
How many Y Combinator founders are/were NOT young hackers?  Any 30+? - webwright

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SwellJoe
Our company is among the oldest, if not the oldest, funded by YC with 32 and
33 year old founders. We are both hackers. I learned today that Joe Hewitt is
getting close to 30 (and he thought he was the oldest of the bunch before
today).

Also, Paul has mentioned several times in the past that the mean age of the
companies they fund is climbing, and he's thinking 24-ish is the right age to
start thinking seriously about a startup (finished school, had a real job for
a while, so you know how much it sucks to work for someone else).

Most of the founders who were in WFP2007 are hackers. Some are more hackery
than others (it's a quite wide range...some are famously good hackers, while
others have only picked up a programming language, probably PHP, in the past
year or two). But, even the ones that aren't hackers by nature have become
hackers, to some degree, during the program...in this early stage, it's the
biggest part of the work that needs to be done. When you have a launched
product, the job becomes more diverse and other skills become as important as
hacking, but before that, if you aren't able to contribute code or design,
you're probably not serving your team very well.

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ecuzzillo
I was more interested in the non-hackers part of the non-young-hackers. Harj
said something about how he started something without knowing how to hack; I
was surprised, because I don't even know what you DO in a web startup if you
don't know how to hack. How does it work?

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pg
Off the top of my head maybe 5-10% are over 30 and 5-10% nonhackers. I don't
think we've ever had anyone who was over 30 and not a hacker.

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BitGeek
How does this compare to the age distribution of applicants?

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jsjenkins168
PG has said here a few times that he's invested in several companies with 30+
year old founders. It seems not really about age as much as it is being able
to take the risk and not having a lot of overhead to support (a family,
mortgage, etc).

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far33d
It's fine to have a house and a kid if you've already got capital. Most
programmers in their 30's would hopefully have sufficient savings for about a
year of no income - It is a pretty well paying job after all.

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cwilbur
I'm about to turn 33, but also sufficiently rootless that it's not like I'm
taking on a lot of extra risk by trying something like this. No kids, no huge
mortgage payments.

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BitGeek
38, Started multiple companies in the past, worked for a dozen startups to
boot, my co-founder is also my life partner, no kids, no roots.

Going to live in bulgaria or somewhere like that, live cheap, grow fast, hire
local talent.

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plusbryan
It's all about commitment folks, simple as that. People over 30 and under 20
tend to have commitments that might get in the way of their startuping. My
cofounder was 31, fwiw.

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sabat
I'm PG's age and definitely thinking about finding a way to do a startup. No,
seriously. Maybe a consulting company that becomes a startup. Who knows?

But I envy the hell out of you guys who are in your 20s now. I had bad luck:
when I was in my 20s, it was the late 80s/early 90s, and the economy was a
wreck. No one was hiring, and doing startups was not all that easy. There was
no internet to speak of, and so not only was it harder to start something
(where??), but there was no place _to talk about starting something and
exchange information_.

You guys really have some good opportunities, I think. If I were you, I'd just
spend my 20s and early 30s (and maybe beyond) attempting to make a successful
startup. Fail? Try again and learn from any mistakes. Adapt to the market as
it changes and never stop learning! (Part of the reason guys my age don't do
startups or invent new things is because they get complacent -- they stop
learning. I have refused to do that, even though I am in an 'executive'
position where I work.)

