
The mean age of high-tech founders is 43, economists say - GoldenMonkey
https://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2018/08/31/silicon-valley-myths-aside-time-is-on-the-side-of-aging-entrepreneurs/
======
ericand
Great data, but I'm pretty disappointed with many of the other conclusions.

In the opening line the article states that the 5 largest tech companies were
founded by those age 30 and lower. Why? The article isn't very helpful here.
It seems to say that they are anomalies, which is a little unsatisfying.

> "one may reconcile the existence of great young entrepreneurs with the
> advantages of middle age by noting that extremely talented people are also
> extremely talented when they are young."

So they destroy the myth of the young founder, by perpetuating the myth that
these founders were superhuman (extremely talented is the word they used). As
evidenced by valuations of their companies continuing to rise as they got
older.

I find Malcom Gladwell's conclusion more satisfying: When the internet was
born, these people were closest to it in - in part because they were young.

I'd extend Gladwell to argue: In once in a lifetime technology revolutions,
the young may be advantaged in creating a handful of super valuable companies.
And those companies are so central and their small head start is so so
powerful, that those companies succeed, at times in spite of their founders.

My conclusion: If you happen to be in college during a technological
revolution, you won the lottery and should start a company. Otherwise, you are
better off learning, accumulate resources, and founding late in your career.

~~~
dkrich
> My conclusion: If you happen to be in college during a technological
> revolution, you won the lottery and should start a company. Otherwise, you
> are better off learning, accumulate resources, and founding late in your
> career.

This seems to be major selectivity bias. Let's call the development of the
internet a major technological revolution. How many successful startups have
emerged over the time since that revolution began? AOL was started in what,
the early 90's? Yahoo was started in the mid-90's. Google was started in the
late-90's. Facebook was started in 2004. Twitter, 2007? AirBnB, 2009? Stitch
Fix, 2015 or so?

The idea that there's a small window to create a valuable startup right after
a tech revolution has begun seems to make sense at first glance, but after
more thorough investigation pretty much falls apart. There's never an easy
time to create a company like that. It requires intelligence, connections,
luck, execution, persistence, and a million other factors.

Put another way, if anyone could go back to 1995 knowing what they know now, I
would bet that almost nobody could recreate Google or Facebook because of all
the hidden difficulties of launching them that is glossed over now that we are
15+ years out from their launches.

Meanwhile, a guy like Bill Gates would probably have enormous success in
pretty much any line of business (albeit not at the scale that Microsoft has
had), but far greater than the average founder.

~~~
jacobush
Yes, as long as we don't mythologize Bill as having something innate _only_
going for him. He _has_ that but he also had Old Money and Family. Not trying
to rain on anyone, just putting things in perspective. Bill's a super talented
dude.

~~~
pdfernhout
Bill Gates is indeed talented and hard working -- and generous in some ways.
He also dumpster-dived to learn how to write good software from looking at
other people's code without their explicit permission:
[https://patch.com/california/losaltos/microsoft-co-
founder-p...](https://patch.com/california/losaltos/microsoft-co-founder-paul-
allen-recounts-his-days-of-7a8784789a) "That phase of Allen's life involved
taking the bus–sports coat, tie, leather briefcase and all—down to the offices
of local computer gurus. "I would boost Bill into dumpsters and we'd get these
coffee-stained texts (of computer code)" from behind the offices, grinned
Allen.""

And MS-DOS is based in part on CP/M's design: "MS-DOS paternity suit settled:
Computer pioneer Kildall vindicated, from beyond the grave"
[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07/30/msdos_paternity_suit...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07/30/msdos_paternity_suit_resolved/)
"Last week, a Judge dismissed a defamation law suit brought by Tim Paterson,
who sold a computer operating system to Microsoft in 1980, against journalist
and author Sir Harold Evans and his publisher Little Brown. The software
became the basis of Microsoft's MS-DOS monopoly, and the basis of its
dominance of the PC industry. But history has overlooked the contribution of
Kildall, who Evans justifiably described as "the true founder of the personal
computer revolution and the father of PC software" in a book published three
years ago. In a chapter devoted to Kildall in Evans' They Made America: From
the Steam Engine to the Search Engine: Two Centuries of Innovators, Evans
related how Paterson "[took] 'a ride on' Kildall's operating system,
appropriated the 'look and feel' of [Kildall's] CP/M operating system, and
copied much of his operating system interface from CP/M.""

If you want to get away with such things, it helps to start rich, of course:
[http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/](http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/) "William
Henry Gates III made his best decision on October 28, 1955, the night he was
born. He chose J.W. Maxwell as his great-grandfather. Maxwell founded
Seattle's National City Bank in 1906. His son, James Willard Maxwell was also
a banker and established a million-dollar trust fund for William (Bill) Henry
Gates III. In some of the later lessons, you will be encouraged to take
entrepreneurial risks. You may find it comforting to remember that at any time
you can fall back on a trust fund worth many millions of 1998 dollars."

And to have free legal advice from his father (a lawyer).

Contrast all that with the hypocritical letter Bill Gates wrote:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists)
"As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software.
Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if
the people who worked on it get paid Is this fair? One thing you don't do by
stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. MITS
doesn't make money selling software. The royalty paid to us, the manual, the
tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is
prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional
work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding
all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free?"

So wrote the millionaire dumpster diver who could afford to write free
software his whole life -- but chose instead to resell an OS that ripped-off
someone else's hard work (one reason IBM may have wanted to keep an arms-
length distance from MS-DOS instead of buying it outright). Those are
hypocritical words to anyone who knows more of the story, but brilliant
marketing -- including the rhetorical deception about how much time free
software developers might have (such as ones at universities or government
labs or students like, then, Linus Torvalds).

[Stuff I previously mentioned here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15772233](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15772233)
]

To be clear: just because Bill Gates did stuff like that in his teens and 20s
does not mean he would do stuff like that now. He many have grown as a person
in many ways over the past few decades (e.g. the Gates Foundation).

