Entrepreneurs, The Clock Is Ticking On Your Career | Hacker News Reader

Entrepreneurs, The Clock Is Ticking On Your Career

chrisyeh.blogspot.com

38 pointschrisyeh67 comments

Ageism is an interesting thing. When I was at Google I was certainly pulling up the median but I didn't feel particularly singled out (perhaps after having to pay Brian Reid that sort of stuff got stopped), but it is a place that many people accuse of ageism. I saw something different.

One of the engineers at Google mentioned at lunch an "insanely great" idea they were working on which involved RPC protocols. Having been pretty deep into the RPC wars of the 80's I was naturally interested. His 'insanely great' idea was a self describing protocol, not unlike ASN.1 but with python interspersed. I mentioned that such protocols were quite popular in the 80's with the whole 'distributed objects' meme that was going on and they all largely vanished, but I would love to hear how his was different. Turns out it wasn't different, and his anger at having that wisdom imparted was directed to me, not toward his cool, albeit not exactly new, idea not being practical at scale [1].

Now was he being ageist? I don't think so, just being a kid. Nobody likes to find out that their idea is not novel or workable. People fall in love with their ideas. And a lot of older engineers who I know who have found themselves on the 'outside' of their employers correlate strongly with stories about how the engineering team was re-inventing some wheel.

Understanding that mechanic lead me to conclude that engineers love to create, and as they get older they have been exposed to more and more things. That means the number of new ideas they see starts getting lower and lower as a percentage of ideas proposed. How they respond, often strongly affects how their peers perceive them. If they point out that the wheel is being re-invented and the old wheel is still good enough, they are often perceived as 'stuck in their ways and unwilling to change.' Whereas if they can bring up the issues that were challenges in the previous implementation and solicit help in over coming them, they look visionary.

Problems can occur when a younger engineer gets promoted to 'manager' or 'lead' and they are in a position where they are responsible for a project. Sometimes like a young lieutenant fresh out of OCS they don't know how to trust their Sargents to get things done, they force a process or a course of action on them which is recreating a wheel. That is where things get ugly as the 'greybeard' pushes back and the manager, not having the skills or wisdom, feels threatened and pushes harder. Usually the older guy gets moved out of the group so that it can go fail (or succeed) on its own.

Any well managed company can, and does, apply the skills and talents of anyone qualified to work, regardless of their age.

That being said, from the energy perspective when you pass 50 you come to realize that there isn't a lot to be gained in killing yourself for someone else's benefit. Folks who would take advantage of that, and some VC's do, will avoid you for that reason and argue against hiring folks who understand that truism.

[1] One of the challenges of so-called 'intelligent' protocols is that they impose a compute burden on the endpoint just to see if they are actionable. Historically that has mean that higher transaction rates become compute limited before the the rest of the system, thus wasting resources. Saw an interesting pitch for a TCP Offload engine that could do the execution but the transaction rate limit is a killer at scale.

I really don't like the message of this post. I think the arbitrary expectations people in the startup world place on themselves do a great deal of harm.

I actually regret being exposed to the startup world at such a young age of 17/18. I became totally obsessed with everything startups, especially the stories of newly christened millionaires at ages not much older than mine. I eventually began setting some ridiculously lofty goals for myself that I've failed to meet time and time again, and it's contributed heavily to my often feelings of failure and low self-worth.

So how about this: Instead of rushing to do something before a completely fabricated deadline, chase opportunities with the intent of trying your best and the understanding that no one event or missed deadline renders you a failure or means that you've missed out on life.

I've written a lot about how one needs to be realistic in the entrepreneurial life. Here's just a few examples:

http://chrisyeh.blogspot.com/2012/05/entrepreneurial-success...

http://chrisyeh.blogspot.com/2010/07/entrepreneurship-is-abo...

If you define success as building a billion-dollar company, you'll almost certainly be disappointed. Billion-dollar startups usually come once every few years.

But I also want people to be aware that their time is shorter than they think.

OP may be right and all, but it's not actionable, so that's why I think his message is harmful. It's encouraging entrepreneurs to worry, rush, and stress about how they should've gotten things done yesterday. It doesn't help you towards your goals at all.

