Comment by richardjordan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by richardjordan | Hacker News Reader

Jason raises a good point. The stresses of startups often go unmentioned, or certainly minimized, in the myth-of-the -heroic-founder out startup narratives become after the fact of a success. Failure and hardship are rites of passage, right?

But the collateral damage is real. Going out on a limb financially is celebrated but most stories don't end with a win - just the ones we tell. Most startups fail and a lot of these risk takers we celebrate end up with financial strains for years to come, busted relationships or broken marriages. Anything can derail the startup process. Experienced entrepreneurs are acutely aware of this and if the end comes when you're out on that limb it can be devastating.

I am sure there are many more suicides and countless lives broken that we just don't hear about because they never achieved prominence or success. It's worth pausing a moment to think about that.

To the criticism of Jason's post. He has his haters for whatever reasons, though I find them to be highly unfair - I think it's clear that he genuinely loves startups and will do whatever he can to help the ecosystem succeed. I've met him twice and he's been nothing but generous. I think it's wrong to accuse him of using this for traffic. It's an important point he's making, and he's right nobody was talking about it in this case, for some reason.

But the collateral damage is real. Going out on a limb financially is celebrated but most stories don't end with a win - just the ones we tell.

The biggest danger from startups as I see it isn't even the financial loss. That's very bad, don't get me wrong-- $100,000 losses aren't uncommon-- but it isn't the worst thing. The worst thing that comes out of startup failure is the confluence of opportunity cost with the extremely harsh age-grading of VC-istan.

Most industries give you 25 years to build a career, and then 15 more on the plateau before you even start to worry about age discrimination. That's something people start to face in their 60s, not 30s. In VC-istan, you have much less time and losing 2 years to a dogshit startup is catastrophic. The loss of opportunities even between 25 and 30 is a substantial drop. By 35, if you're not retired or an executive (never mind whether you actually want to manage) people start to ask what happened.

VC-istan is a hypocritical culture, because it superficially champions risk and failure, but if you don't have an unbroken stream of successes, you become yesterday's dogshit pretty much immediately. What "we accept failure" means in VC-istan is that people with the political skill to make their failures appear to be someone else's fault can continue their careers uninterrupted, but how is that different from the rest of Corporate America? It's not. VC-istan is just as narcissistic and intolerant of missteps. If you're not VP/Eng by 35 and a Founder by 40, goodbye.

The real calamity you risk in a bad startup is the career damage. You can easily end up in a position well below your level of ability in the next job, and once that happens, you're screwed because most people get bored rapidly and lose motivation when this occurs. I have no idea what happens to the people who fall under their age curve. I hope to never find out.

It's no wonder why people are so depressed. A world in which the aging process starts so prematurely is depressing. It's like modeling, but with uglier people.

Maybe so. But there is life outside venture capital - lots of it, in fact. Most of America's biggest companies got started outside the VC ecosystem. It's possible, although it may take some unconventional thinking at times.

The other point to bear in mind is that a bad startup does not mean any particular individual was responsible. I've had a bad startup in my lifetime and went on to have a successful 2nd one, as did 2 of my cofounders there. The original startup was VC funded. 2 of the 3 others were not.

The other point to bear in mind is that a bad startup does not mean any particular individual was responsible.

I agree 125%. Everyone who understands business knows that it's a risky world in which good people can make mistakes, or even do everything right and still fail.

My point is that this "we accept failure" attitude in VC-istan is paper-thin. If you're a 35-year-old with a 32-year-old's resume, you're judged to be a permanent loser, and you're competing with people who haven't made mistakes yet.

When VCs say "we invest in people, not ideas" they're full of shit. They invest in resumes. Oh, and if you want to become fundable, you should spend your 20s in finance, not tech, so as to exploit the VCs' "just like me" bias. Dirty secret: most founders are ex-bankers and traders. There's a reason for that.

If all you have to show is a resume and ideas, the above is probably true. You're then subject to all the stereotyping and pattern-matching that VCs are known for.

Many VCs respect traction and revenue though, so going on ideas alone is not the only way.

As for the part about most founders being ex-bankers and traders part, that's not my experience, at least. Nor does it seem to be true of most of the tech founders I read about, although alot of them certainly do bring in financial firepower as their companies grow.

Surely, surely the experience bonus of having a startup under your belt (even a failed one) outweighs being two years older, to any rational VC?

If not, I think my opinion of SV just went down yet another notch...

I don't know enough VCs to know if VCs themselves are discriminatory, but I've definitely seen a lot of age discrimination in VC-funded companies, and it usually starts to effect people around the mid-30s if they don't have a couple executive-level roles under their belt.

