Is 30s too late as a first time founder? (never done anything biz related) | Hacker News Reader

Is 30s too late as a first time founder? (never done anything biz related)

41 pointsme_me_mu_mu51 comments

I've never built a business before so I'm wondering if applying to accelerators is even feasible. I see all these people younger than me, or people in my age range working on their 2nd/4th+ company.

I'm self taught, didn't go to a prestigious school, and I only got into tech 5-6 years ago so I consider myself pretty good at application development but not exactly someone who understands the deep computing fundamentals, nor do I have connections to startup founders or such people. However, I know what I know pretty well and have been able to build some application experiences for my employer and side projects that I am quite proud of..

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I'm twice your age, totally self taught, also a college dropout, and have originated several tech startups--some successful & some not. I'm launching another SAAS in my 60s (on zero budget just for the lulz).

The one time I raised money for a startup I did great, and I'm sure it was my confidence. You know where my confidence came from? This logic: there are people who are dumber than I am, doing better than I am, at the same age. Therefore if I work hard and smart, I can definitely level up.

You've got this. Remember: if a midwit like me can do it, you definitely can!

I’m all for mantras that give you the right mindset to achieve your goals, but I wonder whether it’s necessary or healthy to compare oneself to others.

Also, to what do you attribute the successes of those dumber people? Pure hard work?

I live in a country with a lot of corruption and usually successful dumb people have great connections.

I don’t know how to live my life without comparing myself to others.

For example, I am morbidly obese, 100+ lbs overweight. The data are very clear: that is extremely unhealthy. If I lived without comparing myself to other people, I would think it’s just fine, because eating right for me is insanely difficult and causes me to jones for food for hours at a time (e.g. eating at 6pm, getting hungry again at 8pm, and wanting food desperately until I finally get to sleep at 5:30 am is a normal day for me). Eating junk makes me feel integrated and whole—every time. Eating the right amount of calories is agony. Exercising makes me feel horrible.

Another example: my family wrecked their lives with drug consumption and nearly wrecked mine with terrible handling of relationships. But when I got away I learned by comparing my upbringing with others that those patterns were damaging, and that I didn’t have to visit that upon my own kids.

Comparisons like this are necessary for me calibrate my systems and actions.

Why do people dumber than I am sometimes do better? I never worried about that. I just figured that by working hard and using common sense I could usually replicate their success.

why are you wasting your time with accelerators? Listen, this whole game about VC, accelerators, startup events, finding a co-founder... all the noise you hear around early-stage / startup companies is just that: noise. Go build something, but more importantly, get it in front of customers. If you can't get someone interested and shouting "take my money!" then you need to keep iterating until you do. Realize you need other talents and help on your team? Great, bring in a co-founder. Need Money? More importantly, ask yourself "*Why* do we need money? What would that money do for us?" If you can't answer that for yourself, then keep on bootstrapping and selling product.

Key points here: Ignore what you see other people doing. It's about 99.9% an illusion.

I don’t know how to deal with legal things. I spoke with my local SBA advisor who said I need to get a lawyer since I will be collecting PII. The quotes from lawyers are pretty expensive and I’m not exactly from a socioeconomic background that I’ve been around lawyers or used their services. However, do you know of any services or specific people who can help (cookie cutter service for people getting started/noobs)?

Thanks

Every single web app and internet-connected mobile app handles PII (IP address, geolocation data, and email address all qualify). Unless it's particularly protected, like health info or storing banking info, you'll probably be OK to learn how to handle it on your own to get a product to market. You also need to understand the impact GDPR, CCPA, and app store requirements have on what you're building. Then there's the legal side of actually creating the company itself, plus concerns around copyright, trademark, and patents if applicable. At the end of the day, you're going to have to learn some legal stuff to succeed as a founder.

I'm in full agreement with kingnothing here...and in fact if your industry / niche is such that you need to do these things, you need to gain domain knowledge even more than you need to talk to a lawyer.

Can the SBA advisor point you at a lawyer? Are there lawyers in your area that partner with the SBA? In my state, there are law firms that everybody knows has focus on early-stage companies, and surprisingly their fees are reasonable (though they may put you with a junior lawyer).

