>> Most hackers who start startups wish they could do it by just writing some clever software
I wonder if the word "hackers" ought to be replaced with "young hackers of the type to apply to YC"?
If you're fresh out of school, or have only worked in big silicon-valley companies doing specialized tasks, I can see it. I have a hard time believing someone with even a few years experience in smaller companies haven't come to grips with "schlepness".
>> Maybe that's one reason the most successful startups of all so often have young founders.
I don't think that's what the research shows:
""" Old guys rule. And they are far more likely to be the founder of a successful technology company than most of you understand. How do I know this? Research that my team conducted, based on a survey of 549 entrepreneurs in high-growth industries, showed that the average founder of a high-growth company launched his venture at age 40. """
Old hackers still wish they could just program. The difference between old and young is that the old are more likely to know they can't have what they wish for in that respect.
The research you quote is about moderately successful startups, not about the most successful of all. You can easily verify I'm right about the outliers by traversing the Forbes 400.
Ok... with correlation vs. causation out of the way, and a ridiculously small sample size to boot, it appears the average age of Forbes 400 tech company founders was almost 32 at the time of the founding their companies (http://goo.gl/iHAEe).
I have a feeling that's not what you meant when you said "young"...? Maybe you meant to restrict that to only founders that wrote the code their companies are based on? In which case, yeah, the founders of facebook, google, and Microsoft were all young when they started... I'd be careful drawing too many conclusions on that sample size, however.
I wonder if the word "hackers" ought to be replaced with "young hackers of the type to apply to YC"?
If you're fresh out of school, or have only worked in big silicon-valley companies doing specialized tasks, I can see it. I have a hard time believing someone with even a few years experience in smaller companies haven't come to grips with "schlepness".
>> Maybe that's one reason the most successful startups of all so often have young founders.
I don't think that's what the research shows:
""" Old guys rule. And they are far more likely to be the founder of a successful technology company than most of you understand. How do I know this? Research that my team conducted, based on a survey of 549 entrepreneurs in high-growth industries, showed that the average founder of a high-growth company launched his venture at age 40. """
http://techcrunch.com/2009/09/07/when-it-comes-to-founding-s...