
Why startups shouldn’t just be for the young - iProject
http://gigaom.com/2012/04/06/why-startups-shouldnt-just-be-for-the-young/
======
japhyr
One valuable asset for a startup is domain expertise. There are two kinds of
domain expertise: academic knowledge, and experience in the field. You can get
academic knowledge when you are young, but experience takes time.

I've only been to one tech conference, but it made me feel better about just
getting into the startup world in my late 30's. One demographic I saw at the
conference was a whole bunch of young, really smart developers who had no idea
what to focus their skills on.

People with strong experience in a particular field can have a valuable
perspective on what kinds of problems are worth solving in their field. They
also know what solutions have been attempted in the past, and why those
solutions were not ideal. This kind of knowledge can help a startup avoid the
mistakes people have made in the past, and create a more effective product or
service.

~~~
keeptrying
Good in theory but in practice perseverance seems to win over anything else
from what I've seen.

~~~
kstenerud
YES! Tenacity is THE biggest contributor to success, along with the ability to
learn the lessons failure teaches.

Domain expertise and a strong academic foundation can give you a massive edge,
but alone they are not enough.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Hm. Young people are not known for tenacity. In fact, no one is. Its rare. And
I'd hazard, uncorrelated with age.

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mindcrime
Meh... it isn't about how "startups _shouldn't_ just be for the young,"
because they're not. No actual intelligent, reasonable person with any life
experience at all actually believes bullshit like:

 _Startups are for the young and hungry. You’re thirty? You’re too old. If you
haven’t made your first million by 25, you’ve missed your chance. If you’re
not working 130 hours a week, you’ll never create the next Google._

Seriously, it's a fun stereotype and it leads to cool movies like _The Social
Network_ but - back here in the real world - there are plenty of startups
founded by 30+ folks. And, in the real world, it's results that matter in the
end, so if you can compete, you can compete. It doesn't matter if you're 19,
29, 39, 49, or whatever.

Then again, I'm a 38 year old startup founder, so what do I know?

------
svdad
As an old (37) guy with experience in a couple of start-ups, there's another
benefit to having older, more experienced people on the team -- if you get the
right people, they will have seen the problems and done the work before, and
will save you a lot of big mistakes up front.

The start-up I currently work for was founded by a bunch of very smart, very
young engineers over four years ago, and we're still dealing with all the bad
engineering decisions they made -- decisions that look obvious to an
experienced engineer but aren't obvious to someone without the requisite cuts
and bruises. Having even one seasoned engineer on the team then would have
saved the company a lot of pain over the subsequent years and would have put
us in a much better position now.

~~~
devinfoley
Those bad engineering decisions the founding engineers made may have been what
allowed them to move fast enough to build a startup that's still in business
4+ years later.

If you know exactly what your customers want, you should take the time to
build it correctly the first time. But if you're innovating and creating a new
product, you'll need to perform a lot of experiments before you figure out
what your customers really want.

Experiments shouldn't be engineered perfectly. It's better to have a creaky
product that customers want than a bullet-proof system that nobody wants.

~~~
rprospero
It's absolutely true that, sometimes, you need a quick and dirty solution to
move quickly. For instance, on a project that I worked on when I was younger,
I was running data through an O(n^6) algorithm when there was an O(n)
algorithm available. However, getting something up and running at O(n^6) was
far more valuable than waiting two weeks to work all the bugs out of the more
complicated O(n).

On the other hand, that same project also had an object responsible for both
displaying bitmaps on the screen and also for calculating statistical
uncertainties. This unholy mash-up of two completely unrelated concepts was a
constant impediment to development. If I'd had an experienced developer on the
project, she'd have caught it in half a second. Splitting the class would have
been trivial and wouldn't have delayed the project longer than a bathroom
break. However, since the other developers were just as green as I was, the
class stayed in and grew into a nightmare that _prevented_ us from doing
further experiments toward customer satisfaction. I think this is the kind of
advantage that svdad was talking about.

------
geebee
I'm a 40 year old with two kids living in San Francisco, and I actually know a
lot of people in my position who work for startups. It's not as big a career
risk as people thing, especially in high tech, where career stability is more
valuable than job stability. The people who work for startups tend to have a
lot of connections and very sharp skills - qualities that make it easy for
them to find a new job quickly.

There are a few downsides. The startups they tend to work for aren't the
"rundown apartment eating ramen" kind of deals. They pay decent salaries,
though they do offer more upside in exchange for lack of job stability (though
like I said, job stability isn't such a big deal if you have a reserve fund
and have very sharp skills). Even so, working for this sort of startup is more
like having a job, more casual than a typical bigco but nowhere near as
liberating as the PG-style ycombinator startup. Quasi "stable" startups aren't
necessarily any better than a job in bigco, and the more they resemble a bigco
in terms of pay and benefits, the more likely they are to behave like a bigco
toward employees. Both types of organizations do display a wide range of
workstyles.