~~~
dkrich
The comments from that post about his best decision being born to a wealthy
family are so moronic.

Sure, the connections probably helped him stay out of trouble, go to better
schools, etc. But to say that he owes his success to his wealth is absurd. I
would argue that extreme wealth for most people would inhibit ambitions, not
enhance them.

I would also argue that today most entrepreneurs wouldn't peruse publicly
available Github repos to learn how to code, let alone dumpster dive for
printouts of code to study. Some might view that as playing dirty, I would say
it shows an incredible amount of ambition and drive. After all, he could have
been getting drunk at Harvard and studying pre-law like everyone else was
there in the 70's.

------
chadash
My guess is that a lot of successful founders are people with experience in a
given domain who founded a company to fill an unfilled need within that
domain, and that most of these founders are on the older end. For example, I
recently interacted with the founder of a $200 million company that sells
infrastructure materials (e.g. fiber optic wire) to large telecommunications
companies. To found a company like this, you need to know that the need exists
in the first place and you are are at a huge advantage if you already have
contacts in the industry.

There are tons and tons of companies like this that you have never heard of
because $200 million companies don't make the news. But they do make their
owners very wealthy even if they aren't billionaires.

Lacking domain experience and/or industry connections, many young people will
often found consumer facing companies. These companies are often winner-takes-
all and a tiny fraction of them will make their founders super wealthy. Plus,
consumer companies by nature tend to be more well known because they advertise
their brand and cater to consumers so they appear on the news more often. For
example, AbbVie and Medtronic both have larger market caps than McDonalds, but
they (intentionally) don't seek publicity, so you don't hear about them (and
therefore their founders) much.

~~~
jjeaff
Many times, these $200 million companies make their owners far wealthier than
even unicorn founders. Because not only are they sometimes fully owned by the
founders, but they are making cash flow from day one (gasp!) and paying out
healthy distributions from the beginning.

~~~
Regardsyjc
Agreed. There are many business opportunities in "niches" . I met a founder
who became a VC after she exited her company that did interior design for
office buildings. I think I offended her when I called her 8-9 figure business
a niche but I had never even imagined that that need could have possibly
existed until she told me.

~~~
chadash
To be fair, that's a pretty big niche. There are hundreds of thousands if not
millions of office buildings out there and they all need _someone_ to design
the interiors.

But one thing that's kind of cool about it is that it doesn't scale beyond a
certain point. Because it requires legs on the ground, this is the sort of
business that isn't winner takes all. Sure you can get large, but there's
always going to be room for boutique design firms.

------
siruncledrew
> _" “Young people are just smarter,” Zuckerberg told the audience of a 2007
> VC conference, adding that successful startups should only employ young
> people with technical expertise."_

> _" “People under 35 are the people who make change happen,” said VC Vinod
> Khosla at a 2011 conference. “People over 45 basically die in terms of new
> ideas” because they “keep falling back on old habits.” Entrepreneur and VC
> Paul Graham said in a 2013 interview that investors tend to be biased
> against older founders. “The cutoff in investors’ heads is 32… after 32,
> they start to be a little skeptical.”"_

I don't buy this, even as someone under 27. I could see an argument that
younger people have more time to think creatively and catch on to new trends
in technology since they likely have more time to do so than older people with
families or greater responsibilities. However, I don't believe successful
change is only limited to younger people. Heck, I have friends who are 25 that
haven't even figured their own life out and don't know how to keep an
apartment clean. Yet, they still must know better than a 35 year old with 10
years of industry experience?

To be honest, I've had more enjoyment working for startups with founders over
30 than under 25 - partly because those over 30 have less time for bullshit.
They treat it like work (which is it). It was also helpful to learn from older
people who could pass on both technical and life advice to me as a younger
person from a "things I wish I knew at your age" perspective.

Younger founders could still be successful, but, in truth, working with a
bunch of other young people my age could feel more like "hanging out" than
getting work done. Sometimes young people don't actually know what to do in
certain circumstances and have no one to ask, which can be good and bad
depending on how you look at it.