Ah, but it is actionable. Knowing when the tide is or isn't in your favor doesn't necessarily encourage you to worry, rush, and stress. It does encourage you keep the big picture of your career in mind.

Also, note that worry, rush, and stress could also be expressed as plan, move quickly, and focus. It's a matter of perspective.

The arbitrary, overly-specific, and gosh-darn unlikeliness of the goals expressed here remind me more of the sort of life plan you'd expect from a ten-year-old girl than from a full-grown man.

"OK, I'm going to meet my boyfriend at sixteen so we can be married by nineteen and then I'll have four kids in the next four years so I can be the world's greatest ballerina by the time I'm twenty-four and then I can start training ponies"

No matter how you spin it, we're all scared monkeys wearing blue jeans, trying to make sense of what's happening around us on this small piece of rock flying through space at ungodly speeds.

Full grown men aren't much wiser than 10 year old girls.

I was with you until the last sentence which seemed to be hanging beyond the edge of its support.

While at uni, I had a habit of attending classes with my friends, outside of my curriculum. I remember attending a lecture on hermeneutics once, by a law professor, versed in philosophy and such... and this must have been some closing lecture as he was talking a lot about his personal experience of failing to achieve any substantial understanding of what meaning was, how (his) mind worked, etc.

He was putting it as if it was like trying to insert your head into your... in a desperate hope of reaching some 'real' understanding. And after all those years of trying (it looked like he had been trying), he was left with empty hands. Not zen-style empty hands, just what-i-hoped-to-grasp-i-couldnt empty hands.

Its a feeling you can probably get investigating stuff like physics, math, meaning in linguistics, neuroscience or simply thinking things through as the years go by.

Maybe grand parent was relating to something like this.

Holy cow, quote of the night

Your time is limited. A was talking with a friend (who incidentally is a VC) over breakfast. He noted that he was 46, and was worried about how old he'd be when his future child (his wife is pregnant) went off to college.

People also don't like hearing that they need to get married before the age of 30 if they want to have kids at a younger age, but that doesn't make it untrue.

Except that having a child is a readily achievable goal that anyone can reach at any time they choose to. The decision to have a child, whether at a younger or older age, is almost entirely up to the two consenting adults.

Hoping to strike it rich before the age of 45 is pretty much the complete opposite.

Ah, the young. Find a couple in their 40s, and ask them if having a child is a readily achievable goal any time they choose.

Men can easily have childrens on their 40s (not recommended though, it's hard work) but women cannot. It's sad to see that most intelligent, talented woman fall in the trap of their careers and die childless. If you are an intelligent entrepeneur woman in their 20's, do yourself a favor, stop to have some childrens and then resume your career.

I think people should seriously consider that not all women want children.

Women aren't idiots. We think about the tradeoffs.

How can you know about the tradeoff? you remember your past lifes? nobody can, you will have to guess and often you will guess wrong. That's why very few people has great family planning skills at their 20's.

Yes, and that time constraint is due to biological processes that can be planned for ahead of time.

Female fertility starts declining from about 24 and starts dropping like a rock from about 35. Men have less to worry about but there are still declines.

This really reeks of the thick-walled Silicon Valley echo chamber.

If "entrepreneur" to you means "founder of a hot VC-funded tech startup", then yeah, there's some evident ageism and it'll be tougher -- but not impossible -- in your 40s and beyond.

But, if "entrepreneur" to you means "person who starts and runs businesses", well, there are plenty of those doing that up until the day they die. Heck, your 60s is a great time to start a new business: you will probably have more resources, more wisdom, better business acumen, and more free time than you did in your twenties or thirties.

If at that age you decide you want to play in the SV startup scene, then cool, put some of your savings behind a couple of young hackers and do it that way if you must.

If anything, shouldn't entrepreneurs be told to relax? To take a breath and enjoy life? I'm sure this article comes from a good place, but to me, it imparts nothing but a frenzied fear of "not making it in time." No thanks. I imagine most of us already have plenty of that fear in us.

Thank you.

We are creating a one hundred year language -- made out of love, not fear. Our startup phase won't be earlier than 2096. See you then.

I don't want people to feel a frenzied fear, but I also don't want them to realize too late that ageism exists and is powerful.

