
Over 40? Data says you could be the perfect entrepreneur - jackgavigan
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-29660624
======
brandonmenc
"He's in his thirties or forties. He's got real physical strength, combined
with an older man's self-control." \- _Silence of the Lambs_

A movie quote, but it's an appropriate observation of the "sweet spot" from
ages 30-50.

If you maintain the drive and flexibility of youth, those pair well with the
attributes that require time to develop.

~~~
ronilan
_Mooj: Hey Andy, don 't let him bother you. It's okay not to have started a
company. Not eveybody's a mulla magnet. You, uh, what are you, 25?

Andy Stitzer: I'm 40.

Mooj: Holy shit, man, you got to get on that!_

A movie quote, paraphrased just a little...

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yen223
Huh. Here I was thinking if you haven't founded your startup at 21, you might
as well give up on your dreams.

~~~
rhizome
How many of the startups you're thinking of have wound up turning into
businesses? Funding is not success.

~~~
yen223
If it wasn't clear that I was sarcastic, I can only apologize.

I don't like the pervasive idea among tech types that you are essentially
damaged goods once you turn 30. It's wrong-headed, it makes no sense, and
frankly, it doesn't jive with my experience. Some of the smartest, most
capable software engineers I know are in their late-30's.

Of course, with Zuckerberg turning 30 this year, maybe now's a good time to
short FB. Who knows.

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MCRed
I find the methodology kinda dubious. For instance, I would like to see some
substantiation that living within the bay area or new york are key indicators
of startup success.

The primary method by which startups fail is running out of capital, that's
pretty much the definition of failure. Yet these two locations are some of the
most expensive locations in the country.

If you take a filter of all software or hardware technology startups across
the US, across all states in the past decade, and then look at their failure
rates, I bet you will find that the odds of success are higher outside of
these two locations.

NY and SF probably have a lot more total startups and thus total winners --
but that's also because they both have spigots of money flowing into a lot of
bad ideas. Many of those bad ideas last long enough to be acquired, often for
the team or for tools, without ever having been a success in the marketplace.
These exits would be considered "success" by this analysis, but they aren't
actually success.

So, look at how many entities are still in business 10 years later.

I bet outside of California and New York, mortality rates are actually lower.

Of course, I can't prove this. But here was an opportunity to actually do some
analysis and they didn't.

~~~
7Figures2Commas
This is just a rehashing of old news. Earlier this year, Mattermark, the
company that Bloomberg Beta worked with, was making the bold claim,
"Mattermark Founder Prediction Is 25X Better Than Chance."[1]

As I noted at the time:

> Predicting who in a group of 1.5 million technology professionals is likely
> to start a company presents an unsupervised learning problem. Short of
> contacting all 1.5 million people and asking them, there is no way to
> confirm whether the predictions the system made are correct, so you cannot
> make claims about efficacy.

> There are approaches used to deal with unsupervised learning problems, but
> there are no details in this post even indicating that the folks involved
> recognized they were dealing with an unsupervised learning problem in the
> first place. Instead, we just have claims like "While we believe the future
> founders group has a 17% chance — 25x higher..." for which no further
> information is provided.

Beyond the unpublished methodology, it would be interesting to understand the
data they modeled against. "Mattermark then mined publicly available
information on social network sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to
find information on one-and-a half-million professionals who were in some way
connected to technology start-ups" is awfully ambiguous.

What were the "in some way connected" criteria? Was there any validation of
the data? Was de-duplication attempted, and if so, how was it performed? How
was age determined when it often isn't displayed on public profiles?

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7473203](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7473203)

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mindcrime
Well I guess I'm sitting pretty then, at the ripe old age of 41. Funny, I
don't _feel_ very perfect, but whatever.

All joking aside, I will say this: There's no question in my mind that I'm far
more capable now, than I was at 20, in a great many ways. Maybe our brains do
slow down as we age, but that's counterbalanced by sheer accumulation of
wisdom and experience. I might have been "smarter" at 20, but I'm far more
knowledgeable and effective now.

That said, I wouldn't mind having my 20 year old body back. :-)

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mesozoic
Amazing that there is so much extra capital to invest they're looking for
businesses that don't even exist yet.

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cheez
I'm counting on it :D