~~~
bsder
If you want a business that is effectively a VC lottery ticket, ie flame out
or go big in 18 months, you want folks under 30. They're stupid enough to
believe the VC's and sign up, energetic enough to do something, and silly
enough to keep up with the lifestyle fads that might produce something that
goes exponential.

If you want a business that produces _money_ , you want founders who know an
industry, understand the holes and deficiencies, have a solid nose to avoid
the bullshit and the swamps, keep tight control over their cashflow and
realize that this will probably take about 5 years--that's someone 35+ and
more probably 45+.

However, 5 years is _WAY_ outside the return window for the modern lottery
ticket VC. Consequently, they are going to give you every excuse in the book
to avoid investing in a company other than "I'm buying a lottery ticket, not a
business."

~~~
GreeniFi
Very good post. Not so many people understand this.

------
justinzollars
> the mean age of high-tech founders is 43.2, economists say

I could see this. From the perspective of an Engineer I'm 36 and I have never
been more qualified to start a company than today. People I work with in their
40s are great I've had the opportunity to learn from some excellent people in
my career

~~~
j45
This has been my experience as well.

After seeing startup CEOs be swept aside for growth or scaling CEOs by their
VC's, I decided I wanted to build lasting and transferable skills alongside
the problem solving.

In hindsight there was little harm spending my twenties gathering 20 years of
experience in 10 years. This is less about age, than how one levels up.

Putting in time helped understand problems at a greater breadth, depth and
uncover inter-disciplinary connections, instead of the spitball ideation
process.

After 10 years (around age), having 20 years of experience on average puts you
ahead of many of your contemporaries, leaving you in a better position to
recognize opportunities, and areas needing improvement. If this is you, let's
chat :)

~~~
bradenb
I appreciate what you're trying to say, but you can't just claim to have 20
years of industry experience after starting in that industry 10 years ago,
right? Do you put 20 years of experience on your resume?

~~~
j45
It's similar to how Paul Graham compares like working really hard for a few
years in a startup vs working slower at a traditional job. How hard one works
in a compressed amount of time, and the results one achieve in the same amount
of time can equate to something.

I never would put 20 years of experience on my resume. Can't fake it till you
make it in tech. :) Years of experience, again aren't the metric alone, its
the quality of those years does matter.

If someone has 10 years of experience, and their achievements and skillset are
mature and are on par with someone at the top of the pile with 20 years of
experience, that might be one way. Does that help clarify?

Either way, I'm not sure where this new literal HN is coming from, and maybe I
haven't done a very good job of explaining much.

~~~
bradenb
Thanks for the clarification. I get what you're trying saying. The point of
confusion for me was how literally you used "20 years of experience" in your
career. As you said, it's hard to pass that off literally, but I totally
understand having compressed learning. I, myself, have been in the industry
for 12 years now and I feel that number is fair, but I feel like almost all of
my usable experience came in the last 6 years. So in a way I feel like I got
12 years of experience in 6 years.

~~~
j45
Cool. Now having 20 actual years of experience, I think I was describing it in
hindsight, vs looking to my future.

I agree with your 12 yeaer experience. When I hire or am being hired we look
for recent, relevant and hopefully experience that shows a higher level of
mastery relative to other candidates.

Still this is a nice reminder of how good HN has been at attracting new
entrepreneurs/technologists, and the lowering the average age/experience level
on HN. I see it as a positive.

