The Young Entrepreneur Myth | Hacker News Reader

The Young Entrepreneur Myth

paul.kedrosky.com

48 pointsbd33 comments

I know several people in the 55+ age range that are starting businesses right now including my father. His problem is that at 59 it is near impossible to find someone who will hire you for 4-5 years, so why not start your own business? He has enough cash to start a small business without outside investment and he can use his 30 something years of industry connections to drive business to his new company. It seems significantly less risky than if I were to tomorrow even though I fit the more typical demographic.

"...he can use his 30 something years of industry connections to drive business to his new company..."

He can also use his 30 something years of industry experience to know what to do without too many false starts. Don't discount meaningful experience. Not everything important is learned from a book.

As a part of their training, CIA analysts are shown satellite photos of a civil war battleground near Washington DC. There is what appears to be a large open field there. They are asked for an analysis. Afterward, they take a field trip to the actual site. There, they discover that the "large open field" actually has undulations that are as much as 10 feet from peak to trough.

Being there on the ground can be a drastically different experience from reading reports and looking at remote data! 30 years of industry experience can give you some special insights.

I think HN needs a "spoiler" tag.

Whoops, I didn't stop to think that CIA analyst trainees might be reading this site! Anyhow, they had this bit on freaking NPR!

My dad is doing exactly the same. He's in his late 60's and officially retired so he already has a good pension meaning he doesn't need to make money straight away to survive.

He's doing it for fun, it's much better than sitting around doing nothing but drinking chardonnay and it keeps him young and sharp.

My dad started a company after age 55 that was sort of interesting. He was VP at a Canadian subsidiary of a 50 year old American construction company that had been run into the ground by 20 something lawyers/entrepreneurs/whizkids. When the parent company entered chapter 11, he and a couple of the other employees at the Canadian subsidiary got a loan from the bank, got access to the construction equipment of the bankrupt company, and took over the government contracts that were the bread and butter of the now bankrupt company. He made a significant amount of money in the four years before the parent company managed to exit chapter 11. The twenty something lawyers/entrepreneurs probably moved on to fleecing other investors.

The 3D chart at the end is an awful way to present the data - at the first data-point (1996), you can visually compare the graphs easily. After that, it becomes pretty much impossible.

We need an army of Tufte Jihadi Hackers to bring down bad charts across the interwebs. They can chant "Tufte is great! Tufte is great!" as they rootor the boxen of the infidel.

I agree in spirit... but the delivery needs work.

How about just: “war against пошлость!”?

(See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poshlost

http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...

http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/images/0002uN-5267.jpg

)

Duh? There is no myth. The "accepted wisdom" in most circles except the startup scene is that you should wait until you have years of experience before starting a company. The whole point of pg in his essays is that young people are best fit for the job. Not everybody agree.

Yet again, the failure to distinguish between startups and small companies generally. This "proves" that Larry & Sergey starting Google at 25 is a bad data point by showing that a lot of 50 year olds start landscaping companies.

I don't think the tone of the article was that "it's bad to start a company when you're young", so much as "it's okay to start a company when you're old."

I'm not sure if you mean it to, but something about that strikes me as derogatory toward 50-year-olds with landscaping companies. They are taking a big risk too, and doing something important, even if it's not as sexy as a 20-year-old making a web startup.

(Or maybe it's just the older I get, the less enthralling the young, inexperienced founder appears to me?)

A landscaping company is structurally different from a startup. That kind of service business only scales linearly.

If the comments on the linked page are to be believed, it's worse than your assumption: Apparently Kauffman only selected "small businesses" with at least $1MM annual sales and 50 employees.

That excludes an awful lot of landscaping companies AND legitimate startups.

My gut also says it skews a little towards older entrepreuners. Because it takes time grow to $1MM in sales, and I'd imagine that more young people found startups that fail than do 40 and 50 year olds.

There were actually two different reports: one about general entrepreneurial activity index (3D graph) [1] and another one more specific about tech companies (39 years median age of founder, $1MM revenue) [2].

