn't happen overnight.

As someone who's 40, had to go through cancer treatment and is lacking in energy, not all 40 is equal.

I'm really sorry for you. My girlfriend has a BRCA gene and the doctors didn't take her seriously when she was 29, because she was ,,too young to have cancer''. Now she has to take anti-estrogene after the chemotherapy that takes most of her energy away.

As for me, I have vasomotor rhinitis since I was 34 because I lived in a street full of cars and air pollution when I was young to save on rent. Now I'm full of money that I can use to decrease all the bad effects that the sickness has on me (like going to hotels far away from cities/villages), but I won't have a normal life until my methylation levels can be reversed.

I'm not sure what that has to do with anything. A 12 year old could go through the same thing. Hope you feel better though

You simply can't understand what chemotherapy does to your body and mind untill you go through it. Your minimization of its effects are callous.

You are both assuming I haven't gone through it and that I don't believe chemo is literal poison that destroys your body. This conversation is about lacking energy because of age and somehow you think I'm some sort of cancer denier.

Why are you getting down voted? The same could be said about a 20 year old cancer survivor. Have we lost our senses here?

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