------
baxtr
_On the other hand, many resources accumulate with age, including access to
human, social and financial capital. Older entrepreneurs are likely to have
more experience in managing development, finance marketing, sales, HR and
other operations._

I wonder why they didn’t look at prior startup experience. Could it be that
those 44 yrs old had 2-3 other startups before that just didn’t work and so
they knew how to do things?

~~~
AmericanChopper
Even just regular work experience will help a lot. Some of the successful
founders I know had a few failed startups under their belt. But you can learn
a lot from just working with other people. I’ve learnt a lot about all sorts
of things just by taking an interest in how my colleagues do their work, and
most of it was stuff I’d have struggled to figure out by my self.

------
mikert5671
Selection bias, if you're starting a company at age 43, you are risking your
career and monetary stability. The type of person who can afford this is
probably already part of an elite financially secure class. How misleading is
this article? They are comparing apples to oranges, people starting companies
in their 20s are not the same as people starting companies in their 40s. Take
the set of people in their 20s who would be capable of starting a company in
their 40s (meaning they have career success, a cushion of money, etc) and
compare them to the entrepreneurs in their 40s, then you have a statistic.
This is false otherwise.

~~~
kown223
you are risking your career and monetary stability, at your 20s too, if you
start a company and fail, you risk going homeless and having a huge gap on
your cv.

~~~
DoreenMichele
I would like to see a citation for this assertion that, if your company fails,
you are at high risk (or higher than normal risk) of homelessness. This
doesn't fit with what I know for what puts a person at risk of homelessness.

And there's no gap on your CV. You put down "Worked on launching x startup
from X date to Y date. It sold, folded, whatever and I'm looking for a job
now."

Thank you in advance if you can come up with a cite.

~~~
ericand
My understanding is that failing is more of an issue outside the US. In the
US, which is where the data is from, I tend to agree with DoreenMichele:
Startup failure is fairly easy to recover from. You mostly risk opportunity
cost (lost wages, lost promotion periods).

~~~
TomMarius
Actually cost of failure is much lower in Europe due to welfare state and
generally lower cost of living.

------
graycat
For my startup, age is crucial: There's no way I could have done this work
before I was 40, and similarly for would be competitors.

I had to learn about:

mainline business

entrepreneurship

startups

venture capital, what it is good for and what isn't

about people, especially in business -- vendors, employees, customers,
investors, lawyers, management, organizational behavior, etc.

quite a lot of pure math

quite a lot of applied math and associated computing

my original applied math

The pure and applied math is Ph.D. stuff, and I do have that Ph.D. But some
serious business experience is crucial. Just those two prerequisites rule out
nearly anyone under 30.

But, but, but, people over 40 are out of new ideas? Not in my startup!!! The
user interface, user experience, some of the computing, and especially the
crucial core enabling applied math are far out, wildly new, "radical,
provocative" stuff.

If I gave a lecture on the custom, internal ad targeting applied math, then
nearly everyone in Silicon Valley, entrepreneurs and VCs, would soil the
furniture and then, on the way to the restrooms, the carpet. Later they'd meet
at a local bar, try to wash away the shock, and try just to f'get about that
experience. Why? As I learned as a first year pure math grad student, there is
little so intimidating, frustrating, confusing, and discouraging as a very
nicely done, precise, fully correct, advanced, strikingly original, calm,
lecture on pure math where understand only a key word now and then!!!!!

I do owe a thanks to the author, Irving W-B: At one time he invited me to
give, and I gave, a very simplified version of just such a lecture on some of
my research to some of his people!!!! What I gave then a colleague had
pronounced "radical, provocative". After my lecture, some of Irving's people
and I had lunch, and on one small point agreed that I'd reinvented k-D trees,
IIRC in Sedgwick.

Think people over 40 can't be original? Ever hear Wagner's <i>Tristan und
Isolde</i>?

~~~
annywhey
In my early 30's now and I often muse on how poorly prepared I actually was,
coming right out of school.

Basically, society molds the young to fit an image. Then those young people
all compete over that image, hopefully start to realize this is a terrible
idea and there are better things, and start looking for a niche to exit to.
And then perhaps 20 years later they've learned enough to successfully hit
that niche!

~~~
GreeniFi
Your second para here is quite a profound statement!

------
aswanson
I think the the younger folks are more likely to spot an outsize opportunity
where no one was looking at all, whereas an older person might be more aware
of an incremental change in an existing business model that presents a new
opportunity.

