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Comment by ghiculescu | Hacker News Reader

I think this study should ask founders their age. It has a huge impact, probably more than any factor they did ask.

I started my first startup at 20. We were bootstrapped, so we started at $0 salaries, and didn’t pay ourselves more than 1k/month for a few years. We all lived together somewhere cheap to keep rent low.

Now I have a family and stuff… it would be very hard to go back to living like that. So the range of salary options practically available to me is totally different, regardless of where (in the US) I live, how much I raise, etc.

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Strongly agree that this is a valuable data point. I’d suggest another way of getting at the same thing would be to ask about previous salary; this correlates with age but only somewhat.

Did the $1M salary founders get paid $1M at Google previously? I’d expect there is a quite strong correlation here since it’s much easier to justify to your board/equity in that case.

And just because you’re 50, that doesn’t mean you made it past Senior. Similarly, you could get to Staff+ before 30 if you are exceptional.

Great suggestion! I think we'll ask this question in the next iteration :)

Yeah actually beyond age I would also break out "Do you have children" explicitly as that changes that calculus a lot.

Additional potential questions: Does your spouse or coparent have an income? Do you have a mortgage and what is the monthly amount? Do you support an elderly parent?

Agreed.

I’m married with two children, and my spouse effectively[1] doesn’t earn an income. I’d consider running a startup, but my life situation requires that I have a reasonably steady annual income of ~$125k.

That doesn’t mean I have a lower risk tolerance, or at least not exactly. It means I have a higher risk floor that I had fifteen years ago.

[1]: they have a small business that I’d reasonably say is their life’s work. Because of my income they don’t have to make it a steadily profitable business and can therefore reinvest the profit it produces. It’s a business serving children and is parts of the burgeoning local arts community. It’s very helpful to be able to waive fees and offer small scholarships for children in our area, where the median family annual income is <$30k. It’s also been a blessing to be able to hire teenage students from time to time; more than once that’s turned an extracurricular activity that the kid is passionate about from a cost to a small source of income for a family of very limited means./

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