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Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship

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Re: Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship

#71

Post by CalRobert »

ghufran_syed wrote: post #47
jknoepfler wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can certainly concede that achieving "ramen profitability" while living off savings is substantially less exciting while trying to pay down a mortgage and save up for one's childrens' college tuition.

Any reason why the kids can’t pay for their own tuition? Isn’t that what government student loans are for?

Because university is a fantastically overpriced and surprisingly unconvoluted system for turning government-guaranteed un-dischargeable debt in to administrators' and football coaches' salaries via misery and virtual indentured servitude.

That is, a system that perpetrates upon people who have not gained the mental tools necessary to understand what they're agreeing to as a result of the US' staggeringly ineffective secondary schools, but who _have_ been convinced that not attending college is a guaranteed marker of social inadequacy by a marketing engine that pushes the message "You're a worthless person if you don't go to college" in to culture at every possible juncture?

Re: Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship

#72

Post by austincheney »

jknoepfler wrote: post #24

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 bet…

The youth buzz has nothing to do with engineering potential.

Young people tend to be more free of external responsibilities: marriage, children, job contracts, consumer debt, professional associations, expensive educational entanglements, and so forth. This makes young people more available to take giant risks with less apprehension (they have less to lose).

There is also giant marketing buzz when an uneducated 18 year old female creates something vaguely interesting, but nobody cares when a 45 year old man creates something absolutely revolutionary until they old it in their hands. Case in point: Elizabeth Holmes.

Re: Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship

#73

Post by deepGem »

tixocloud wrote: post #66
deepGem wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I more or less left full time work when I was 39 to pursue startups. The reasoning was exactly on the lines of what you have described. It's been 2 years and the journey has been fraught with failures. One, it's become really hard for me to find a co-founder. Almost none of the guys in my friend circle are willing to take the risks associated with startups. I've attended a pre-accelerator to find a co-founders but ha…

I'm curious to know what are the things you've been thinking about working on? I've experienced the challenge of finding a co-founder in my immediate circle but looking beyond that, there are plenty of potentials. I know a startup called Wagepoint that started with a co-founders from vastly different age groups.

I started working on recording meetings and converting the recordings to meeting minutes with actionable items. Not a trivial task. My idea was to build an iPhone app with ML in the cloud. I did some initial market survey and found no takers for this idea. I spoke to startups, mid-enterprises and even law firms. I got one positive response from a VC who said this could be useful in tracking the meetings he has with founders as most of them go untracked but I was not too convinced (perhaps I was wrong). So dropped that idea and tried on some ideas around computer vision, prompted by the problems some of the customers were elucidating to while validating the above idea. "We don't really care about meetings but can you use machine learning to monitor people ? I am not a big fan of surveillance. After this I have drifted quite a bit around the last year or so. Current situation - no direction. Just having a side thought on doing something around high definition maps. Looked for a job to fill up some savings, but boy the interviewing phenomenon is nuts. I haven't interviewed in like 15 years. So got back to doing leetcode and Hackerrank.

Re: Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship

#74

Post by gexla »

austincheney wrote: post #72
jknoepfler wrote: post #24

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 bet…

The youth buzz has nothing to do with engineering potential. Young people tend to be more free of external responsibilities: marriage, children, job contracts, consumer debt, professional associations, expensive educational entanglements, and so forth. This makes young people more available to take giant risks with less apprehension (they have less to lose). There is also giant marketing buzz when an uneducated 18 ye…

> This makes young people more available to take giant risks with less apprehension (they have less to lose).

Is this a contradiction? How can there be risk if there's nothing to lose?

Re: Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship

#75

Post by sharemywin »

deepGem wrote: post #60
codazoda wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but ~45 may be a golden age again. By then your kids may be starting to becoming self sufficient, retirement is still 20 years off, and you've lived through a fair number of financial problems. Your retirement plans might be coming together and the world is starting to look more rosey. Plus, you find yourself feeling like you're nearing the end of your "youth"; you're aged but you still feel good. Perhaps you b…

I more or less left full time work when I was 39 to pursue startups. The reasoning was exactly on the lines of what you have described. It's been 2 years and the journey has been fraught with failures. One, it's become really hard for me to find a co-founder. Almost none of the guys in my friend circle are willing to take the risks associated with startups. I've attended a pre-accelerator to find a co-founders but ha…

tried to check out your website www.callindra.com it doesn't go anywhere. Do you have a current website?

Re: Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship

#76

Post by sharemywin »

volgo wrote: post #27

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…

I think the point was there aren't a lot of young developers/entrepreneurs working on how to make the property casualty preferred vendor relationships work better. Because that type of business would take years of time in that industry to both understand the problems and make the contacts.

Re: Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship

#77

Post by CalRobert »

thebradbain wrote: post #59
ghufran_syed wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any reason why the kids can’t pay for their own tuition? Isn’t that what government student loans are for?

Federal Direct Student Loans, available to undergraduate students at a relatively low fixed rate (but still higher than say, a decent mortgage on a house), only allow a student to take out about $6000/year. But as college tuition skyrockets (mine is $70k/year, and increasing, and I have a brother at an equivalently priced institution too!), that wont cut it. The rest must either come from personal/family finances, be…

This is a big part of why my wife and I emigrated, but that option is pretty drastic.

More generally, perhaps we'll finally see people question if college offers the best return on an investment of 100 grand+ and 4+ years of life.

Re: Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship

#78

Post by deepGem »

sharemywin wrote: post #75
deepGem wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I more or less left full time work when I was 39 to pursue startups. The reasoning was exactly on the lines of what you have described. It's been 2 years and the journey has been fraught with failures. One, it's become really hard for me to find a co-founder. Almost none of the guys in my friend circle are willing to take the risks associated with startups. I've attended a pre-accelerator to find a co-founders but ha…

tried to check out your website www.callindra.com it doesn't go anywhere. Do you have a current website?

I don't have a current website yet. Thanks for pointing this out. I have a static page at callindra.com (works without the www) I have to fix the Godaddy DNS. Will do.

Re: Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship

#79

Post by [deleted] »

gexla wrote: post #74
austincheney wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The youth buzz has nothing to do with engineering potential. Young people tend to be more free of external responsibilities: marriage, children, job contracts, consumer debt, professional associations, expensive educational entanglements, and so forth. This makes young people more available to take giant risks with less apprehension (they have less to lose). There is also giant marketing buzz when an uneducated 18 ye…

> This makes young people more available to take giant risks with less apprehension (they have less to lose). Is this a contradiction? How can there be risk if there's nothing to lose?

[deleted]

Re: Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship

#80

Post by Infernal »

gexla wrote: post #74
austincheney wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The youth buzz has nothing to do with engineering potential. Young people tend to be more free of external responsibilities: marriage, children, job contracts, consumer debt, professional associations, expensive educational entanglements, and so forth. This makes young people more available to take giant risks with less apprehension (they have less to lose). There is also giant marketing buzz when an uneducated 18 ye…

> This makes young people more available to take giant risks with less apprehension (they have less to lose). Is this a contradiction? How can there be risk if there's nothing to lose?

Maybe a valid rephrasing would be "This makes young people more able to take actions that older folks with more obligations would consider to be giant risks".
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