While your critique is probably on spot for [1], I'm not so sure about [2].

Authors defined "technology" company as working in: semiconductors, computers, communications, biosciences, defense/aerospace, environmental, software, innovation/manufacturing related services (check Appendix for more detailed classification).

Age of founder was counted at the time of the incorporation of the company.

Of course, there is a survivorship bias, but doesn't this just mean that companies founded by older founders had higher chances to grow to $1MM in sales/20 employees/branches with 50 employees?

[1] http://www.kauffman.org/uploadedFiles/kiea_042709.pdf

[2] http://www.kauffman.org/uploadedfiles/Education_Tech_Ent_061...

Hmm, (this is from word-of-mouth), note that 34's also the average age people get their PhDs.

I doubt there's a correlation between degrees and entrepreneurship, but there's something about that age that seems interesting.

At least in the US, I'm pretty sure the average age of a PhD (at least in the sciences) is closer to 27 than 34. 27 = 18 + 4 years undergrad + 5 years grad school.

The problem with that is all the outliers. Such as my mom just finished her second PHD at 58. Also, lot's of people only finish their dissertation at the 10 year deadline before they need to take more classes.

Exactly, 27 is sort of the practical lower bound, and probably a median. I believe very few people complete a PhD before 27, but many complete one after. Years in industry, years off, taking an extra year here or there, it adds up. This means the average will be significantly higher than the "optimal" or even "median" solution.

Actually, it's not that remarkable to have a PhD by 24 in the UK. Our university system's much more intensive than the American one; three years to your bachelors', three years of flat-out research for the PhD. (We don't do quals.)

I was slower; I was 26, which was pretty typical. Four year undergrad because I did a Masters, four year PhD because I overran a bit and started my postdoc before I'd finished writing up.

UK PhD's are not as intensive or valuable as American PhD's. The lack of a qualifier and the relatively lax criteria on which a PhD is awarded are two reasons for this.

Got a source for that? I'm pretty sure that the institution I went to you (hint: it's got more Nobel Prizes than yours) would disagree.

Here you go: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=40...

Without opining one way or the other about the young entrepreneur myth, is this the best metric to prove or disprove it?

I'm assuming the "rate of entrepreneurship" means the percentage of people in that age range who are entrepreneurs. If that's the case, wouldn't the mid to older age ranges have an advantage, since people who started being entrepreneurs in their twenties, could conceivably still be entrepreneurs in their 30s and beyond?

In other words, at the upper age ranges you're counting both people who just started being entrepreneurs as well as people who are continuing to be entrepreneurs. Whereas in the 20-25 age range, the only pool of people to count is the just-starting entrepreneurs.

I think it would be more informative to show the median age of first-time founders. The article linked in this post mentions the average and median age for founders is 39, but in the context of this myth it makes a difference if that's a 39 year old first time founder or if he's on his seventh company and has been an entrepreneur since he was 19.

It's really a time tradeoff. I see the first option, as pg and others espouse, as being the typical 20-something right out of college with no life (family life) and no money. They can afford to spend 100 hours a week on their startup gaining knowledge and experience as fast as they can. Since they have no outside commitments and no huge debts holding them down (other than college), they can do this.

The other option is to work a normal job for a decade building experience and knowledge slowly over time and then when you're in your mid-30's start your company. It's a race to gain knowledge and experience and while one way might be preferable to the other, it doesn't mean it can't be done either way.

"It's a race to gain knowledge and experience..."

Good point. The right job can actually help you play leap frog once you start your own business because of the experience. The wrong job is just a waste of time and life.

More findings from this study are here:

http://www.kauffman.org/research-and-policy/education-and-te...

are the people 55+ just becoming entrepreneurs like a youngster? or are they entrepreneurs with a ton of experience already? (success or failure)

When you are young, you have more time, more tolerance for risk, more imagination.

This happens because successful young entrepreneurs grow old and if they choose to start a new business they fall into one of the other categories along with first-time older entrepreneurs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com