

It's never too late to become an entrepreneur - Wista
http://www.dailybreeze.com/lifeandculture/ci_22083255/helen-dennis-its-never-too-late-become-an
This will become a big trend in next 5-10 years amongst "Baby Boomers"&#60;p&#62;The growing interest in entrepreneurship and age is reflected in a study by the Kauffman Foundation that found that more people ages 55 to 64 are creating their own businesses than those ages 20 to 34.&#60;p&#62;As a percentage of total entrepreneurs, the 55 to 64 age group has grown the most. For example, in 1996 14.3 percent of all entrepreneurs were ages 55 to 64; in 2011, that grew to 20.9 percent. The percentage of entrepreneurs that declined most sharply were those in the 20 to 34 age range.
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MojoJolo
I'm happy that there are people in their late ages still doing
entrepreneurship. But I wonder how are they managing the life of an
entrepreneur with a family to feed, bills to pay, and age related issues (like
energy decline). As I know life of an entrepreneur in a startup is very tiring
and lack of sacrifice. So I wonder how they are doing it.

It is also my reason why I wanted to start at an early age. I still don't have
a family to feed. No housing, electricity, water bills to pay because I can
still live with my parents. And I still have the energy because I'm still
young. With it, I can focus solely on my aim which is building a
startup/company.

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d4nt
I'm 33, have two kids, mortgage and have recently left my job to freelance
while I bootstrap a startup. Here my take on it:

1\. Seed capital seems largely useless, my lifestyle is very modest but the
realities of childcare and mortgage mean my living expenses are higher than
for your typical 20-something. The sums of money available at an early stage
wouldn't last long enough to build an MVP, demonstrate traction, then find an
angel. I'd have to go back to freelancing, only then I'd have an investor on
my back. Bootstrapping seems like the only real option.

2\. Having worked for 14 years as a developer then manager, I have a pretty
good professional network. I've been pleasantly surprised by how easy its been
to get work that fits round my startup work. I'm booked till Apr 2013 and
turning gigs down at the moment.

3\. Having kids is a huge time commitment. I simply cannot work at the office
for 80 hours or more like some startup people do. However, I share an
incubator space with some people like that and without wanting to sound in any
way arrogant, I've realised that (a) my time constraints force me to focus
really hard, I put in 50 really focused hours a week whereas they sometimes
kick back and chat for a while because their energy is low, and (b) I have a
lot more experience than them so I'm able to move faster than them on things
like how to prep for a meeting with a potential partner or how to architect a
system for the future. I think of it like this: if I can't leverage my ten
years extra experience on these people to match their output in less time,
then I deserve to go bust.

3\. Energy: I'm doing what I love, I have all the energy I need.

Basically, you have to be a different kind of entrepreneur, some wouldn't call
my product a "startup" because it isn't (yet) a shoot for the moon type
venture, but I'm still 'starting something up' and it's still an exciting
challenge :)

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Wista
Very good points d4nt, 1\. The unmentionable (elephant in the room) to
investment is that typical Investors tend to look for 10x payback, that
orients all future business decisions. Getting outside capital has one value
in my mind, enables capturing a market quickly that has the potential to scale
up fast and has a high ceiling. I too am working on bootstrapping while in
another job (In an Enterprise B2B play), I'm 55yrs, my first customer is in
negotiation with me, a Fortune 50 company) and this is pre-product. My plan is
to fund via Customer investment... 2\. My network has also been great. Need to
talk with 4-5 Fortune 50 companies? Found them in my LinkedIn network. 3\.
Totally agree here, life is more than work, as much as you may love it. Ryan
Carsons Blogs is excellent, and he's a very balanced person and build a great
company (<http://ryancarson.com/about>). Some great tips about work life
balance and focus. 3\. Energy is about passion, not physical endurance!!

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rjzzleep
the single best sentence in the whole text

"Seeing what everybody does, thinking what nobody does."

i would change it a little.

Seeing what everybody does, thinking what few do, executing like noone else

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seats
The way Schrodinger said it

"Thus, the task is, not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think
what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees."

~~~
rjzzleep
well yes, in his context seeing is the idea and, thinking is the execution,
which might amount to written proof or the likes.

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benzor
This is interesting given the article that appeared just yesterday on age bias
in Silicon Valley [1]. I'd be inclined to think that the ageist mentality
probably doesn't extend to the rest of the entrepreneurship world, although I
have absolutely no evidence to support that.

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4838215>

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ommunist
Being pushed to entrepreneurship is very different from making business as a
personal choice. If you can do business, start early. When you are old, you
have almost no time to learn from mistakes.

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paulgerhardt
Curious to see what percentage of the entrepreneurs in this study are starting
'small businesses' versus 'startups'.

Didn't Steve Blank peg it at 99.7%?

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jacquesm
Small businesses: anything that doesn't grow at 6% per week and that doesn't
have an incubator and a VC on board?

It's quite possible to create a business that does several tens of millions in
turnover and employs 100 people or more.

It happens all the time and those businesses are started by a wide variety of
people when it comes to age, gender, ethic background, location and so on.
These companies are the economic backbone of many civilizations.

Corporations are complex surfaces along many axis changing dramatically during
their lifespan, there isn't such a thing as a clear dividing line between one
group and another, only vague clustering and shifts.

At one point during its lifespan Kodak was a small business, then a start-up,
then a Fortune 500 company, then ripe for disruption and now they're dead.
Calling a company a start-up is like calling a person a baby throughout a
large portion of their life. A start-up is a phase, not an endpoint.

Some people don't start out to do a start-up according to the SB or PG
definition but find out after the fact that that was just what they ended up
with.

Some people start out to do just that and end up with a small business. It
isn't all black and white, there are lots of shades of grey and there is a lot
less control by the participants than you might be led to believe.

