
How Old Are Successful Tech Entrepreneurs? (2018) - spking
https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/younger-older-tech-entrepreneurs
======
dang
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17405997](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17405997)

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gavanwoolery
As someone who is nearing 40 and worked in many different areas of software
(including at 3 startups), with about 10 failed "micro startups" (i.e. hobby
projects) under my belt, I can confidently say that I still have not nearly
figured everything out. But at least I am not quite as dumb as I once was. :)

~~~
beat
After mastering a few skills, I can tell when I've mastered something when I
hit that point where I feel like the more I learn, the less I know.

There's a Zen saying for that (I know via Shunryo Suzuki)... Before you start
zen, mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers. But once you learn some
zen, mountains are no longer mountains, and rivers are no longer rivers. When
you master zen, mountains are just mountains and rivers are just rivers again.

~~~
deconstructive
This is the process of deconstruction taking place. It's the act of
internalizing the awareness of all of the moving parts of a dynamic,
interactive process in motion. To understand with intuition, just as much as
with observation, equalizing the cognitive substance of each with the other.

A sometimes often related example is that of a bicycle. To look at a bicycle
as a complete object, its integrity as a whole, represents a conceptual
recognition of the noun it is known by. It is a mineral, a thing, a bicycle.

To disassemble the bicycle to pieces, strewn across the concrete floor of a
garage, is to render it unto its parts, and destroys the recognition of the
original object. To scoop up all of those parts in a bag or bin, is to obscure
the bicycle as we once knew it.

The process of disassembly is a complex task, and so too, the act of
reassembly. But to reassemble the bicycle, is to understand it more
completely. To be able to repair one bike (or mountain, or river), or
duplicate parts and fabricate many bicycles (mountain ranges, tributaries),
from scratch, represents a greater power and command of the recognizable
object.

So now we have passed through all three stations. Discovery (learning to
recognize a distinct phenomenon), disassembly (rendering the recognizable
complex whole as the sum of its atomic pieces by destroying its
recognizability), mastery (the ability to utilize an inventory of elements as
a part listing, and create distinct recognizable things from them).

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ttul
This article does not surprise me. Survivorship bias feeds the narrative that
all breakaway successful companies are founded by 19-year-olds from Harvard -
and it's true that many have been. But the truth is young people found a lot
of horrible companies and a great deal of capital goes down the toilet in the
process.

My own startup experience over 20 years has taught me that there is a great
deal of life and business wisdom to be gained between age 20 and 40. I'm less
likely to make a wild-ass bet - one that is highly likely to fail, but might
just succeed wildly - and more likely to make a very calculated bet that has a
higher likelihood of pretty decent success. And because I'm already "old", the
clock is ticking, so I'm going to be more serious about getting results.

When I was young, I didn't care whether my business succeeded, because I had
all the time in the world. Now, it matters.

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lwb
At least part of this is due to just simple statistics, right? A 40 year old
has likely started more companies than a 25 year old, because they've had more
time.

I'd like to see more data comparing the success of a startup with the Nth
attempt that it represents for an entrepreneur. For example, is it better for
someone to try to start a bunch of little companies and hope one takes off, or
to work on one company for a long time? Etc.

~~~
rossenberg79
No, it isn’t. And I’ve said this before, a 45 year old has a grip on life that
an early 20 something can’t even conceive of, especially if they’ve just lived
a fairly easy life sailing through school and college thus far.

A 45 year old has a better idea of how life can be improved in ways that
matter, and has the connections and skills to capitalize on it. Sorry kids,
the big dogs will eat your lunch.