Also, I don't know how it will be as these folks get older. I've found "age
discrimination" per se to be overstated so far in my life, but that doesn't
mean age won't make for a poor cultural fit. Plus, I am "only" 40... so who
knows, I may feel it more later. When you have two kids at home, certain types
of startups (the kind that might use the term "brogramming", for instance)
generally aren't going to be a good fit for a 40+ year old with kids and a
mortgage. I know a programmer in his 50s with teenage kids - the sort of dude
who is super sharp in terms of intelligence and technical prowess, physically
trim, and a little edgy. He works with these sorts of companies, but he says
he sometimes looks toward more of a consulting arrangement.

Lastly, these folks could be at risk in a true meltdown. The last time I saw
this was when during the dot-com bust, when genuinely talented programmers
just couldn't get a gig. The big companies did shed some people, so I can't
say bigco is necessarily safer, but there was little doubt that if you needed
a stable income, a large organization was better shelter from the storm. This
sort of true bust is rare, but it does happen. That said, if I did lose my
job, I'd rather have the kind of network and technical skillset more common
among a startup type than a bigco type who had gotten too comfortable over the
last decade...

My lesson learned so far is that everything does carry some risk, and that in
some ways a bigco career _can_ carry greater risks than a series of
startups... there isn't a single hard and fast rule for this.

------
padobson
_But the vast majority of us simply don’t work as well if we drive ourselves
too hard._

And the vast majority of startups fail.

I agree with the premise that you can never be too old. Even if you have a
family and a mortgage, you're really just dealing with numbers.

If you're doing a startup and you're 20 years old and you need $1000/mo to
live, then some amount of time every week is going to be devoted to making
$250. Find a job that pays you $10/hr and work 25 hours a week, and work on
your startup 40 hours a week. A 65 hour week in pursuit of your passion is a
good place to be in life.

Similarly, a 30 year old doing consulting that has a family and a mortgage (or
2) may need $6000/mo to survive. Well, it's the same calculation - you need
$1500/wk. So get your skills to the point that you can charge $100/hr. Consult
for 15 hrs a week and work on your startup for 50. 65 hours a week in pursuit
of your passion - and still another 60 or so waking hours to spend with your
family.

Like everything in life, it's just positioning yourself to get the math to
work for you.

------
fellars
As a relatively "old" guy (Its hard to write that as I don't feel old at 35)
doing his first startup, I appreciate reading these articles. Although, the OP
is on his 3rd startup and appears to have had some successes (especially if he
had stock options from working at Apple).

I'd be curious to hear from people who left corporate world and went into the
startup world later in life and how the adjustment was.

I touched on this from my perspective in a recent blog post:
<http://dannydo.es/a-startup-despite-these-7-reasons/>

------
benjohnson
As you get older, You find there's virtue in having 60% of the success with
only 40% of the labor.

~~~
monsterix
Which is something those rare young startup entrepreneurs realize too, isn't
it?

------
adahm
I'm 26 but couldn't agree more with a lot of what's said. I'm married younger
than most in my industry and feel an intense pressure to work all hours of the
week, essentially be on call 24/7. And most kids entering my field do, they
make their job their whole life. I'm just not willing to do that and think
it's very important to draw those work/life boundaries. It doesn't make you
less of an asset at your job because most of the work I see is work for work's
sake, to seem like they are putting in the effort. Working smarter, not harder
is absolutely right. And there are also other tactics that are important.
Working from home if need be, adjusting your hours so you can make time for
your family/kids and still get things done, etc. Burn out is a big risk and my
guess is that even though most kids in startups are young, there are many who
are unsuccessful because they think they need to work 100+ hour weeks and just
can't maintain the pace. They get burnt out, fail at what they're doing, and
end up squandering a lot of talent. If they'd just rationed their energy, who
knows what could have happened.

------
demian
Wasn't the "startups are for/mostly created by young people" myth already
debunked?

------
j45
I don't know if startups are for the young.

In the 30's you can take the shortcut secret: Learn from the success of others
instead of having to splash everywhere furiously in your 20's to figure it out
on your own.

The lean startup methedology specifically comes to mind on how to get stuff
really done, and out of being a 'startup'. Being a startup should only be a
temporary thing.

If the goal of startups is to learn the business skills to "start" a business
model to become a lasting business, startups are a different kind of time use
for me in my 20's than in my 30's.

Most of my 20's were spent learning business. My late 20's into 30's have been
about buckling down and getting results from what I've learnt. Rubber to the
road, no more confusing startup 'activity' with results. Schools over, time to
deliver and launch, launch, launch.

Having other demands on me make me better. Who doesn't work better with the
pressure of a deadline? Imagine what a family or children can help do. I'm not
afraid of it.

Maybe VC's want my whole living energy don't know themselves that I get more
done in 8 hours than burning myself for 16 hours a day 7 days a week. I did
that for 6 years, zero vacations, I know it better than anyone who expects it
indirectly. I can still do it, but I'm being smarter about it. The opportunity
has to be right. Until then, my 8-10 hours a day are focused on being
productive, no distractions, and no longer confuse activity with results.

If running businesses are for the middle aged, the young seem to be often
forced out of startups once they get going. To prepare for this, I spent my
20's getting 20 years of business experience so I was the equivalent of a 40
year old in experience by the time I hit my 30's.

I'm not sure if it was the best or ideal course but I sure am more comfortable
and prepared for the ups and down and continue to build my focus daily.

------
deanostent
There is nothing like the energy and vitality you feel when you are building
something that you feel passionate about. While I have a sucessful
professional career, the small strides that you make with a startup are much
more gratifying than even the best day at work. You appreciate this more as
you get older.

------
therandomguy
I'm 33 and launching our idea next month. My biggest fear is that while I'm
working on it part-time along with spending time with family and friends,
somewhere a 21 yr old is eating Ramen and working away 20 hr days to
annihilate my project.

