The Average Founder Ages 6 Months Each Year | Hacker News Reader

The Average Founder Ages 6 Months Each Year

tomtunguz.com

38 points2bluesc20 comments

Grammar abortion. The age of the average founder rises. The average founder doesn't age at a rate less than 1 year per year.

No "average founder" exists, but the mathematical average of founder ages does!

However, an additive 6 months is definitely what some have done (1yr + 6mo). Stress is a killer.

Please just let me believe I can double my lifespan as percieved by the rest of the world by becoming the average founder.

I would say that in the years I was a founder I definitely aged faster than that ;)

100%, I think there were weeks when I aged a year...

Title is very misleading - founders are older every year they dont age faster...

I think it's possible to have a little fun with your titles without them being "misleading". And in this case there's a reading that's straightforwardly correct: there's an abstract "Average Founder", and each year that hypothetical person is six months older than the prior year's Average Founder.

I thought the title was pretty clear.

The title clearly states that the average founder doesn't grow old as fast as everyone else. I assume ur actually meant that the age of the average find increases 6 months every year. So, no, not very clear

If the title was true they actually age slower. Begin a startup to extend your life!

Haha that is fair - i thought they age an extra 6 months due to all the stress

Aww was hoping this would be a Peter Thiel immortality quest story :/

title definitely made me click and was true enough that i wasnt mad

It'd be interesting to see how this correlates across markets in different eras of history.

At the core, being a "founder" (as cringe as the cult around that word has become) is about accumulating capital. As technology advances it becomes more capital-intensive to create. You outcompete other businesses based on how advanced your technology is. Older people generally have more money even if for no other reason than they've had more time to accumulate it.

Thus, so long as you are still able to grasp the concepts related to the technology and can act upon it to accumulate more capital, you're at an advantage in the quest to start a successful business over younger people. Not an insurmountable advantage for the younger people to overcome, mind, but it's still an advantage.

I don't think technology is a linear progression towards more and more capital intense businesses.

Software businesses in the 2000-2020 era were famously capital light. Much more so than the technology businesses that came before them. I think these extremely capital light businesses were an aberration that briefly lowered average founder age and now we're just reverting to the mean.

Yes, AI is capital intense, but many of the world's previous technological endeavors were also capital heavy.

My current experience is quite the opposite, I have the feeling I aged more than 1 year in the last 6 months after funding....

Devs age 6 years every year

Does this go up exponentially based on how many companies you found?

Unlike the rest of us who age 12 months every year ...

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