21–30 of 57 posts
My first reaction is that this makes sense if you're counting restaurant owners, etc. Also, the media isn't going to draw attention to someone of average age doing something average, so the misconception seems expected, although I've met very few 50 year olds hacking away on their Web 2.0 startup.
"Hacking away" is a narrow definition of entrepreneurship.
I'm going to guess--I have no proof--that entrepreneurs over 50 tend to be looking for a technology to meet a specific market need that has been eating at them for a long time, while those under 25 are more likely to be looking for a market need they could address with the brand new tech skills they've been developing. If I'm right, they could make pretty good partners.
If I had to choose between productivity and a better/more creative outcome in the startup world, I'd personal think the the good, creative decision would be more important.
(More studies: http://bit.ly/ZBpsxJ)
Wadhwa must be taken with very large grains of salt as he is relentlessly pushing an agenda which is probably not completely accurate. How are they defining entrepreneur here? Including dry cleaning shops and law practices? And are they having the kind of success as Zuckerberg, Gates, Jobs, Page/Brin, Yang/Filo, Omidyar, Musk, and on and and on and on?
I'm surprised it's only twice as many...
I refer to "Twice as many successful entrepreneurs are over 50 as under 25; and twice as many, over 60 as under 20. ... ". That takes a bit of parsing and visualizing to actually make sense of, and is pretty central to the topic of the article.
That sentence describes some sort of log-normal bump distribution. But you'd want to compare it to the some-sort-of-lognormal distribution of population per age to draw a conclusion.
The assumption may be "our readers are too math-dumb to read a chart". If true, why is that? Most people can read a map, so I wonder what percentage of people can read a population distribution and make some sense of it. How can it be improved?
[ I created GridMaths.com [ early demo stage], so I'm actually interested in how to get Math concepts across to young people. ]
I'm amazed no one has commented on the fact that the pool of potential entrepreneurs under the age of 25 is incredibly small (most kids ages 0-18 aren't out there starting companies, and a big chunk are in college) versus if you're 50+ there is a much bigger pool (reasonably ages 50-75) and you probably have the means and connections to be more successful. I'm surprised it's only twice as many...
21.5 million age 20-24
vs
58.9 million age 50-64
80.4 million age 50-74
(from https://www.census.gov/population/age/data/2011comp.html)
VCs tend to break investments into two classes: "Better, faster, cheaper" and "Brave New World" The "Brave New World" ideas put 25 year olds on equal/better footing than 50 year olds, since they tend to be everything new. The "Better Faster Cheaper" ideas leave the 50 year-olds with the advantage: They have a better sense of what the market wants, and what features are important/not important, since they've been work…
This is a persistent myth, but if you examine the math it doesn't work out. A VC firm could improve their returns by at most 2x or 3x by extracting really good terms from an inexperienced founder. But that's rounding error compared to the 100x difference between a big success and a small one.
This is a subset of the more general rule that there is no "value investing" in startups. All the returns are concentrated in a few big hits, and a VC does well iff they invest in them, regardless of the terms.
The empirical evidence confirms this. Google and Facebook are among the biggest recent hits for VCs. Both had young founders. But the reason VCs made so much from these deals is not that they extracted unusually good terms from the founders. In fact, the founders extracted unusually good terms from the VCs. The VCs made a lot despite that, because the companies were so successful.
Wadhwa must be taken with very large grains of salt as he is relentlessly pushing an agenda which is probably not completely accurate. How are they defining entrepreneur here? Including dry cleaning shops and law practices? And are they having the kind of success as Zuckerberg, Gates, Jobs, Page/Brin, Yang/Filo, Omidyar, Musk, and on and and on and on?