It's not explicit ageism so much as brutal and unrealistic age-grading that doesn't allow for career mistakes. If you're 40 and an executive, no one looks askance at you, but if you're 40 and still a full-time programmer, you're judged to be a loser unless you can prove that you're a top-1% engineer (which is miserable because most of the people you have to prove yourself to are not even top 20 percenters.)

My shortest job ever (3.5 months) was a company where I was brought into a management role and my responsibility was to generate paper that would be used to get rid of some "old" (late 20s to 40s) engineers. I was to be the 28-year-old douche who fired the old-timers, because the 25-year-old douche they hired 3 months earlier (now a full-blown manager, last I heard) to do it didn't want to get his name dirty.

Being asked to perjure myself and disparage people whose work I knew nothing about (but whom I liked personally) ended that job quickly.

At least according to PG, VCs like you more with a failure than with nothing. One of his essays also refers to a claim that older founders are more likely to be successful and to run their companies sustainably -- fewer eighty hour work weeks, etc. I dunno for sure, but I guess the person you're replying to probably doesn't know what he's talking about, because I haven't seen anyone claim before that there's a serious age barrier in startups, especially to the degree that that would be a primary concern if you failed in your mid to late twenties.

I really know nothing about whether VCs have a tendency to age-discriminate. But ageism is rampant in VC-istan startup culture. It's not so severe that older people can't get hired, but they tend to get less respect if they haven't held executive roles by age 40.

I tend to think of this age discrimination as something where both classes are victims. Older programmers start losing opportunities, but younger programmers are attractive precisely because they're easier to take advantage of. Both young and old lose in this.

I really don't get why you would call it "VC-istan" then, because that makes it sounds like you're trying to disparage VCs. Also, it makes a whole host of your arguments in your original post irrelevant, because what we're talking about is founder-suicide, not employee suicide. Last, it's kind of offensive that you use the "-istan" suffix pejoratively as you are.

I think before you go around slamming the VC culture in this particular thread, you might want to consider that Jody Sherman was well into his forties when he founded Ecomom.

Sure, which means it was probably his last opportunity to be funded. (Also, I'm 29, so I have no personal issue with age discrimination-- yet. But it will become "our issue" for all of us, and I recognize the time pressure that it injects into all stages of the career game as unhealthy.)

Outside of VC-istan, the idea that you face inexorable career decline in your 50s would seem bizarre, brutal, and unreasonable.

Maybe. But most entrepreneurs live inside VC-istan. So what happens in the fields of elysium doesn't really matter to us :-/

Sad to say, as someone who just recently passed 40 and is definitely feeling the agism of Silicon Valley up close and personal.

You're saying that even if 5 years down the road ecomom had turned into a 5x or 10x return for the investors, he still would have trouble raising money for his next idea?

I think as the other reply you got to this states. It's not slamming VC culture. It's recognizing a reality. And your point actually reinforces it.

Jody Sherman - who committed suicide after all - was under the increased pressure of knowing if he doesn't make THIS one a hit, he probably won't be given another chance. That is part of the whole stress, and the problems related to it, that are in question in this thread.

The real calamity you risk in a bad startup is the career damage. You can easily end up in a position well below your level of ability in the next job, and once that happens, you're screwed because most people get bored rapidly and lose motivation when this occurs. I have no idea what happens to the people who fall under their age curve. I hope to never find out.

I don't claim any personal experience forming a startup but I've never heard anyone complain of adverse effects of a failed startup on their professional careers. The skills that you develop in the mere act of trying are always touted as a consolation prize for a startup that fails. Within reason[1], these skills are presumably valuable in themselves and would make for good additions on a CV/resume. Do you have any examples of anyone hurting their career from a failed startup?

[1] Obviously, claiming failure of a startup trying to market perpetual motion machines would probably not be wise.

I wish I could upvote you more than once for this.

It also doesn't matter if something in life derails you from the game for a few years. I have the situation where the first several years of the life of my special needs child required a different approach to things. Am I any worse at doing startups than 5 years ago. Hell know, I am more experienced than ever. I've done startups for over a decade. I have had some real successes. No home runs (the one exit I got was small 7 figures and the acquirer tanked shortly afterwards), but I can show a track record of knowing what I'm doing.

But I'm now 41.

Given that the route to startup success now seems to go through angels, unless you are a superstar who can go straight to a big Series A with a VC. Many angels - not all - are young and made their money being in early in someone else's startup. Their comfort leve is investing in younger and less experienced people.

VCs themselves are looking to find Zuckerberg cos they missed him first time around.

