from Hacker News

Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship

by dalek2point3 on 4/9/18, 4:06 PM with 87 comments

• by jknoepfler on 4/10/18, 1:11 AM

  I honestly can't understand why this would shock anyone with experience in engineering. As a senior developer, I'm vastly more able to realize ideas than I was even three years ago. I also know vastly more. I'm able to understand cutting-edge systems and language research that I couldn't before. I'm able to design systems quickly and more reliably. I'm able to separate good ideas from bad ideas more reliably. I'm better with people and managing my own ego, and therefore able to navigate interpersonal situations more reliably.

  I'm also financially stable and have deep savings, so I'm able to take time off to pursue ideas more reliably.

  After a few more years, particularly as I gain leadership experience, I expect to be even more effective.

  There's literally no down-side to getting older in terms of my ability to bootstrap a successful company.

• by leonroy on 4/9/18, 11:15 PM

  One thing to note is that 'young college drop out makes billions' is a more compelling story than 'middle aged, well educated person with good savings makes billions'.

  The former sells more clicks and hence advertising dollars - it conjures the notion that anyone can do it. The latter suggests at least a decade of work experience, probably an education and some money.

  It's clear which story is going to end up trending on the news and the public's consciousness.

• by volgo on 4/10/18, 2:12 AM

  I think there's a little bit of confirmation bias mixed with a bit of jealousy toward younger developers.

  The fact is, technology doesn't really matter that much to the success of a business. Business sense, ability to spot what's next, and a fair bit of risk taking attitude are what matters. Older engineers don't fare better than younger engineers in starting a business not because they're worse at engineering, but that after a certain point engineering skills simply don't matter.

  SAP, Adobe, IBM, all have terrible engineering culture, but rake in money. Facebook started with janky PHP. There are only rare instances where the technology itself was the differentiator in business. Maybe if you're working on advanced AI or weapon design or something

• by montrose on 4/10/18, 7:12 AM

  If this result is surprising to HN readers, it is probably because this list of the last 100 IPOs is also surprising:

  https://www.iposcoop.com/last-100-ipos/

  Only 19 of the 100 most recent IPOs are classified as "technology" companies. The rest are in categories like "health care" and "oil and gas."

  There are a lot of high-growth companies that are not startups in the classic sense of starting from nothing and winning by building a better mousetrap. E.g. pharmaceutical companies commercializing research, where the founder is a PI and probably a tenured professor who's at least 40.

• by dalek2point3 on 4/9/18, 4:11 PM

  here is the full paper in case anyone is interested: http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/jones-ben/htm/Ag...

• by kozikow on 4/10/18, 4:52 AM

  I would like to see the data broken down by startup profile. I suspect that the ideal age differs between B2B and B2C startups.

  B2C have smaller chance of success, but the success is bigger. Ideal B2C founder is young. Most of enormous tech successes (e.g. Facebook, Google) are B2C companies founded by founders before 30.

  B2B have higher chance of success, but the success is smaller. Ideal B2B founder is middle-aged. There are more succesfull B2B startups than B2C starups, what increases the total mean.

• by redm on 4/9/18, 10:08 PM

  As I've gotten older (ironically) I've felt this should be the case; key decisions have such an impact on the success or failure of a startup, it's much more likely you make the right key decisions the more experience and wisdom you have.

• by deuslovult on 4/9/18, 11:14 PM

  I don't think this is surprising, but I'm also not surprised that VCs and accelerators still trend toward younger founders.

  It makes sense to me that older (successful) founders likely leverage their own experience and network to a greater extent, but this isn't necessarily what seed stage investors are looking for. I think investors are more in the game of betting on people/teams, injecting their own experience and network as leverage. Older founders have less need, therefore less leverage- and older founders without these support networks are poorly positioned anyway.

  Theres a big difference between running a successful small business and architecting a tech startup.

• by Bucephalus355 on 4/9/18, 11:23 PM

  In art the term for this is “young geniuses and old masters”. We are all familiar with the trope of a ‘young genius’ but I think it says something that art, a field older than any language or building, has a specific category carved out for those who reach distinguished success in old age...

• by mrkstu on 4/9/18, 10:20 PM

  This aligns with my observation and current impulse. I've been extremely hesitant to do my own startup- imposter syndrome maybe, but more likely healthy skepticism about the odds for success.

  Now that I'm in my mid-40s I'd be much more comfortable taking on the task. Wide life experience, learning to interact with and observe human tendencies, and learning to overcome internal and external obstacles seems like fertile ground for business success.

• by smoyer on 4/11/18, 10:20 AM

  I dug up the links for two past age polls on HN to see what the average age of the HN reader might be:

  * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5536734

  * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=517039

  PG's comment suggests that you shouldn't trust self-reported data on HN but it's interesting that polls taken in 2009 and 2013 are at least "eyeball correlated" (the top 5+ age brackets are in the same order). I have a few more thoughts that are probably more like wild guesses (since you can't assume an even distribution of start-up founders over that population) but my gut is telling me that if you're here you're more likely to be a founder than say Slashdot.

  Since the last poll was so long ago, here's an updated one for 2018 with categories for founders versus non-founders in each age bracket:

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16809398

• by blawson on 4/10/18, 12:19 AM

  The paper doesn’t appear to be able identify more than the age distribution of the founders from the dataset, unfortunately.

  Would be interesting to know how many of the successful older founders were unsuccessful younger founders previously.

• by Russell91 on 4/9/18, 10:21 PM

  4 of 5 of the biggest tech company founders were in their early 20s. So the biggest ideas clearly slanted towards young visionary founders, but the statistics do skew back towards older founders for all but the largest companies.

• by s2g on 4/10/18, 2:45 AM

  What were these people doing at 25/30/35/40?

• by mcbreezy on 4/10/18, 12:23 AM

  I'm 37. I constantly remind myself that Craigslist, Wikipedia, Salesforces, Intel, etc. were founded by someone >=35 years of age[0], and that, since I live a healthy lifestyle have at least 30 great years ahead of me (on average).

  https://readwrite.com/2013/09/27/jimmy-wales-to-silicon-vall...