One valuable asset for a startup is domain expertise. There are two kinds of domain expertise: academic knowledge, and experience in the field. You can get academic knowledge when you are young, but experience takes time.
I've only been to one tech conference, but it made me feel better about just getting into the startup world in my late 30's. One demographic I saw at the conference was a whole bunch of young, really smart developers who had no idea what to focus their skills on.
People with strong experience in a particular field can have a valuable perspective on what kinds of problems are worth solving in their field. They also know what solutions have been attempted in the past, and why those solutions were not ideal. This kind of knowledge can help a startup avoid the mistakes people have made in the past, and create a more effective product or service.
Yes, you are correct but you dont want to persevere to solve problems that are not important. From what I understand japhyr is saying that experience helps you choose these important problems from a set of all possible problems you can solve.
I didn't mention perseverance because that seems like a given for a startup to be successful. I sure wasn't claiming that domain expertise allows you to be half-hearted in your efforts.
Perseverance is necessary, but not sufficient. Perseverance and technical excellence, without domain expertise, seems like a road to failure.
Meh... it isn't about how "startups shouldn't just be for the young," because they're not. No actual intelligent, reasonable person with any life experience at all actually believes bullshit like:
Startups are for the young and hungry. You’re thirty? You’re too old. If you haven’t made your first million by 25, you’ve missed your chance. If you’re not working 130 hours a week, you’ll never create the next Google.
Seriously, it's a fun stereotype and it leads to cool movies like The Social Network but - back here in the real world - there are plenty of startups founded by 30+ folks. And, in the real world, it's results that matter in the end, so if you can compete, you can compete. It doesn't matter if you're 19, 29, 39, 49, or whatever.
Then again, I'm a 38 year old startup founder, so what do I know?
As an old (37) guy with experience in a couple of start-ups, there's another benefit to having older, more experienced people on the team -- if you get the right people, they will have seen the problems and done the work before, and will save you a lot of big mistakes up front.
The start-up I currently work for was founded by a bunch of very smart, very young engineers over four years ago, and we're still dealing with all the bad engineering decisions they made -- decisions that look obvious to an experienced engineer but aren't obvious to someone without the requisite cuts and bruises. Having even one seasoned engineer on the team then would have saved the company a lot of pain over the subsequent years and would have put us in a much better position now.
Those bad engineering decisions the founding engineers made may have been what allowed them to move fast enough to build a startup that's still in business 4+ years later.
If you know exactly what your customers want, you should take the time to build it correctly the first time. But if you're innovating and creating a new product, you'll need to perform a lot of experiments before you figure out what your customers really want.
Experiments shouldn't be engineered perfectly. It's better to have a creaky product that customers want than a bullet-proof system that nobody wants.
It's absolutely true that, sometimes, you need a quick and dirty solution to move quickly. For instance, on a project that I worked on when I was younger, I was running data through an O(n^6) algorithm when there was an O(n) algorithm available. However, getting something up and running at O(n^6) was far more valuable than waiting two weeks to work all the bugs out of the more complicated O(n).
On the other hand, that same project also had an object responsible for both displaying bitmaps on the screen and also for calculating statistical uncertainties. This unholy mash-up of two completely unrelated concepts was a constant impediment to development. If I'd had an experienced developer on the project, she'd have caught it in half a second. Splitting the class would have been trivial and wouldn't have delayed the project longer than a bathroom break. However, since the other developers were just as green as I was, the class stayed in and grew into a nightmare that prevented us from doing further experiments toward customer satisfaction. I think this is the kind of advantage that svdad was talking about.
Not all engineering is over-engineering. You can use your years of past experience to build something both quickly and better. Should not the experiment part should be experimenting with the function of the application, rather than experimenting with how to design code or architect systems?
I'm a 40 year old with two kids living in San Francisco, and I actually know a lot of people in my position who work for startups. It's not as big a career risk as people thing, especially in high tech, where career stability is more valuable than job stability. The people who work for startups tend to have a lot of connections and very sharp skills - qualities that make it easy for them to find a new job quickly.