~~~
paulhauggis
I always thought that too. But, you have a vision for your startup. Not
everyone has that same vision.

If they start copying you, it's fine because you will always be one step
ahead.

I have found that the vast majority of people have lots of ideas but never
want to put the effort into actually completing them.

The ones that do usually have their own ideas and most likely won't be copying
you.

------
jasonhitchcock
This post had nothing to with the title. It was an anecdote of work-life-
balance...

------
michaelochurch
28\. No idea if this makes me old or young. Don't care.

I'm pretty sure I'm not fundable because I just don't see the value in being a
billionaire. Ever. I'd get off around $10 million if money were the only
motivation. Solving interesting problems, helping people, teaching people so
the knowledge I have doesn't die when my body does, those are interesting to
me. Scoring huge "exits" to make rich people richer? Meh. Not averse to it,
but I don't care. Why would I? That rich people don't have enough money isn't
even on the top 100 of the world's most serious problems.

And if any VC ever shot a term sheet my way that had participating preferred
or multiple liquidation preferences on it, I'd feel like I was punched in the
face and never deal with him, or his firm, or anyone connected with him,
again.

The TL;DR of this sense: You know what's _not_ cool? A billion dollars. Unless
you're Louis CK, because he'd have fun with that shit:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_XiA4U_XsE>

I'm reaching the age where "just a programmer" positions (without, at the
least, informal technical leadership) aren't acceptable, and I definitely like
the blank-sheet creativity that's possible with startups, but I don't see
myself as being VC-istan "founder material". I won't have the necessary
connections to get funding till at least 35, and I stopped seeing any value in
being a billionaire around 24, when a short-term but scary health problem
convinced me of the utter-fucking-uselessness of material ambition.

It's not that I wouldn't be awesome as a founder. I have as good or better
odds than anyone else. I just have to recognize that by the time I'll be
fundable, having acquired the connections, I'll probably care even less about
billion-dollar exits.

~~~
mirsadm
I'm also 28 and have left my work to form a startup. Money is not a motivation
for me but I've been doing this for 8 months now and it is a big factor. If
someone offered $5 million dollars to me right now and buy my company I would
definitely say yes.

The reason is that it would give me the freedom to do whatever I want for a
long time. I wouldn't start buying expensive things because I was able to do
that when I was working as a senior software engineer anyway. There are so
many projects I'd love to be able to do for the sake of learning something new
which I am not able to do right now. I have to focus on earning money as my
funds will eventually run out.

------
Radzell
I'm a 20 year old with no obligations what so ever. I would say your wrong
startup isn't for the old it isn't for the in experience. I have run my own
consulting company since I was 15. I have been through the ups and downs of
hiring and firing, management, dealing with unruly customers, as well as
unruly employees. I would that the benefit of experience working as a
programmer on big project is that you know when it's time to stop. You have
found those ways to get through 60 hours werk. Mines being working out. You
know a good employee from a bad, and you know the difference between a
unmotivated employee, and one that needs to go. As a turned from a consulting
to a startup just recently I do see something young people the few like me do
have. We have time. I don't have any obligations, School will always be there
if I need it, even with my experience I am enough of stupid dreamer to follow
a good idea.

~~~
padobson
The presentation skills that you can learn in a few college-level
communications classes are invaluable for getting noticed and being taken
seriously. Your comment highlights this.

~~~
lukeholder
I agree.

Although all of us on HN like to think we can look past the grammar and poor
sentence structure and judge someone by their github account or code quality -
In reality humans are not built to evaluate others that way during first
encounter, and most people you interact with in a startup (like customers) do
not care about the code.

Thread OP sounded like a 20 year old.

~~~
unimpressive
>and most people you interact with in a startup (like customers) do not care
about the code.

Exactly. Technical debt is your problem; not the customers.

Right now, to the average person you're probably a wizard. (And to some of
your colleagues if your skills are of sufficient quality.) Nobody questions a
wizards magic as long as it _works_. (Except in the edge case where it is
indeed your colleagues observing.)

The best magic requires sleight of hand and people skills to perform.

EDIT: And since were all listing our ages here, 16.

