What's happening with founders over 40?
justinjackson.ca
justinjackson.ca
- You have more time since your kids are more independent, and they might even help with your business.
- Your significant other might have a full-time job, giving you a safety net with steady income and insurance.
- By now, you have a network of friends and colleagues, making it easier to find your first customers and get honest feedback.
- Hiring is easier because you already know people in your industry or community.
- You understand your industry better, which gives you an advantage. However, this can also be a downside—you might avoid risky, “crazy” ideas that could lead to huge success.
And the statistics would agree with this intuition:
https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2020/comm/busi...
Over half of business owners are over 55 years of age. This includes small businesses, IT startups, etc.
But even within tech, the majority of founders and CEOs I worked with, from small startups to large enterprises, tended to be 40s and up.
Here's the research on older entrepreneurs being more successful: https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/younger-old...
> "Among the very fastest-growing new tech companies, the average founder was 45 at the time of founding."
However, the deciding factor appears to be experience:
> "founders with three or more years of experience in the same industry as their startup are twice as likely to have a one-in-1,000 fastest-growing company."
> your kids [...] might even help with your business.
...is a really, really bad idea. N=1 and everything but I've seen this backfire far more times than it has worked out. A few of the more common scenarios:
- Somebody loans somebody money even though both parties know (and refuse to admit) that the loan will never be repaid. Much consternation and gnashing of teeth ensues a year later when the inevitable happens.
- The business owner asks for a project to be done and it ends up not being done to their satisfaction because they didn't feel the need to spec it formally/properly which then leads to partial or non-payment for said project. Everybody is unhappy and worse off.
- Long, difficult work days with somebody that you live with continue after you get home at 2AM because you don't have time apart to process the interpersonal conflict from the day. Occasional distaste turns into outright protracted hostility.
- Friends of friends are hired, do a bad job because of entitlement or incompetence, then get terminated for cause. This creates hostility between the business owner and the person that referred them in the first place. Much shit is talked and everybody's reputation is tarnished.
- Non-related employees develop bad attitudes towards related ones because of perceived nepotism. The team at large then underperforms due to low trust and bad morale.
Occasionally things are resolved amicably but I've seen multiple families outright broken because they chose to do business together. Best to steer clear altogether in my experience.
Not sure I see the next Facebook or Google being founded by folks 40+, but the older I get the less I aspire to that
(Yes, I recognize the irony of posting this on a website that is associated with YC)
- At 40+ you're more judicious about where you put your energy
- In your 40s, you have some accumulated wisdom: you recognize patterns faster and are more willing to change course
Do I have the blind faith to grind it out 5+ years in a stagnating startup on an off chance it might take off someday - especially if I've done that before? Looking for a better way is not always a bad thing. On another hand - my 20yo self wouldn't have believed my 40yo self - some things you just have to live through.
Part of what I'm identifying is a simple truth: in your 40s, you don’t have that same kind of “raw firepower” you had when you were younger.
That doesn't mean you can't still be ambitious or leverage your accrued wisdom, network, and resources to launch a company; it just means the dynamics are different.
It's possible only because I've a had a lot of years to learn and experiment with how to have MORE "firepower". I had so many health issues when I was younger, I couldn't accomplish much. It affected my life goals and perspective tremendously. At the same time, if I don't do enough things right now, I suffer faster. Even with my issues at a younger age, I could get away with much more when I was younger.
Part of it is motivation in that it went from being a personal project I use to something others primarily use but I also constantly ask myself "Is this really what I want to spend my time on" which was never really a thought back then when it was just fun (and something I needed)
Not exactly the same but echoes of the raw firepower thing where it's easy to fully commit if you either have nothing else or you're fully sure of your dedication otherwise you're sort of one toe in the pool and aren't sure whether to save your energy
I wish this self-harming myth would stop being repeated as a "simple truth". It's a simple falsehood. It comes from a 100-year old idea about scientific productivity, that science (and specifically mathematics) is a young person's game. This has been widely debunked for many decades now.
The reality is that a lot of people use this myth to not admit the fact that they burned themselves out and lost their drive. Then they don't take care of their mental health and use this unscientific nonsense as the excuse for why things went wrong.
