
Fred Wilson: The Age Question (Why younger founders have an advantage) - farmer
http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2007/06/the_age_questio.html
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neilc
Familarity with social networks and the latest Internet fads is definitely an
advantage for people considering _consumer_ -oriented Internet startups, but
those aren't all the startups out there. Heck, consumer-oriented, "Web 2.0",
advertising-dependent startups are a minority of all the technology startups
out there, let alone startups in general. (I often find the focus on consumer-
oriented startups to be perplexing: IMHO, most of the cool startup ideas, and
most of the money to be made, doesn't lie in the consumer sphere.)

So sure, if you're trying to start another MySpace or FB, it helps to be
younger and more familiar with the latest technology trends. But there are
countless startups for which that isn't relevant.

~~~
pg
But consumer-oriented advertising-dependent web startups are quite a large
fraction of the Nasdaq, based on Google alone.

~~~
startupper
A large fraction, e.g. 1/5 can still be a minority.

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donna
what I've noticed throughout my career in the computer industry is this: it
takes open minds to blaze trails (age is irrelevant). Ones ability to adapt
and evolve to newer mediums. So many times I hear how painful the computer is
to use from those over 36 years of age.

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gyro_robo
The biggest advantage is enthusiasm. When I was younger I was excited about
everything in the world of computers.

If I combined my experience and knowledge _now_ with my enthusiasm _from back
then_ , I'd be an industry titan.

Nothing's really that interesting anymore, and when virtual reality gets good
I'm locking myself in a room with my virtual girlfriend and staying there.

~~~
amichail
Computers were a big deal when I was in junior high. Learning assembly
language was a status symbol.

Today students take computers for granted. Most students now can't program at
all.

~~~
altay
_Today students take computers for granted._

You say that like it's a bad thing. But it's really a good thing, for both the
general population and also for those select few who _do_ know how to program.

(Also, I'd bet that the percentage of students who can program is a lot higher
now than it was when you were in junior high.)

~~~
amichail
I don't know about percentages, but I would bet that when I was in junior
high, students who learned programming took it much more seriously than
students who do today.

~~~
amichail
This is what students used to read in junior high/high school:

<http://www.csbruce.com/~csbruce/cbm/transactor/>

~~~
pg
Depends on when you were in junior high school:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Computing>

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Tichy
It seems to me that at least according to that article, it also depends on
what you consider to be "exciting". If you consider Twitter exciting, OK -
maybe I am too old to be excited by that (been there done that with the social
networking, not that excited anymore). Targeting young people might work best
for other young people. But what about startups that target old people?
Newspapers are reporting about the aging of society all the time, but Web 2.0
doesn't really seem to account for it yet?

Personally, I would consider a startup targeting old people exciting, and
maybe older founders would have an advantage there.

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amichail
One problem is that a CS degree does not encourage students to be creative
thinkers at the application level. The focus is mostly on implementation
issues.

So younger entrepreneurs without a CS degree might have an advantage in that
regard.

The solution IMO is to make CS degrees more balanced, encouraging more
creative application-level thinking.

~~~
Alex3917
Business school doesn't teach students to come up with good business ideas.
And writing classes only teach grammar and style, not what makes something
insightful.

I suspect it's because these things are said to be functions of "intelligence"
and "creativity."

They're not.

So why don't schools teach students how to have good ideas?

Most decisions about what to teach are presupposed by emergent systemic
factors.

Take, for example, time_on_task. Our educational system is designed around the
idea that achievement is a function of ToT.

Fortunately, this isn't a philosophical belief. It's an empirically testable
claim. A claim that has, in fact, been tested again and again.

Unhappily, the results are pretty much what you'd expect. No correlation.

So how many credit hours does it take to teach someone how to write
insightfully? Or have good business ideas? If you can't put a number on it,
colleges essentially aren't allowed to teach it. By law, actually. (Think
about how financial aid works, and the rules concerning whether or not you can
be on your parent's health insurance.) PG himself has said that he basically
won't fund you unless you've been in the classroom a certain number of hours
-- the number required to graduate.

So how do you learn these skills?

The answers aren't really in any one book, but if you take a year off from
college and sit in the local cafe reading every decent book on the subject
ever written, you'll more or less figure it out.

Of course you'll lose many friends, your parents will hate you, you won't have
health insurance, and everyone will generally think of you as a loser. But
that's another issue entirely. :-)

edit: By "intelligence" and "creativity" I just mean things that can't be
taught, not literally that success is zero percent innate.

~~~
pg
One reason most schools don't teach how to have good ideas is that most
teachers can't have good ideas themselves. How can you teach what you can't do
yourself?

Plus it's probably just not that teachable. I think the most you can do is
teach people where to look for good ideas: where to find cracks in
conventional wisdom, what types of questions tend to produce fruitful answers,
and so on.

BTW, YC doesn't care how much time people have spent in classrooms. The reason
we like graduates is simply that they can't retreat to school if things get
tough.

~~~
Alex3917
Ideas seem to come in patterns. In some fields, good ideas come in patterns.
For example, with biology:

1) I often see woodchucks walking along the breakdown lane of the highway, but
very rarely do I see them run over. I bet there's something interesting going
on there.

2) I put a terrarium in my freezer, and after a year a worm in the bottom was
still alive. I bet there's something interesting going on there.

And so on.

It might be the case that entrepreneurship is a "weak patterned" field, i.e.
that there are only patterns in bad ideas. For example:

1) No one wants to use my product.

2) My product costs more money than it makes.

3) There is no way of implementing my product.

4) It's like MySpace but for knitter's in Canada! (Going from general
demographic to niche demographic)

5) It's like MySpace but with this cool new feature! (It's a feature, not a
product)

6) It's like Google, but with a tag cloud! (Doesn't give a better answer to
the user's questions)

And so on. Just looking through other people's bad ideas I think we can easily
find 20 or 30 common patterns.

So even if it's not possible to teach what a good idea is, it certainly is
possible to teach "the funnel method" of eliminating bad ideas.

And while there may be no patterns in good ideas, I think that, as you
suggested, there are some very clear patterns in where good ideas come from.

Incidentally, I have this theory that most good business ideas start with "I
have this theory..."

------
ivan
Maybe some stats (similar to those co-founder stats) tell they have some
advantages, but as Donna wrote age is irrelevant.

~~~
donna
Here's something interesting <http://farrukh.wordpress.com/2006/05/28/does-
age-matter-in-advertising-agencies/> "The need for "intellectual curiosity" is
being stressed."

~~~
Alex3917
Why is it that Silicon Valley types keep saying that intellectual curiosity is
as or more important than IQ, but virtually zero research has ever been done
on IC whereas there are hundreds of books on IQ?

(I have this long list of books that should have been written, but haven't
been.)

~~~
donna
The "intellectual curiosity" piece was written by a gentleman in Dubai, UAE.--
not by a silicon valley type.

