The 20-year-old entrepreneur is a myth, according to study • Hacker News Board

Re: The 20-year-old entrepreneur is a myth, according to study

#31

Post by aje403 » Mon, Apr 23, 2018, 2:38 PM UTC

gbacon wrote: post #26

aje403 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Unfortunately, delusions of grandeur and a unicorn VC culture convince average young people into believing themselves to be power law founders with power law ideas. Thankfully that has changed a bit and it looks like the miracle men are moving into blockchain. In reality, billion dollar+ ideas are rare, and clever, delusional, and young people are a great fit for the helm. When you're older, you have domain k…

“Nothing defines humans better than their willingness to do irrational things in the pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs. This is the principle behind lotteries, dating, and religion.” (Scott Adams)

Nothing more true than that. Except I'll add that people become a bit more disillusioned by experience and willingness to take risk as they get older - at least maybe with dating and startups, maybe not lotteries and religion

Re: The 20-year-old entrepreneur is a myth, according to study

#32

Post by n4r9 » Mon, Apr 23, 2018, 2:58 PM UTC

autokad wrote: post #5

ainiriand wrote: post #2

So what we get is a very big case of survivorship bias. Relevant: https://xkcd.com/1827/

could you explain how it factors in this case? because I don't think that it does. there may be some 'selection bias', by only including start ups that went on to hire at least one employee, but I am OK with their operational definitions in this case. the story makes sense, and it jives with my observations when doing my masters in computer science. In tech in particular, most of my classmates were not entrepreneuria…

I think they meant that the myth has been caused by selection bias, not that the study is prone to it.

Re: The 20-year-old entrepreneur is a myth, according to study

#33

Post by lowry » Mon, Apr 23, 2018, 4:03 PM UTC

padobson wrote: post #18

jasode wrote: post #12

I don't see the raw data of the study but I can think of one reason why it contradicts the public perception of the 20-something founder: There's a difference between B2B/SaaS/enterprise startups vs B2C startups. The B2B companies are often started by older folks in their 30s and 40s. (E.g. PeopleSoft human resources software started by David Duffield age 46 and Siebel CRM software started by Tom Siebel age 41. Both…

If I was going to sum-up this comment, it'd be something like "Sell what you know." The viral growth of companies started by 20-something founders is fueled by 20-something consumers. The growth of companies started by 40-something founders is fueled by businesses with 40-something managers/executives.

Hm... Women make most of purchase decisions in households but founders are mostly men. Something does not match up.

Re: The 20-year-old entrepreneur is a myth, according to study

#34

Post by snowwrestler » Mon, Apr 23, 2018, 4:06 PM UTC

georgewsinger wrote: post #10

Studies like this often ignore the power law. Consider the most valuable tech companies: 1. Apple: $570.7B. - Jobs: 21 - Wozniak: 26 2. Alphabet: $560B. - Larry & Sergey: 25ish 3. Microsoft: $434B. - Gates: 19ish - Allen: 22ish 4. Amazon: $365B. - Bezos: 30ish 5. Facebook: $354B. - Zuckerberg: 19 What matters are the power law companies, not the average company. My guess is that your ability to create an incremental…

Salesforce, LinkedIn, SpaceX, Tesla, heck Intel... I suspect the conclusions one draws from "power law companies" will depend on which companies one includes for consideration.