Often people are scared to talk to other professionals - accountants, lawyers, etc - because they think it will be crazy expensive. I've been really pleased with how affordable their services can be for basic consult, documents. It's only when you are in litigation that it gets crazy (don't ask me how I know). So - it might be just a couple hours (let's say $600 or so) for some of their time to get all your questions answered. In fact, I've found a brief coffee with a lawyer will often answer all my questions and that only if we have to do something with them after that point does the meter start running.

Point being: Get comfortable talking to these people, they are your allies.

> I spoke with my local SBA advisor who said I need to get a lawyer since I will be collecting PII.

IMHO this is really putting the cart before the horse. When you are bootstrapping, the first thing to understand is that you can only do 0.1% of all the things people will tell you that you "need" to do. That means what you really need to do is apply your own judgement identifying the critical work that will move the needle like understanding what people are willing to pay for and building it.

Of course you should use some minimal measures to protect yourself from legal risk (eg. start an LLC), but generally speaking your biggest risk is no one knowing or caring about what you are doing. Don't start by asking a bunch of experts as that will lead you down the path of "playing house" as PG describes in his Before the Startup essay (http://www.paulgraham.com/before.html)

Forget about GDPR, PII, Incorporation, Taxes, etc... No one is going to care about you/what you are doing unless you are making real money or disrupting something. Once you start making real money, start spending some of it on regulation/legal.

Unless you are prepared to pay for 100% of your cloud costs, seed funding or accelerator acceptance is required for the ~100k in credits that the major cloud providers offer to startups.

There are light accelerators out there that take no equity, just a first right of refusal of funding kinda arrangement.

(Now queue the HN cloud haters telling me I can run anything on 3 raspberryPis or something)

A local incubator can also offer these cloud credits. Doesn’t need to be an accelerator…

Am I a hater if I say I run the sideline saas product I made in the cloud for €20 per month? I bring in a modest 4 figure MRR. You don't need a 100k or an accelerator. You need an accelerator if you want to go big quickly...and you probably won't...so back to starting with make something and have a go.

Cloud costs, basic incorporation fees, etc are nothing compared to labor costs, for example, or what it will cost to keep a roof over your head while you build out your product and get traction. Those credits et al are peanuts by comparison.

To be clear - my original comment wasn't really intended to disparage incubators, accelerators, etc, but rather to say that you can spend a lot of time playing the whole startup game where often you are better off to just keep your head down and focus on your own work.

Agreed. I wasn't disparaging incubators, accelerators either. I was on one and sort of admired the fact some people, with no tech skills, were having a go at making a tech business. I think those with tech skills should put the head down first as you say.

You absolutely don't need 100k in AWS credits to validate your idea and most web apps/SaaS APIs can be running on one or more Digital Ocean droplets at fairly low opex. AWS giving away cloud credits to startups is not unlike drug dealer handing out some free hits to new potential customers. They're not doing it out of goodness of their hearts.

Take it with a grain of salt, but: https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-succes...

This matches my personal anecdata as well. Locally there are a number of tech startups founded by people in their 20s, but the ones that have gotten significant traction have been older. Which, at 38, keeps me from being discouraged. I mostly love my current gig, but there's a pretty solid chance that it'll be the last employer/employee relationship for me for a while.

I was going to post this exact same HRB article! Age gives you so many advantages. You know your industry. You know who the players are. You have a professional network you can tap when you have a problem (or when you’re looking for your first customers).

I started my first company at 46, with co-founders that were 43 and 30. Much of what we've done right as a company is a direct consequence of some of what we saw done wrong (or did wrong ourselves!) at other companies; there is a tremendous benefit to starting a company with more life experience! (Indeed, part of why startups so often make entirely avoidable mistakes is because their founders haven't had the life experience to know otherwise; and I know that I myself would have made similar mistakes because I did make them.) Yes, there is a challenge around your other life commitments (especially if you have kids!) but don't let anyone dissuade you: you can make up for a lot with wisdom and hard work!

You are asking the wrong questions. Care about your product and customers, not about founder beauty contests!

Loreal Silicon Baby

Jeff Bezos was 30 when he founded his first company (no extra points for guessing which one), Reid Hoffman was 35 (LinkeIn). And here's a book about "every unicorn start-up started between 2005 and 2018" (65) which finds the median age of their founders (when they started) to be 34:

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/27/super-founders-median-age-of...