~~~
mindcrime
_I think the the younger folks are more likely to spot an outsize opportunity
where no one was looking at all,_

I hear variations of this refrain a lot. But I wonder, is there any particular
evidence to support this, or even a reasonable sounding theory to explain why
it is likely to be so?

~~~
aswanson
A lot of the more "visible" larger outcomes seem to be based on how people
socially interact moreso than technical innovation. Older people generally
aren't first wavers in new means of sharing their lives, e.g. facebook,
twitter, snapchat etc were all just new ways of talking. I know thats
ridiculously reductive in scope, but it just seems older folk are more
dispositioned to attack problems that provide a clearer path to renumeration,
while younger folks seem more focused on doing something cool that technology
enables.

I have 0 data to back up that armchair analysis.

------
ashelmire
The numbers are far more favorable for older founders than I expected. But
that's also completely in line with my life experience. As you work, you learn
how to manage yourself and others, and a lifetime learner accumulates
knowledge of much greater depth and breadth than someone younger. This
accumulated knowledge and management skill should provide advantages in
startups.

------
jlgray
I think an important aspect not mentioned in this article is the environment
in which the computer and internet wunderkind founders got their starts.

You had a perfect storm of brand new, super powerful tools (the internet
providing dirt-cheap distribution, cheap computation, beginner friendly
programming languages -- php for facebook, java and python for google, etc.).
There was so much low-hanging fruit with relatively little competition.

A very similar thing happened in physics in the early 20th century, and led to
the same notion that genius is a fleeting trait concentrated in the young. To
quote this BBC article: [https://www.bbc.com/news/science-
environment-37578899](https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37578899)

 _It was like discovering a new toolkit which could quickly yield discoveries.
Or, less charitably, as one scientist said: "mediocre physicists could
discover great physics"._

------
gremlinsinc
Good, there's still hope for me... lol (38/dev/entrepreneur).

------
saudioger
Sure, I can see how this is a myth about founders... but what about employees?
We can't all run startups. There's a lot of age bias in hiring.

~~~
adventured
There's definitely a lot of age bias in the employment, particularly after
~40. The key is to move up the difficulty ladder. Your age-resistant
employment prospects skyrocket if you move away from lower value skills -
think PHP - and move up to (just for example) Java or Go et al.

Or move away from low value front-end junk that turns over every three years
(the latest JavaScript framework of the month), and to higher value serious
programming. That's where long-term job security comes from. The difficulty
acts as a barrier to entry against a flood of low skill labor that will
constantly undercut you (both in regards to age and income). Master a high
value, higher barrier to entry language or two and you can write a six figure
ticket for the rest of your adult life. And as certain languages begin to
themselves age off, the demand often only goes up for the dwindling supply of
engineers that still know it well.

~~~
jpindar
Any examples of those languages?

~~~
rohansingh
I almost agree with the poster above, but I think it's less about the
languages than high-value skills or specializations. As long as you're
defining yourself by a language, you're more limited than someone who's known
for expertise in some specialty.

Examples include distributed systems, realtime software, embedded programming,
network programming, etc.

------
baccheion
The most successful founders now would be in their early 30s, as that's the
range that captures die hards that started just early enough to have the most
thorough perspective while still being younger. On the other hand, any
successes can only really come from "the chosen" (ie, whoever VCs decided to
fund).

------
neonate
[http://archive.is/6aBOh](http://archive.is/6aBOh)

------
ThomPete
My take on it:

"The youth have all the energy and time to spend, no obligations and no
financial worries. But they have very little life experience and exposure to
these hidden problems. So what they end up solving are the kind of problems
primarily young people have. This certainly makes for some very amazing
products, but I can’t help feeling a little disillusioned. The amount of time
and energy that goes into fun, but ultimately useless ideas, rather than
fixing some of these hidden problems is mind-numbing.

On the other hand, the older generations are exposed (aware or unaware) to a
lot of these hidden problems. They have experience on how to solve them
because they understand them. Yet by that time, most of them have to provide
for a family, pay of their mortgage, tuition fees, healthcare, yearly
vacations and the 3 cars. They also often lack the imagination on how to solve
things in a new technological paradigm."

------
joejerryronnie
I think one big advantage of older founders is the wisdom not to be fooled by
the first VC to come along dangling cash with major strings attached.

~~~
GreeniFi
Good point. VCs are looking for outsize returns. Older founders, who can’t
spread their risk like a VC, are pursuing more predictable businesses but
which are therefore probably lower profile and lower return.

------
sgt101
Figure 3A is really interesting - post 40 founders are more successful.

------
replicatorblog
I can't get past the paywall, but the info looks a lot like the survey that
circulated this summer. In that study, the researchers went through tax data
and used tech companies that hired at least one employee as their proxy for a
"startup."

This seems wildly flawed. It's the same methodological quirk that makes
Kauffman data not so helpful.

I'd like to do a study that looks at some of the more common metrics of
success in the startup community.

\+ Top 100 companies tracked by Gartner

\+ Top 100 Apps on Apple Store

\+ Top 100 Websites measured by Quantcast

I've looked at sample that's pretty close to that and the average age is much
closer to 30, and even artificially inflated by serial entrepreneurs who are
on their third companies.

~~~
dredmorbius
[http://archive.is/6aBOh](http://archive.is/6aBOh)

