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Comment by tlogan | Hacker News Reader

The best time to start a business is in your 40s or 50s and when your kids are in high school or college. Here’s why:

- 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.

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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.

a business owner being 55+ is different statistic from a founder being 55+

This is true! However, "age" might be less of a deciding variable than experience, connections, and resources.

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."

There's a lot of talk in this thread about age-related wisdom. One thing that didn't take me long to figure out was that this...

> 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.

Particularly as the idea of “micro-startups” is becoming both more popular and accessible.

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)

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