There are a few downsides. The startups they tend to work for aren't the "rundown apartment eating ramen" kind of deals. They pay decent salaries, though they do offer more upside in exchange for lack of job stability (though like I said, job stability isn't such a big deal if you have a reserve fund and have very sharp skills). Even so, working for this sort of startup is more like having a job, more casual than a typical bigco but nowhere near as liberating as the PG-style ycombinator startup. Quasi "stable" startups aren't necessarily any better than a job in bigco, and the more they resemble a bigco in terms of pay and benefits, the more likely they are to behave like a bigco toward employees. Both types of organizations do display a wide range of workstyles.
Also, I don't know how it will be as these folks get older. I've found "age discrimination" per se to be overstated so far in my life, but that doesn't mean age won't make for a poor cultural fit. Plus, I am "only" 40... so who knows, I may feel it more later. When you have two kids at home, certain types of startups (the kind that might use the term "brogramming", for instance) generally aren't going to be a good fit for a 40+ year old with kids and a mortgage. I know a programmer in his 50s with teenage kids - the sort of dude who is super sharp in terms of intelligence and technical prowess, physically trim, and a little edgy. He works with these sorts of companies, but he says he sometimes looks toward more of a consulting arrangement.
Lastly, these folks could be at risk in a true meltdown. The last time I saw this was when during the dot-com bust, when genuinely talented programmers just couldn't get a gig. The big companies did shed some people, so I can't say bigco is necessarily safer, but there was little doubt that if you needed a stable income, a large organization was better shelter from the storm. This sort of true bust is rare, but it does happen. That said, if I did lose my job, I'd rather have the kind of network and technical skillset more common among a startup type than a bigco type who had gotten too comfortable over the last decade...
My lesson learned so far is that everything does carry some risk, and that in some ways a bigco career can carry greater risks than a series of startups... there isn't a single hard and fast rule for this.
But the vast majority of us simply don’t work as well if we drive ourselves too hard.
And the vast majority of startups fail.
I agree with the premise that you can never be too old. Even if you have a family and a mortgage, you're really just dealing with numbers.
If you're doing a startup and you're 20 years old and you need $1000/mo to live, then some amount of time every week is going to be devoted to making $250. Find a job that pays you $10/hr and work 25 hours a week, and work on your startup 40 hours a week. A 65 hour week in pursuit of your passion is a good place to be in life.
Similarly, a 30 year old doing consulting that has a family and a mortgage (or 2) may need $6000/mo to survive. Well, it's the same calculation - you need $1500/wk. So get your skills to the point that you can charge $100/hr. Consult for 15 hrs a week and work on your startup for 50. 65 hours a week in pursuit of your passion - and still another 60 or so waking hours to spend with your family.
Like everything in life, it's just positioning yourself to get the math to work for you.
As a relatively "old" guy (Its hard to write that as I don't feel old at 35) doing his first startup, I appreciate reading these articles. Although, the OP is on his 3rd startup and appears to have had some successes (especially if he had stock options from working at Apple).
I'd be curious to hear from people who left corporate world and went into the startup world later in life and how the adjustment was.
I'm 26 but couldn't agree more with a lot of what's said. I'm married younger than most in my industry and feel an intense pressure to work all hours of the week, essentially be on call 24/7. And most kids entering my field do, they make their job their whole life. I'm just not willing to do that and think it's very important to draw those work/life boundaries. It doesn't make you less of an asset at your job because most of the work I see is work for work's sake, to seem like they are putting in the effort. Working smarter, not harder is absolutely right. And there are also other tactics that are important. Working from home if need be, adjusting your hours so you can make time for your family/kids and still get things done, etc. Burn out is a big risk and my guess is that even though most kids in startups are young, there are many who are unsuccessful because they think they need to work 100+ hour weeks and just can't maintain the pace. They get burnt out, fail at what they're doing, and end up squandering a lot of talent. If they'd just rationed their energy, who knows what could have happened.
In the 30's you can take the shortcut secret: Learn from the success of others instead of having to splash everywhere furiously in your 20's to figure it out on your own.
The lean startup methedology specifically comes to mind on how to get stuff really done, and out of being a 'startup'. Being a startup should only be a temporary thing.
If the goal of startups is to learn the business skills to "start" a business model to become a lasting business, startups are a different kind of time use for me in my 20's than in my 30's.
Most of my 20's were spent learning business. My late 20's into 30's have been about buckling down and getting results from what I've learnt. Rubber to the road, no more confusing startup 'activity' with results. Schools over, time to deliver and launch, launch, launch.