~~~
jshaqaw
I’m 43 for whatever that matters. I think the experience and gravity a 45 year
old brings vs a 25 year old is incredibly valuable. That said, at this point
in life I am no longer willing to give all my life to work. I have a family. I
realize how previously brief life is (ah mid age) and want to savor enjoying
it. I work hard but with definite limits. A 25 year old has no such burdens.
So there is a balance.

~~~
neilv
Honest points, though of course doesn't apply to all.

Of course, some people burn out, or were never focused enough on work to end
up knowing much more about work at 45 than they did at 25.

Others at 45 are as sharp and energetic about work as they ever were, and
constantly learning, with the added benefit of much more experience than they
had at 25.

Some people in early 20s start families, or would prefer to spend all their
time traveling and rock climbing.

Some people in 40s live to work, for the craft and/or bigger goals for the
world, and, even if they were financially independent already, would be doing
much the same work, even without being paid.

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neilv
When PG was first promoting having very young people do startups, IIRC, the
rationale included things like fewer obligations, more time to spend grinding
crazy long hours, willingness to live&work crammed into an apartment with a
few other people working crazy long hours.

Maybe it also included the perceived possible narrow opportunity window for
early dotcom funding, during the initial gold rush (which would be part of the
rationale for PG once encouraging interrupting college to do a startup). You
had to be there to appreciate how much of a race it was -- anyone who could
type the most rudimentary HTML could get funded or get hired by a startup.
There was much more "visionary" posturing than technical competence, and a lot
of displays of funding wealth (e.g., lavish offices and launch parties). You
didn't need to be good; you needed to grind hours, and/or strut confidently.
Teens/20yos were perfect for both. PG's version was more merit-oriented and
modest, with no Herman Miller furniture, but still with emphasis on grinding
huge hours.

Later, other people played up myths about the youngest having all the ideas
and insight and vision and brains. IME, these people were usually trying to
sell something, or to get cheap labor. It was often not that different from a
TV commercial for a canned beverage, coddling and suggesting an attractive
lifestyle and identity, to get a targeted demographic to buy what you're
selling. And of course we want to believe we're special, we're getting
external validation, and we don't know what we don't yet know, so this meme
has traction.