I think the whole article boils down to this (note my emphasis)

--------------------------------

The scary thing is, if you're an entrepreneur, your days of starting companies from scratch are probably over by age 45.

I'm not happy about this; in fact, that particular deadline will loom in my career all too soon. But it's based on a realistic assessment of the Silicon Valley ecosystem.

Like it or not, the startup world is full of a pervasive and unacknowledged ageism

------------------------------------------------

* He doesn't provide any data to back up his claim that starting a company from scratch is over once you hit 45, and I've read enough outside of HN to know this is not true especially when you get outside of Software technology.

* Noting how he mentions the 'Silicon Valley ecosystem' should give you further notice that you can safely ignore this article if you don't live in Silicon Valley. Just because things happen a certain way in one place doesn't mean that it happens like that everywhere ... There is ageism in the software industry and that probably manifests itself in the startup world, but we haven't even matured as an industry ... Do you think Mark Zuckerberg is going to get turned down for VC money at 50 because he's over-the-hill? I'm thinking not.

The industry is still young (we have what ... 10, 20 years of data to back this up?), extrapolating things like this while we're in the middle of one of the most fascinating periods of technological change is kind of silly, history has shown that resolve more than anything else determines success in areas such as this ... its not like sport where your body gives out long before your mind is willing to.

The post specifically refers to Silicon Valley; you can feel free to ignore it if you're not in that ecosystem.

Mark Zuckerberg won't get turned down because he's already super-successful--and I point out the fact that if you do hit a home run, the limits don't apply.

The Silicon Valley high-tech startup culture dates back nearly 60 years if you mark the beginning with Fairchild, more if you mark it with HP.

You can overcome bias with achievement...but you ought to acknowledge that it exists, and plan accordingly.

It strikes me odd to consider venture capital a retirement plan. My anecdotal observation is that the age of successful VCs is decreasing. I'm guessing this follows the need to relate to younger technologies and markets. That's not to say that "older" VCs will disappear, but that the successful 50 year-old venture capitalist of 2027 will have started in 2012. Or 2007.

I have experience in a couple of industries where investors would never trust anyone under the age of 40 to run a company, even a startup. It's probably true that the tech industry favors young people, but if you've been an entrepreneur your whole professional life, it shouldn't be hard to transition away from this high tech echo chamber when the time comes.

True even in some tech-related areas. Nobody is going to fund a 24-year-old heading a biotech startup, unless there are pretty exceptional circumstances.

Unless you've hit a home run with one of your startups (which, incidentally, eliminates the need to worry about money again), you'd better start that VC transition before you turn 50.

Starting any major career change after 50 is dicey. I'm not sure there's anything special about VC in this regard.

Harry Bernstein began writing his first novel at 93. He published it and gained fame at 96. He published two more before he turned 101. His fourth book will be published this year (posthumously, unfortunately).

Is 50 too late to start a new career? Only if we decide so in our minds.

Says who?

The problem with articles like this is they actually contribute nothing. What is one supposed to do in response? Work harder?

Real entrepreneurs pay no heed to the arbitrary limitations implied by this sort of BS. Carry on.

The proper response is to understand the biases that exist and plan for how to succeed regardless. This might involve changing your plans, or it might just be a matter of resetting expectations.

The successful entrepreneurs I know aren't very good at resetting their expectations.

Entrepreneurs tend to be irrationally optimistic...it's good for the world as a whole, but probably maladaptive for the individual.

Cargo Cult Capitalism:

Successful startups are filled with young people, so fire all the olds.

I hate the sentiment that 45 is too late. Is there any statistics? Any evidence to support the theory? Not as far as I'm aware.

I really wish I could downvote this post.

How about if you have a good idea for a new business venture, do it?

I'm 20, and have no plans to actively start my own business in the next few years. I have no great ambition in that regard, and unless you have such drive, anything you attempt will be less than what could be.

But I know if I discover some new-found passion I wish to venture upon in my 50s, and there is no business established for it yet or that the current king of the hill is in desperate need of a good shake down, I will jump without hesitation into my own start-up venture.

I mean, I hope. 30 years is 150% of my current number of rotations of Earth that I have spent breathing of my own accord.