No point complaining. It's the reality I live in. Just means I have to bootstrap longer and find revenues earlier. I am hoping this just means I build a stronger company. Getting funding to grow is never easy. It's not supposed to be, but the system is broken when it completely discounts experience in favor of youth and an ability of strings enabling you to work 100-hour weeks living on Ramen.

value in any form will be rewarded. IMHO you have this completely backwards - your age is an advantage, not a disadvantage

I don't know. I've gotten in more trouble in my career for being too good and overperforming than vice versa. I can name two instances of managers who fucked me over specifically because they saw my technical skill and intelligence as threats. (One put me on bad projects till I quit. The other tried to get me to fire people who didn't deserve it and I told him to fuck off.) I may be an outlier, but one of the things I like about the HN community is that I'm less of one. The danger of being too good is quite real.

So if you take someone like me, add 15 years of badassness (to age 44) but somehow fuck up that person's career on paper so he's stuck in junior-level jobs, you have someone who's a complete mess: an incorrigible overperformer.

I think that once you're 1.5-2.0 sigma, in capability, above the social position that's available to you, your goose is cooked because it's hard to condescend in the right way and, once the discrepancy is vast enough, it becomes an impossible task.

>>>I think that once you're 1.5-2.0 sigma, in capability, above the social position that's available to you, your goose is cooked because it's hard to condescend in the right way and, once the discrepancy is vast enough, it becomes an impossible task.

I think that software is a great field for these talented individuals. The necessary tools(other than luck) to produce profitable software products are: 1)talent, 2)experience, 3)a powerful enough computer to develop your software, and 4)an economically feasible way to distribute your software.

It seems like your "1.5-2.0 sigma, in capacity" individuals possess 1) by definition. 4) is ubiquitous now that the internet and payment processing are cheap and ubiquitous. 2) seems achievable for anyone who has 1). 3) is affordable to most interns I know in the software industry!

That said, I agree with your observations(in this and other comments) in reference to corporate structure and social positions and managers and etc. Managers shouldn't be managing their underlings, they should be managing away all of the bullshit that makes their underlings less successful.

VC's are probably just crunching the numbers here, no? If 50-year old founders were more likely to succeed, don't you think that we'd see more of them getting funded?

My experience is that unlike in finance, a lot of older guys in tech are unfortunately out of date.

I'm in my 30s, and it's taken a ton of time/effort for me to even keep up with tech in my area, and I'm hopefully doing a bit better than treading water here. I'm not sure that too many people would want to do that over a 20-30 period, particularly since most tech employers don't encourage their employees to learn new skills.

I see a lot of "You know how to do X, so do more of that..." type of stuff. Tech employees need to develop their own learning regimen outside of work to keep up to date.

Only the paranoid survive. Always be paranoid that you're out of date. Never stop learning.

Ilya's mother reportedly said, "I strongly believe that if Ilya did not start this project and stayed in school, he would be well and alive today."

I agree on the startup stress but you have to admit that the above quote isn't fair either. College kids attempt suicide at a pretty regular clip - be it from social or institutional pressures. I personally believe that suicidal people are prone and it's not their circumstances so much as it's them.

> I agree on the startup stress but you have to admit that the above quote isn't fair either. College kids attempt suicide at a pretty regular clip - be it from social or institutional pressures. I personally believe that suicidal people are prone and it's not their circumstances so much as it's them.

But you can't separate social context from this, can you? College students, for example, are very much liminal figures. One essentially enter adolescence somewhere around high school and becomes a full adult after graduating college in our society. This extended adolescence is very likely a part of the problem, and it keeps people in this liminal state.

The same problem exists in start-ups. We think of the start-up phase as being sort of an extended rite of passage, which involves insane work schedules, personal sacrifices, and the like and which lasts from founding to IPO or acquisition. But that puts people through the same basic problems just to a greater extent. Again, I have nothing against insane work schedules and personal sacrifices. These can be helpful in this rite of passage process but one has to admit that they are not sustainable, and therefore one goal needs to narrow the scope. I would prefer to see the scope narrowed to be from launch to first customer delivery. Sure, put in 160 hr workweeks between those points, have bunk beds in the break room, or whatever you need to do. An extended hackathon isn't a bad way to look at it. Let everyone live in the office for all I care, but make it a short and reasonable time for this. Don't let it stretch on for five months let alone five years. (In reality two weeks is probably optimal.) Then get back to a normal work week, and running a proper business.

> Failure and hardship are rites of passage, right?

They are and they should be. The problem though is that rites of passage are, well, rites of passage. You go from one social state to another.

The confusion I think is in making the liminal state in that rite the object of the passage. It's a paradoxical place to be, being at once both very lonely, and filled with the bonds with the initiation brothers and sisters.

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