~~~
gdilla
The story we hear the most is of young CEOs. We don't hear about the 100x
failures of those who try the same. PG supports youth doing it because cost of
family/personal obligation is lower, which is true, but at the same time, at
the time he was talking about low capital software startups, the kind he was
interested in when YC started. But the flip side of the coin, is having 20
years of experience and domain knowledge, and a rolodex of potential customers
(and relationships) to milk with an idea you know will solve a need. It could
be a capital intensive endevor, and not a unicorn, but still good. We don't
hear a lot about those as celebrated stories in the media.

~~~
neilv
When learning from a successful young CEO icon, we need a healthy balance of
humility and skepticism, so that we benefit from the good stuff (e.g., sincere
bits they learned by virtue of their unusual experiences and access), but so
that we aren't taking investment advice from a lottery winner. Nor do we want
to be buying nutritional supplements ("vision", "smarts") pitched by a fitness
influencer who actually used steroids ("family money/connections", "terrific
luck", "backstabbing").

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3xblah
"The researchers find that, contrary to popular thinking, the best
entrepreneurs tend to be middle-aged. Among the very fastest-growing new tech
companies, the average founder was 45 at the time of founding. Furthermore, a
given 50-year-old entrepreneur is nearly twice as likely to have a runaway
success as a 30-year-old."

If you are a VC who would you rather be negotiating with? Why?

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aaavl2821
I'd be careful drawing conclusions about tech entrepreneurship from this
study. If you look at the actual paper (I somehow couldnt find a link to the
paper in the summary article... its here [0]), the authors used growth in jobs
as their metric for success. Employment growth is a very imperfect surrogate
for startup success. The paper says they also looked at sales growth and IPO /
M&A exits, but they dont show this data. Not sure how theyd get sales growth
data for all these companies in the first place. I wonder why they didnt
publish the analysis of age and sales growth, IPO and M&A exits? Maybe i
missed it?

Using employment growth as the success metric is biased towards high growth
labor-intensive companies (like specialty manufacturing firms), and against
high growth labor efficient companies (like tech and biotech).

The summary article linked here is pretty intellectually dishonest imo, the
tagline being "a definitive new study dispels the myth of the silicon valley
wunderkind". If they published data on age and sales growth, exit, or returns,
maybe they could say this is "definitive". I dont see how a study measuring
startup success based on job growth can be definitive. There are other studies
showing young founders do better, though they have their limitations as well.
The truth is probably that you can succeed as a founder at any age

I started looking at this study bc I was trying to find data on age bias in
biotech, which is the opposite of in tech. In biotech startups, the
conventional wisdom is that only experienced founders can succeed. But the
data does not support that. More $10B+ biotech companies have been started by
under 40 CEOs than over 40 CEOs, but most CEOs who get funded today are over
40 (or even 50). This doesnt mean young foudners are better in biotech, just
that a bias towards "experience" is not supported by data [1]

[0]
[https://www.ipr.northwestern.edu/publications/docs/workingpa...](https://www.ipr.northwestern.edu/publications/docs/workingpapers/2018/wp-18-11.pdf)

[1]
[https://www.baybridgebio.com/blog/young_founders_1.html](https://www.baybridgebio.com/blog/young_founders_1.html)

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JohnFen
A lot of this depends on how you define "success". By my own definition, my
first successful venture happened when I was 25 years old, but it was a rather
painful process largely due to my inexperience in business specifically and my
inexperience in life generally.

I've had a couple of successful ventures since then, in my 30s and 40s, and
each time it has been easier because I've learned a lot, in both business and
life, since then.

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areoform
We should be honest about ageism and what it really is, a yearning for the
innocent and spirited world of youth. We look at the young as a foreign land,
one that we have visited and (often) fondly remember. We believe that their
foreignness makes them immune to our conventions and imbues them with new
perspective. We chase after what we have come to see as exotic and tell
ourselves that the young will do the impossible simply because they aren’t
familiar enough with the customs of our land to know that it isn’t possible.

And sometimes that’s true. Except when it’s not. But, for the true believers,
the stories of the many don’t get in the way of the exotic few.

It reminds me of the trope, Born Sexy Yesterday, where a (typically male)
protagonist encounters an alien or displaced being who is highly attractive
and yet extremely naive (i.e. born yesterday). The protagonist is uplifted by
them and they serve as their introduction to the world. More often than not,
it goes even further. The protagonist _is_ the character’s world. Their
reference point for the rest of humanity and they view the mundane protagonist
as profound as they don’t know any better, transforming them both in the
process.

I believe youth plays the same role. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but
it’s what we want from the young. To be uplifted, seen as profound and
transformed. We want to shape the young so that we can be shaped by them in
turn.

Someone old can see through this desire even if they see us profound. They
have bitten the forbidden fruit of experience and simply know too much to be
awed by our mundane inanities. And so we shun them. Because they have better
boundaries and are mirrors that remind us of just how mortal we are.

If the young are foreign strangers visiting our strange land, the old are our
neighbors whom we’ve come to despise. We try to get away from them even though
we are them. We all grow old. And yet we all despise ourselves for doing it.

Humans are a schizophrenic lot.

~~~
AchieveLife
This hasn't been my experience at all as a young person. Really the old/young
paradigm is a shallow mask of personality traits and their relative
development.

As a young person I've encountered older individuals with the motive to

\- Shape me into their image (duplicating the ego)

\- Threatened by my existence (ego in survival mode)

\- Oppress my voice and project what they think I should be (super-ego acting
like a child)

\- Attempt to take advantage of my 'youthful ignorance' (ego with neutral/evil
alignment)

\- Interact with me like an individual and genuinely place interest in the
mutual growth (self)

I highly value people I run across who fit that last motive.

~~~
jimrhods23
"Oppress my voice and project what they think I should be (super-ego acting
like a child)"

I'm in my 40s and am managing a team of developers in their 20s. What may
sound like oppression many times is a desire to not go down a path to failure
that I can see from a mile away, but someone with less experience may not even
understand.

My way isn't always correct either. If you can back something up with great
supporting evidence, you win. I find that many people now don't feel they need
to back anything up with evidence and any sort of criticism is seen as
oppression.

"Interact with me like an individual and genuinely place interest in the
mutual growth"

I feel like if you don't run into someone who fits this motive, you won't even
listen to what they have to say because you feel like you are being oppressed.

"Threatened by my existence (ego in survival mode)"

You can thank companies that fire the people with experience and hire the
youthful and cheap for this.