I see it in colleagues all the time in science. Some burn out, others get far better, smarter, and can get things done that they couldn't have a decade before. It has nothing to do with wisdom, network, resources, etc.
Source: https://www.wsj.com/health/wellness/feeling-suddenly-older-s... Mirror: https://archive.ph/7C1Wl#selection-2469.0-2473.75
In an industry that exploits a pool of young workers, paying them less but assuring them that they're smarter and their skills are more up-to-date than those middle-aged coders of yesteryear, it's still effective rhetoric.
The WCC is just a tournament though, and the winner isn't always the best player. In 1993 for example Kasparov split from FIDE, and nobody thinks of FIDE's champions as "real" until Kramnik brought the titles back together in 2006. Meanwhile Kasparov lost a match and his title to Kramnik in 2000, but remained the highest rated player until he retired. And Magnus outranked Anand for years before bothering to contest the championship.
The top three classical players today are in their 30s (with Arjun right there behind Fabiano and Hikaru). The most impressive to me though are Anand in his fifties and Aronian in his forties, in the 10th and 11th spots. And then of course there's speed chess, where the youngsters are barely competitive.
As Otto Von Bismarck once said: "Fools learn from experience. I prefer to learn from the experience of others."
He was the Prussian friggin' Yogi Berra.
Maybe it's my bubble but I'm 41 and most people I know my age have kids in the 2-12 age range, not high school/college.
I would love to be a founder but I am tired as hell, and don't have the wealth to quit my job to start a company.
I’m 46 and my oldest is 18 and will start college next year (southern hemisphere), not that different from you after adjusting for our age difference :)
Here in Germany it has become extremely common to have children in your mid 30s or later.
if you give me a gun and point me at the Russians invading England, I'll probably head over and shoot in their general direction.
if you put me in a camp and i have to suffer a drill sergeant shouting at me, I'll probably shoot him in the knee.
Ive been around the corporate world and the equivalent of this pretty much never happens. And when it does it’s always been a young person standing up for themselves. So I think this is just big talk.
And by that I don’t mean a personal insult. But your answer doesn’t give me confidence in your view.
an older person who can't afford a mortgage, has no friends or family, and not much to live for other than work/food/shelter is one who is a lot harder to coerce.
So "founder" is not in the context of Silicon Valley startups.
But "startup" only means "new company" to most people these days.
I had experience in myriad aspects of releasing and maintaining software, managing release-level projects that were hybrid hardware/software (I originally hailed from a hardware genesis), and the myriad "soft skills" that are required of anyone that is going to ask cynical, hard-boiled people with bags of money (think Japanese executives) to help fund their efforts. I had (still have) a guaranteed income for life, so I would have been quite willing to work on equity, and had (still have) no problem, putting in a huge amount of hours (my GH Activity Graph is almost solid green. I keep busy).
My experience: no one cared about that. They wanted young jargonauts. I assume that's the formula that gets VCs to pony up cash.
They were probably correct, in pushing me away. I am not particularly enamored of the business plan model that seems to be in fashion, these days.
More work, more chaos, more micromanagement for less pay, what's not to like?
Im in my 40s and I even turn down good paying jobs at startups, when I see no upside for me (long hours, terrible business model).
But when you’re in your 40s or more, and your startup fails, it hits you harder, you lost some last good years to the stress of building a startup, for nothing. And now you’re even older and more tired.
It’s like there’s no point unless you’re sure you have something very promising, not just snake oil BS. Better to spend time with family and your hobbies.
What’s the point of getting rich at like 70? You’re old and all the romance of life has been drained. Your wealth just pays for better end of life care.
My best learnings have come from founders who were in their 40s when they started their businesses. One was even 58 when he started.
It's always been the case. 20 years ago I remember seeing the number 38 being thrown around.
By middle age you've had enough time to accumulate skills, a network, and capital, which can far outweigh the downsides of this period of your life.
Young adulthood is your fuck around period. Middle age is your find out period. It's really when the rubber hits the road and whatever you've been turning into a reality through your actions for the last 20+ years, happens.
Old age is when you live with the consequences.
Some would call it higher risk tolerance, others might say its risk ignorance.