Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Old Are Successful Tech Entrepreneurs?

insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 62 posts

Re: How Old Are Successful Tech Entrepreneurs?

#31

Post by harrydry »

How are people believing this shit. Complete BS.

There's several independent variables (money / trial and error / twitter following / coding ability etc ...)

this clickbait paper makes it sound like age is the independent variable. when age is merely CORRELATED with these independent variables. Age itself is of little importance.

You may as well say:

"A person who has already started 5 startups is 4.9X more likely to found a successful startup than a person has never founded a startup before"

Google "Multicollinearity" before you vend BS clickbait.

Re: How Old Are Successful Tech Entrepreneurs?

#32

Post by codingdave »

bitL wrote: post #22

Could this be a result of wide-spread ageism? People >40 are basically forced to be entrepreneurial and can't afford to waste time on unimportant stuff like they did in their 20s.

As someone in their 40s, that perspective is completely alien to me. As my kids are getting older and no longer need 24x7 supervision, I am getting more free time in my 40s to "waste on unimportant stuff". I'm doing more side projects, more art, more reading, and still getting my job done and sharing time with my family. Combine that time with more experience and a larger nest egg to support time away from salaried work... and any entrepreneurial efforts are not because I am forced into them, but because all the pieces of my life are aligned well to try something new.

Re: How Old Are Successful Tech Entrepreneurs?

#33

Post by jasode »

computerphage wrote: post #3

Link to the paper: https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/jones-ben/htm/A... The abstract: Many observers, and many investors, believe that young people are especially likely to produce the most successful new firms. We use administrative data at the U.S. Census Bureau to study the ages of founders of growth-oriented start-ups in the past decade. Our primary finding is that successful entrepreneurs are middle-a…

>The mean founder age for [...] is 45.0. [...] Prior experience in the specific industry predicts much greater rates of entrepreneurial success.

To me, "prior experience" favors B2B startups and those tend to be founded by 40-something entrepreneurs. (I made a previous comment about this.[1])

In contrast for B2C, many observers (VCs like Bill Gurley, Fred Wilson, etc) have noticed that experience doesn't necessarily help consumer-facing internet companies and viral smartphone apps. (E.g. Twitter founder Ev Williams started Medium at age 40 but it's still losing money and it's not as successful as Twitter.)

The counterintuitive conclusions about median age of 45 may be happening because the study doesn't group the data between B2B vs B2C. It's the B2C startups that have more exposure in mainstream media and they dominate pop culture conversation. The numerous B2B startups become hidden as a sort of "dark matter" in the business universe because they probably comprise most of the successes but ironically get the least amount of news coverage.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16902662

Re: How Old Are Successful Tech Entrepreneurs?

#34

Post by fapjacks »

codingdave wrote: post #32
bitL wrote: post #22

Could this be a result of wide-spread ageism? People >40 are basically forced to be entrepreneurial and can't afford to waste time on unimportant stuff like they did in their 20s.

As someone in their 40s, that perspective is completely alien to me. As my kids are getting older and no longer need 24x7 supervision, I am getting more free time in my 40s to "waste on unimportant stuff". I'm doing more side projects, more art, more reading, and still getting my job done and sharing time with my family. Combine that time with more experience and a larger nest egg to support time away from salaried w…

This is exactly my experience, as well. I started companies twice in my life before out of necessity, literally to pay the rent. Now, I'm doing it because I want to do it and I have the resources available.

Re: How Old Are Successful Tech Entrepreneurs?

#35

Post by katzgrau »

jath wrote: post #13

I presume one reason could be at 40 you dont make the mistakes you made at 20. I was 20 once and when i built a product i tried to load it with features/options. Now at 30 i make things as simple as possible. I don’t discuss which DB to use. I straight away use SQL. I don’t discuss scaling issues. I dont bother about 80% of the issues i used to discuss when i was 20. I’m better of now.

Agreed. You realize that making money is the hard part so there's no need to do a ton of thinking into technical decisions until it becomes "a good problem" to have.

These days I might have an idea for a feature in my head and pitch it to people as if it exists to gauge interest. If it seems like it's a clear winner I build it into my product. If not, I'm not writing any code.

Re: How Old Are Successful Tech Entrepreneurs?

#36

Post by TomMarius »

indogooner wrote: post #9
1ba9115454 wrote: post #7

The article talks of old and the young as if they were different people. All of the old people were young people once. If you consistently try to build businesses through side projects, or other means, there's a good chance you're getting better at it as the years go by. So it shouldn't come as a surprise to find you may eventually succeed.

Right. It would be more instructive to see what percentage of old entrepreneurs are first-timers.

It'd be even better to know their work experience.

Re: How Old Are Successful Tech Entrepreneurs?

#37

Post by jazoom »

kiloreux wrote: post #29
TekMol wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t discuss which DB to use. I straight away use SQL. That is a language though, not a DB.

Did you really have to be that guy ? What he meant basically is using a relational database. Please refer to the HN guidelines before commenting. It strongly encourages to have comments that add value to the discussion.

I agree with TekMol that it's an important point. Nowadays we have new types of SQL databases emerging. Some examples:

TiDB (distributed)

CockroachDB (distributed)

Crate (uses SQL but isn't even relational)

They all use SQL.

Picking between these and more established SQL databases is worthy of discussion.

Heck, based on what I see on Hacker News, picking between the established ones generates a lot of discussion, usually with people preferring Postgres over MySQL, etc.

Then there's SQLite, which is completely different again.

OP probably has a favourite database as a go-to regardless of the application, but for some projects SQLite might be a better fit than the others, for example. That would warrant discussion.

In conclusion, I believe you were too harsh to TekMol.

Edit: Fix autocorrect fails and add clarity.

Re: How Old Are Successful Tech Entrepreneurs?

#38

Post by amelius »

Can we make a distinction based on:

- High-tech/low-tech. It makes a difference if the entrepreneur simply glued together existing technologies, or invented a new technology.

- The amount of investment money.

- The amount of failed companies of the entrepreneur.

Re: How Old Are Successful Tech Entrepreneurs?

#40

Post by SmellyGeekBoy »

TekMol wrote: post #25
jath wrote: post #13

I presume one reason could be at 40 you dont make the mistakes you made at 20. I was 20 once and when i built a product i tried to load it with features/options. Now at 30 i make things as simple as possible. I don’t discuss which DB to use. I straight away use SQL. I don’t discuss scaling issues. I dont bother about 80% of the issues i used to discuss when i was 20. I’m better of now.

I don’t discuss which DB to use. I straight away use SQL. That is a language though, not a DB.

In the .NET / Microsoft world "SQL" has been synonymous with "Microsoft SQL Server" for years. GP could just be from that background.
Post reply on HN