Not too late. You've probably derisked the product side a but since you already have years of experience building technical products. You just need to learn the basics of running a business now, and get comfortable with sales and marketing.

I'm 32 and just started a solopreneur bootstrapped business. I have much more confidence now than when I was in my 20s.

The biggest thing is that I'm more patient now. In your 20s, it's easy to feel like you need everything right now. But as you get older, you learn patience. I'm still impatient at times, but I also feel more comfortable saying I'll spend the next 4 years trying things, than trying to race to success and giving up at the first sign of trouble.

From what I've seen, the people who start successful businesses in their 20s are from generational wealth and can afford the career risk, or their parents are entrepreneurs. Then you also have the people who have been coding since they were 8 years old, so by the time they are 20 already have 10 years of experience. Plus, code has the wild scalability of infinite permissionless leverage (as does social media), so it's possible to make millions from your bedroom as a high school or college student.

In short, give it a shot for a year. If you hate it, you can always go back to a job to learn from your mistakes on someone else's dollar!

My inspiration is Harland Sanders. He started KFC when he was 62 surviving on social security (I'm 64)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonel_Sanders

Maybe I’m just out of touch, but wouldn’t someone in their 30s be a lot more emotionally mature and ready to handle starting a company way better than someone in their 20s? I was an absolute wreck of a kid in my 20s, so no clue how so many young people have it so together to run a company.

Is it possible we are still mythologizing the Zuckerbergs of this world?

According to statistics I recently heard, you'd be twice as likely to have a successful exit if you were 50 than 30 when founding, but you'd also find getting investment more difficult because investors prefer younger founders. (I guess that means investors must not be particularly data-driven.)

Those stats might reflect that 50 year old founders might not be on their first attempt, so perhaps it doesn't apply to you as a first time founder.

But still, 30 does not sound too old.

All those people around you on their 2nd/4th company: They indicate a culture, but it doesn't mean their current companies are going to be particularly successful if that's measured by a large exit. Perhaps they will get that by their 6th company which they start at age 40, if they aren't burned out by then.

No, but you have to start. Thinking about it will only dim you dream and make it harder to succeed. Read up as much as possible on the subject and start. Starting a company, any company, will get you going and let you see where you need to strengthen your skills.

Anything below 30 is too young actually, yes some 20yo founders succeed, but being 30+ and thus more mature derisks the entire operation.

Posted yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30655956

More discussions about ‘average age founder’: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

I'm in the same boat! May be more challenging if you, like me, have other obligations competing for your attention. I've also noticed that I'm a bit mentally slower than I was in high school and college. But I am more emotionally stable, so that's good. But in terms of feasibility, I don't think age in itself is much of a factor, especially if you stay humble and open to constantly learning more.

I've been to a dozen accelerators and many teams were above 30/40 years old and some with kids.

So definitely not late for you but it will take a lot of time, grinding, resources, and its an emotional rollercoaster! First step is to get some MVP going on and some basic business model and then apply to all the things. Good luck!

Once you hit 18 it is all down hill.

It is absolutely not too late.

This sort of worrying is an unnecessary that this community needs to leave behind.

I run a regional accelerator for people working full time to get a saas launched on the side. They often do better than founders I work with in their early 20s because they have domain expertise. It’s never too late…

It depends on your life situation. If you have a family and children, it’s perhaps a bit too late unless money is not a concern for you. You may want to wait 20 years. If you are single and free, why not ?

Harland Sanders (Colonel Sanders KFC) was 66 when ge started KFC, so no.

Your age will not be a factor in your success. Many of my friends are successfully running companies while raising children in their 30s.

If you can get funding to maintain a steady salary sure, otherwise the financial risk is through the roof

Time for those founders’ kids to leave the nest methinks

My mistake. "Founders in their 30s raising kids".

Just do it! I'm 41, first time founder, programmer, with no experience business related, or silicon valley contacts.

That you feel the need to ask for permission is an issue (one you can solve!) but your age is not.

"nor do I have connections"

It's possible, but without this it's going to be very difficult.

Don't ask the question, you know the answer, don't fear and go for it.

No.

Think Ray Kroc. Nothing else matters, according to Metallica.

You'll find most successful founders are acutally 30+.

That's inspirational. If you don't mind. What is your process. I would like to do the same. I don't mind eating Ramen for 1 year.

Do it

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