A friend told me the story of a guy they now call "Mr. Lucky." He started 10 different companies. All failures. His wife left him. His friends thought he was crazy. Then at age 68, company #11 was sold for over $1 billion. Today, he is a philanthropist who is a pillar of his community.

It gets harder. That doesn't mean it's impossible.

It's never too late...but it gets harder.

None of us likes to think about getting old. "Old" is always 5-15 years older than we are. That's why we don't realize the danger of ageism until it bites us on the behind.

I just turned 47 last week, and I'm just about established with my first startup. It took several years.

Does this mean I should quit and go get a corporate job?

Startups are a numbers game. Just know that and work the system. Don't fret with how old you are, where you live, or any other thing that you have no control over. You were dealt cards, now play them.

I would say the article offends me, but it's nowhere close. If anything, from the echo-chamber that SV can be, it probably makes a lot of sense.

But not everybody wants to work a startup-VC life in SV. If that's your thing, then fine: be aware it's an ageist culture and you have an expiration date.

Maybe I'm missing it, but as fast as funding requirements are dropping for startups, this (and SV in general) just doesn't seem that big of a deal anymore.

I just have one question for the OP. Why would you do this: http://i.imgur.com/RqxZ7.png

I saw this thing pop-out and was immediately distracted, and then annoyed, and then lost my place.

Why would you distractingly lure me to one of your other articles, where I'll probably be distractingly lured to another one of your articles...

I'm not a mouse.

I think it's a tool I installed while looking at a company as a potential investment. I'll try to figure out how to turn it off.

Gotcha. Don't invest in them :)

I didn't!

hehe

A lot of people seem to think this article is full of BS. Maybe. But I'm only 30 and felt that I've pissed away a lot of my younger years trying to become successful with 80 hour weeks. Maybe, by some slim chance, I will be successful when I am 40, but at that point I've already lost my youth. Is it worth it? I suppose it depends on your priorities.

I think a lot of that is because of an overly narrow and idealistic picture of success.

I remember thinking in college that I'd half-ass my coursework so I could go do a major open-source project so that I'd have a kick-ass resume when I entered the working world. The project was nowhere near as kick-ass as I hoped (I did the software for fictionalley.org), but it did serve 100k people or so, and I didn't have any trouble getting jobs. So that was something, at least.

Then I thought I'd work my tail off for a few years so I could found a startup and get rich. Well, I did work my tail off, and I founded a startup, but I just didn't have the skills yet to take it across the finish line. It didn't make me rich, it failed without accomplishment. But I did get hired by Google afterwards, and I guess that's a decent consolation prize. So that was something, at least.

And then once I'd been at Google for 9 months, I heard about this cool new project to completely redesign the search page from the ground up. At the time (2009), this was viewed as crazily ambitious: remember that the main Google SRP basically had not changed in look & feel since 2000. We launched in May 2010, after a long hard slog, and we felt really good about ourselves for a while. But then Google Instant launched that summer and completely overshadowed us, and the page was completely overhauled again in the summer of 2011, so the UI we slaved over lasted barely a year. We each got reputations internally as kick-ass devs that got stuff done, though, and were given a fair amount of latitude to pick our next projects, and had our pictures in BusinessWeek, and once in a while somebody even remembers the Google Search UI from 2010-2011. So that was something, at least.

I'm still looking for the big success that'll make it all worthwhile. I'm beginning to think that it doesn't really exist, that no matter how "successful" I am by external metrics, I'll always be chasing the next big thing. And increasingly, I'm beginning to think that the real big success was just the fun I've had hanging out with other people. That can sometimes be in the context of work, or it can sometimes be in the context of play. But somehow I think it matters a lot more than 80 hour weeks that usually go for naught anyway. (Luckily, I haven't really put in that many 80-hour weeks. In crunch time I might do up to about 60, but for the most part I work reasonable hours and spend my free time with friends.)

great post. Really, age is meaningless, the more meaningful number is how much time does one have left. Of course, nobody knows this with any certainty, so just proceed every day as if it were your last or the beginning of the next 1000 days, take your pick. (Yes, I understand at the extremes of age, odds start weighing heavily, but we're talking about 50 vs. 30 here).