~~~
ok_coo
Thinking about myself when I was that age, the biggest problem is that they
don't know what they don't know. (myself included) And I'm still there,
there's a ton I still don't know but looking back, it was egregious.

There is _no_ substitute for experience. That said, it's important to have
employees of all ages. I just hope people can find a place to work that
emphasizes building good teams instead of cost minimization because it's good
to have a balance.

~~~
JohnFen
> That said, it's important to have employees of all ages.

Yes, I agree wholeheartedly.

Experience is essential, as you point out. Experience is what lets you know
well in advance what is likely to work and what isn't, what the most fruitful
and harmful approaches are, and so forth.

Inexperience has its virtues as well. Experience (particularly recognizing and
avoiding errors before they're made) is not 100% effective, and can sometimes
make you discount an innovative approach that is valuable. Inexperienced
people, by virtue of a lack of preconceptions, can sometimes come up with
obviously impossible or impractical solutions that, in the end, aren't either
of those things.

If a workforce has a diverse set of people, including diversity of experience,
that makes the workforce stronger.

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jaden
> successfully “exited” the market, either by getting acquired by another
> company or going public in an IPO

> ...twice as likely to have a one-in-1,000 fastest-growing company

Is fastest-growing or an IPO necessarily a good measure of success for a
startup? For one, it excludes successful lifestyle businesses.

~~~
jrimbault
Actually defining what "success" _is_ should be the first step...

What is "sucess" in the general sense ?

I'm quite happy and successful, but I'm not an entrepreneur, nor do I want my
revenues to rise exponentially. I'm sure for other people "success" is
measured in the amount of money they get, but that seems really reductive.

~~~
JohnFen
Yes, this is exactly why I get a little nervous when the topic of "success"
comes about. More often than not, "success" is used as a synonym for "wealth".
Particularly in a study, where you really want to have something objectively
measurable.

Personally, I define "success" as "achieving your goals". For some, that may
be to maximize wealth. For others, it may be to live a certain sort of life,
or to have personal satisfaction, and so forth. There are probably as many
definitions of "success" as there are people.

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wildermuthn
Age is just a number that happens to correlate with obligations, health,
energy, ambition, etc. But whether these are weak or strong correlations, what
truly matters isn’t a number, but what kind of person you are.

As far as I know, YC doesn’t see any significant correlation between age and
success, most likely because their criteria for acceptance focuses on real
character traits rather than proxies like age. Using age to judge anyone —
whether young or old — is just lazy thinking.

Having said that, at the extremes of age, it makes sense to be lazy in a
virtuous way. A four-year-old would make a poor CEO. So would a 110-year-old.
There is a spectrum where you can make assumptions based on age. Where does
one draw the line in making assumptions based on age? 15? 20? 60? 80?

YC has already identified for us what matters when it comes to startup
success: a team of insanely determined founders who have the right mix of
intelligence and boldness. Age, given those qualities, is irrelevant.

~~~
JohnFen
> what truly matters isn’t a number, but what kind of person you are.

I'm actually not entirely sure what you mean by this, so my comment here may
be agreeing with you.

I don't think that "age is just a number". Age inevitably brings experience.
The older you are, the more situations you have encountered and the more
experience you have gained. I think discounting that is a mistake.

However, it's not like there's a linear or directly comparable relationship
here. People are different. One 50 year old can have a very different amount
of experience (or, more accurately, has learned more from their experience)
than another, and I have met 20-somethings that have learned more from life
than most middle-aged people.

That said, if you look at a person in their 20s and compare with the same
person in their 50s, the 50-year-old version is most likely wiser and more
knowledgeable than the 20-year-old version.

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Dowwie
Link to the study:
[https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3158929](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3158929)

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cerealbad
explanations for success are post-hoc and wrong. otherwise we would build it
into machines and scale.

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cheez
Not clear to me if they're 45 when it's founded or when it becomes successful.
Sounds like it's the latter.

~~~
jgrahamc
_Among the very fastest-growing new tech companies, the average founder was 45
at the time of founding._

It says "at the time of founding"

~~~
cheez
I will chalk it up to my allergies.

