
The Young Entrepreneur Myth - bd
http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2009/06/the_young_entre.html
======
krschultz
I know several people in the 55+ age range that are starting businesses right
now including my father. His problem is that at 59 it is near impossible to
find someone who will hire you for 4-5 years, so why not start your own
business? He has enough cash to start a small business without outside
investment and he can use his 30 something years of industry connections to
drive business to his new company. It seems significantly less risky than if I
were to tomorrow even though I fit the more typical demographic.

~~~
edw519
"...he can use his 30 something years of industry connections to drive
business to his new company..."

He can also use his 30 something years of industry experience to know _what to
do_ without too many false starts. Don't discount meaningful experience. Not
everything important is learned from a book.

~~~
stcredzero
As a part of their training, CIA analysts are shown satellite photos of a
civil war battleground near Washington DC. There is what appears to be a large
open field there. They are asked for an analysis. Afterward, they take a field
trip to the actual site. There, they discover that the "large open field"
actually has undulations that are as much as 10 feet from peak to trough.

Being there on the ground can be a drastically different experience from
reading reports and looking at remote data! 30 years of industry experience
can give you some special insights.

~~~
byrneseyeview
I think HN needs a "spoiler" tag.

~~~
stcredzero
Whoops, I didn't stop to think that CIA analyst trainees might be reading this
site! Anyhow, they had this bit on freaking NPR!

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abstractbill
The 3D chart at the end is an awful way to present the data - at the first
data-point (1996), you can visually compare the graphs easily. After that, it
becomes pretty much impossible.

~~~
rjurney
We need an army of Tufte Jihadi Hackers to bring down bad charts across the
interwebs. They can chant "Tufte is great! Tufte is great!" as they rootor the
boxen of the infidel.

~~~
jcromartie
I agree in spirit... but the delivery needs work.

~~~
jacobolus
How about just: “war against пошлость!”?

(See:

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

[http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-
msg?msg_id=0...](http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-
msg?msg_id=0002kk)

<http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/images/0002uN-5267.jpg>

)

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alexk7
Duh? There is no myth. The "accepted wisdom" in most circles except the
startup scene is that you should wait until you have years of experience
before starting a company. The whole point of pg in his essays is that young
people are best fit for the job. Not everybody agree.

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pg
Yet again, the failure to distinguish between startups and small companies
generally. This "proves" that Larry & Sergey starting Google at 25 is a bad
data point by showing that a lot of 50 year olds start landscaping companies.

~~~
csbrooks
I'm not sure if you mean it to, but something about that strikes me as
derogatory toward 50-year-olds with landscaping companies. They are taking a
big risk too, and doing something important, even if it's not as sexy as a
20-year-old making a web startup.

(Or maybe it's just the older I get, the less enthralling the young,
inexperienced founder appears to me?)

~~~
pg
A landscaping company is structurally different from a startup. That kind of
service business only scales linearly.

~~~
encoderer
If the comments on the linked page are to be believed, it's worse than your
assumption: Apparently Kauffman only selected "small businesses" with at least
$1MM annual sales and 50 employees.

That excludes an awful lot of landscaping companies AND legitimate startups.

My gut also says it skews a little towards older entrepreuners. Because it
takes time grow to $1MM in sales, and I'd imagine that more young people found
startups that fail than do 40 and 50 year olds.

------
lallysingh
Hmm, (this is from word-of-mouth), note that 34's also the average age people
get their PhDs.

I doubt there's a correlation between degrees and entrepreneurship, but
there's something about that age that seems interesting.

~~~
yummyfajitas
At least in the US, I'm pretty sure the average age of a PhD (at least in the
sciences) is closer to 27 than 34. 27 = 18 + 4 years undergrad + 5 years grad
school.

~~~
Retric
The problem with that is all the outliers. Such as my mom just finished her
second PHD at 58. Also, lot's of people only finish their dissertation at the
10 year deadline before they need to take more classes.

~~~
Periodic
Exactly, 27 is sort of the practical lower bound, and probably a median. I
believe very few people complete a PhD before 27, but many complete one after.
Years in industry, years off, taking an extra year here or there, it adds up.
This means the average will be significantly higher than the "optimal" or even
"median" solution.

~~~
adw
Actually, it's not _that_ remarkable to have a PhD by 24 in the UK. Our
university system's much more intensive than the American one; three years to
your bachelors', three years of flat-out research for the PhD. (We don't do
quals.)

I was slower; I was 26, which was pretty typical. Four year undergrad because
I did a Masters, four year PhD because I overran a bit and started my postdoc
before I'd finished writing up.

~~~
jojo79
UK PhD's are not as intensive or valuable as American PhD's. The lack of a
qualifier and the relatively lax criteria on which a PhD is awarded are two
reasons for this.

~~~
adw
Got a source for that? I'm pretty sure that the institution I went to you
(hint: it's got more Nobel Prizes than yours) would disagree.

~~~
jojo79
Here you go:
[http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=40...](http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=404928)

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imgabe
Without opining one way or the other about the young entrepreneur myth, is
this the best metric to prove or disprove it?

I'm assuming the "rate of entrepreneurship" means the percentage of people in
that age range who are entrepreneurs. If that's the case, wouldn't the mid to
older age ranges have an advantage, since people who started being
entrepreneurs in their twenties, could conceivably still be entrepreneurs in
their 30s and beyond?

In other words, at the upper age ranges you're counting both people who just
started being entrepreneurs as well as people who are continuing to be
entrepreneurs. Whereas in the 20-25 age range, the only pool of people to
count is the just-starting entrepreneurs.

I think it would be more informative to show the median age of first-time
founders. The article linked in this post mentions the average and median age
for founders is 39, but in the context of this myth it makes a difference if
that's a 39 year old first time founder or if he's on his seventh company and
has been an entrepreneur since he was 19.

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stuff4ben
It's really a time tradeoff. I see the first option, as pg and others espouse,
as being the typical 20-something right out of college with no life (family
life) and no money. They can afford to spend 100 hours a week on their startup
gaining knowledge and experience as fast as they can. Since they have no
outside commitments and no huge debts holding them down (other than college),
they can do this.

The other option is to work a normal job for a decade building experience and
knowledge slowly over time and then when you're in your mid-30's start your
company. It's a race to gain knowledge and experience and while one way might
be preferable to the other, it doesn't mean it can't be done either way.

~~~
edw519
"It's a race to gain knowledge and experience..."

Good point. The right job can actually help you play leap frog once you start
your own business because of the experience. The wrong job is just a waste of
time and life.

------
bd
More findings from this study are here:

[http://www.kauffman.org/research-and-policy/education-and-
te...](http://www.kauffman.org/research-and-policy/education-and-tech-
entrepreneurship.aspx)

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kunqiana
are the people 55+ just becoming entrepreneurs like a youngster? or are they
entrepreneurs with a ton of experience already? (success or failure)

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quizbiz
When you are young, you have more time, more tolerance for risk, more
imagination.

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kwamenum86
This happens because successful young entrepreneurs grow old and if they
choose to start a new business they fall into one of the other categories
along with first-time older entrepreneurs.

