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When It Comes To Founding Successful Startups, Old Guys Rule

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Re: When It Comes To Founding Successful Startups, Old Guys Rule

#61
post #28
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to intelligent design theory (IDT), everyone is very capable of providing good advice, and people are always better than anything else at giving you information. This is because IDT shows no computational device or mechanism can actually create information, only people can do so. And, any person can do so, not only special people. This is because people have free will and intelligence (i.e. are intelligent…

This is because IDT shows no computational device or mechanism can actually create information, only people can do so. How does it show this? And for what definition of "information"? it is mathematically provable... The first step of mathematics is to define your axioms and then your terms. IDT doesn't seem to do either.

Per question 1:

http://marksmannet.com/RobertMarks/REPRINTS/2009_Conservatio...

A critique (FWIW):

http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2009/08/quick_critique_demb...

Dembski's paper shows that any search performing better than random sampling requires the addition of information. This is information in the Shannon sense, -log2(p), where p is the probability of sampling the target region in a search space normalized according to random sampling.

This cannot be done algorithmically for an arbitrary search landscape. According to IDT, however, the defining quality of intelligent agents is their ability to produce information. This can be measured and thus falsified or confirmed. I.e. do agents we normally identify as intelligent, such as humans, actually produce information?

Per question 2:

If the above does not define terms enough for you, let me know. Dembski does a very good job in defining ID mathematically. The following is a collection of his work, much of it freely available online.

http://www.designinference.com/

Re: When It Comes To Founding Successful Startups, Old Guys Rule

#62
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to intelligent design theory (IDT), everyone is very capable of providing good advice, and people are always better than anything else at giving you information. This is because IDT shows no computational device or mechanism can actually create information, only people can do so. And, any person can do so, not only special people. This is because people have free will and intelligence (i.e. are intelligent…

What is falsifiable about your IDT ?

If you can show mechanisms/algorithms can produce information (which they mathematically are incapable of doing) or that intelligent agents (such as humans) do not produce information.

Re: When It Comes To Founding Successful Startups, Old Guys Rule

#63
post #52
post #10

I think this article is misleading. See Figure 1 on page 8 -- only 30.4% of the entrepreneurs surveyed were in software or hardware start ups, the rest were in other 'high technology' industries such as energy and bio-tech. I would love to see the same questions asked of only web-software start up entrepreneurs, I bet the results (age, experience, etc.) would skew differently.

No - the Hacker News/PG convention of referring to 'startups' meaning only web software startups is misleading. The general use of the term is broader. Seeing the breakdown by category would be interesting though.

I didn't explain myself well enough. It's assumed that &th audiences of HN and Techcrunch skew very much towards software startups. Given that, it is wrong to assume this survey bears much weight towards the audience of these sites. Techrunch should have realized this and flagged it before publishing the article.

Re: When It Comes To Founding Successful Startups, Old Guys Rule

#64
post #36
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=638350 from pg: "There are quite a lot of founders over 30. I don't know exactly how many because we don't keep track of ages. The sharp falloff is around 35, but we've had a handful of founders over 40. None over 50 though. I think our age distribution is probably close to the age distribution for startups generally. We've funded more founders who are 27 than 20 or 35 because more…

I think our age distribution is probably close to the age distribution for startups generally. That can't be right - surely there is a correlation between the value of that YC provides and the amount of time one has spent in industry. I'd imagine that once one has $50k in savings, and has worked with law firms, knows angels and VC's, the value of YC funding drops drastically. Hence, I'd imagine older (more experience…

As somebody who is over 30 and works in startups, I'd say you're right. I'd not even consider for a moment the standard YC deal ($11k + $3k/founder for 6%).

When I was right out of school, or off my first job I might've considered it... but these days? never.

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