I teach guitar, sometimes I'll get an older student, a beginner, who will ask, "Is it too late for me, I'm going to be 30 (40/50/60..) in x year". I always tell them, well, you are going to be 30 (40/50/60..) anyhow, lets just get on w/doing something you want to do.

The best time is yesterday. The next best time is today. The clock is ticking on all of us.

except it's just not true - there are plenty of studies that prove the opposite point. here's just one - http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-innovations/the-ca...

PG once stated that he wouldn't fund a first-time startup founder over the age of 35. I remember reading that at 28, and saying "oh crap. I have 7 years."

5 years later, I know how to make my own money. I'm no longer worried about meeting PG at 36.

Ah yes, when I buy any product I always do a search beforehand to make sure the founder was of the correct age when the company was founded

The post specifically refers to the ageism of VCs, not consumers. I don't think any of the millions of people who bought Dyson products cared how hold he was when he invented his famous vacuums.

Exactly... which also makes the assumption that VCs are the gatekeepers to entrepreneurship which is obviously not true. Any customer is going to care less if the creator of a product they like was 9 or 90.

I'm considering doing a companion post, "It's Never Too Late To Start." Would folks want to see that?

I started writing about this a long time ago on Quora: http://www.quora.com/Chris-Yeh/answers/Career-Paths

If you have data, yes. If not, you are just being the antagonist.

Vivek Wadhwa has the data. But ultimately, what good is the data to the individual entrepreneur? The point is that there are ways to maximize your chances for success that are different at age 45 than at age 25.

That's total crap.

"Illusion of Entrepreneurship" sticks the median age at 41.

Remember, this post is just about the Silicon Valley ecosystem. It's a narrow and specialized world where youth is worshipped, and it's very different from the rest of the world.

This stuff is always funny to me. I am going to be 47 next month. I have two adult sons in their twenties. I am routinely asked if I am their sister. People guess I am in my thirties. Meanwhile, the average life expectancy for my genetic disorder is mid thirties. So I joke that, in human years, I am the equivalent of an octogenerian...and, daang I look good for an eighty year old.

My plan is to be an entrepreneur. I think that is my only hope of making things work. Working for Da Man was helping to keep me sick and my health issues are the single biggest obstacle I have to success. Will it be a "start up" as in some company I can sell for millions some day? I have no idea. But I don't expect to be an employee again.

The wonderful thing about entrepreneurship is that if you're not relying on the vagaries of investors, your age, gender, race, academics, and many other traditional "criteria" are irrelevant. Deliver results, and you will be successful.

The scary thing is, if you're an entrepreneur, your days of starting companies from scratch are probably over by age 45.

Bullshit, as evidenced by reason and by actual example (google for it).

Vivek Wadhwa has done a great job of writing about how older entrepreneurs are an important part of the economy:

http://wadhwa.com/2011/12/02/washington-post-the-case-for-ol...

The ageism really is a strong part of Silicon Valley culture. Just look at the quote with which Wadhwa begins his article:

“People under 35 are the people who make change happen,” said venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, “People over 45 basically die in terms of new ideas.”

Correlations tell you about the data selection process, not the data points. A lot of 45 year olds who can successfully run a new business project already are, thanks to their connections and track record. These success stories don't show up at a VCs office begging for money.

Valley "ageism" sounds a lot like sour grapes from VCs who are only attractive to young people who haven't built up credibility yet, and old people who cannot imagine that 25 years of being turned down by their boss could possibly have anything to do with their talents.

Many top VCs explicitly prefer younger founders. Vinod Khosla doesn't back older founders, and Paul Graham stated he wouldn't accept any first-time founders older than 35. Both of these gentlemen are legends who are attractive to any entrepreneur.

> Both of these gentlemen are legends who are attractive to any entrepreneur.

Really? Suppose a successful 45 year old with a net worth of $750k decides to ditch his chief engineer job for a startup. If he decides YC could help him not lose perspective, is PG going to turn him down cold? If his self-funded proof of concept gets traction, is Khosla going to have a secretary blow him off?

Probably not. The college kids only mentality is public relations, not an actual policy.

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