
Staying Credulous: On Not Letting Being 40 Get In The Way - thafman
http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/27/staying-credulous-on-not-letting-being-40-get-in-the-way/
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lkozma
"The companies that shape our culture – Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Google,
Facebook, etc. – are almost always started in a dorm room."

Yeah but Craigslist, Amazon, Wikipedia, ... were not started by 20 year-olds.
Ok, last one is not a company...

Some interesting related links:

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

And in mathematics:

[http://mathoverflow.net/questions/3591/mathematicians-who-
we...](http://mathoverflow.net/questions/3591/mathematicians-who-were-late-
learners-list)

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abstractbill
One useful strategy for avoiding this affect is to move around a lot and to
deliberately remain a little undereducated about the things you don't work on.
That way, if you ever feel like you've grown too cynical about the field
you're working in, you can switch to something else and approach it as a
complete newcomer.

Software is used in so many places that it's easy to regain your newbie status
any time you feel like you need it again.

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DanielBMarkham
Meh.

I get where he's coming from, really I do. I strive to keep that attitude as
well, and I put my money where my mouth is by actively living that life, not
just writing about it or thinking about it from a distance. I'm the guy
getting the fist bump, not the guy trying to remember how to give one.

Having said that, and agreeing with the general sentiment he is making, you
can only take this thing so far. At some point, being alive for a year should
give you some kind of insight you didn't have at the beginning of the year. If
not, you're turnip.

As I get more and more inside of the startup community, as I finally begin to
start feeling like I am figuring this thing out, I'm beginning to separate the
external "business of startups" guys from the guys actually having a startup.
The external guys all have googly eyes, romantic writing, praise of youth, and
run in herds. The internal, real-world guys don't have time for all that
bullshit and simply go get the job done. That means taking the baggage you
have -- both good and bad -- and working with it.

I sure hope I am different now than before, and I sure hope I continue to be
different as time moves on. Yes, youth and naiveté are a critical requirement
for creating that change-the-world startup, but they are not a _sufficient_
requirement for it. The reason startups work so well for 20-somethings is that
you can throw a thousand of them at a problem and then pick out the 2 that fix
it, not that somehow youth and attitude carry the day. It's a numbers game.
It's the same reason that we pick 20-somethings to run up the beach on D-Day.
Somebody has to take the beach, and more likely than not it's going to be
somebody who never really understood what the hell they were getting into.

~~~
10ren
I think there's another age-effect for new technology, that young people will
learn that, rather than enhance their skills in an existing technology.

A test: if this is true, then fields with faster-moving technology (eg.
silicon, software, internet, gene-sequencing) will have a higher _proportion_
of young entrepreneur than in other fields (eg. earth-moving equipment, iron
processing, civil engineering, fast-food). Of course, the faster fields will
also have more entrepreneurs in absolute terms, because they'll have a greater
number of disruptive opportunities, but here I'm just considering the
proportion.

Statistically, there's also greater tolerance for risk in the young because no
spouse, no kids, no mortgage.

Neither factor is intrinsic, and needn't apply to a particular entrepreneur.

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aresant
"Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, etc." - it's interesting to see
Arrington so narrowly define successful entrepreneur stories.

Dietrich Mateschitz, the founder of RedBull, was in his mid-40s when he
started the company and it wasn’t until he was in his mid-50s that it really
took off.

In my experience the 40s seems to be a sweet spot – resources, contacts, and
experience all come together at that point . . .

~~~
erikstarck
Ray Crok was 52 when he discovered a little restaurant chain called McDonalds
while selling them milkshake machines.