Having other demands on me make me better. Who doesn't work better with the pressure of a deadline? Imagine what a family or children can help do. I'm not afraid of it.
Maybe VC's want my whole living energy don't know themselves that I get more done in 8 hours than burning myself for 16 hours a day 7 days a week. I did that for 6 years, zero vacations, I know it better than anyone who expects it indirectly. I can still do it, but I'm being smarter about it. The opportunity has to be right. Until then, my 8-10 hours a day are focused on being productive, no distractions, and no longer confuse activity with results.
If running businesses are for the middle aged, the young seem to be often forced out of startups once they get going. To prepare for this, I spent my 20's getting 20 years of business experience so I was the equivalent of a 40 year old in experience by the time I hit my 30's.
I'm not sure if it was the best or ideal course but I sure am more comfortable and prepared for the ups and down and continue to build my focus daily.
There is nothing like the energy and vitality you feel when you are building something that you feel passionate about. While I have a sucessful professional career, the small strides that you make with a startup are much more gratifying than even the best day at work. You appreciate this more as you get older.
I'm 33 and launching our idea next month. My biggest fear is that while I'm working on it part-time along with spending time with family and friends, somewhere a 21 yr old is eating Ramen and working away 20 hr days to annihilate my project.
The minute your project proves be remotely successful this will be true. There's no escaping it. Don't let it keep you up at night, just keep plugging away. Most of the time when it comes to a good idea there's enough money and demand for it that more than one company can live in the space.
28. No idea if this makes me old or young. Don't care.
I'm pretty sure I'm not fundable because I just don't see the value in being a billionaire. Ever. I'd get off around $10 million if money were the only motivation. Solving interesting problems, helping people, teaching people so the knowledge I have doesn't die when my body does, those are interesting to me. Scoring huge "exits" to make rich people richer? Meh. Not averse to it, but I don't care. Why would I? That rich people don't have enough money isn't even on the top 100 of the world's most serious problems.
And if any VC ever shot a term sheet my way that had participating preferred or multiple liquidation preferences on it, I'd feel like I was punched in the face and never deal with him, or his firm, or anyone connected with him, again.
The TL;DR of this sense: You know what's not cool? A billion dollars. Unless you're Louis CK, because he'd have fun with that shit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_XiA4U_XsE
I'm reaching the age where "just a programmer" positions (without, at the least, informal technical leadership) aren't acceptable, and I definitely like the blank-sheet creativity that's possible with startups, but I don't see myself as being VC-istan "founder material". I won't have the necessary connections to get funding till at least 35, and I stopped seeing any value in being a billionaire around 24, when a short-term but scary health problem convinced me of the utter-fucking-uselessness of material ambition.
It's not that I wouldn't be awesome as a founder. I have as good or better odds than anyone else. I just have to recognize that by the time I'll be fundable, having acquired the connections, I'll probably care even less about billion-dollar exits.
I'm also 28 and have left my work to form a startup. Money is not a motivation for me but I've been doing this for 8 months now and it is a big factor. If someone offered $5 million dollars to me right now and buy my company I would definitely say yes.
The reason is that it would give me the freedom to do whatever I want for a long time. I wouldn't start buying expensive things because I was able to do that when I was working as a senior software engineer anyway. There are so many projects I'd love to be able to do for the sake of learning something new which I am not able to do right now. I have to focus on earning money as my funds will eventually run out.
I'm a 20 year old with no obligations what so ever. I would say your wrong startup isn't for the old it isn't for the in experience. I have run my own consulting company since I was 15. I have been through the ups and downs of hiring and firing, management, dealing with unruly customers, as well as unruly employees. I would that the benefit of experience working as a programmer on big project is that you know when it's time to stop. You have found those ways to get through 60 hours werk. Mines being working out. You know a good employee from a bad, and you know the difference between a unmotivated employee, and one that needs to go. As a turned from a consulting to a startup just recently I do see something young people the few like me do have. We have time. I don't have any obligations, School will always be there if I need it, even with my experience I am enough of stupid dreamer to follow a good idea.
The presentation skills that you can learn in a few college-level communications classes are invaluable for getting noticed and being taken seriously. Your comment highlights this.
Although all of us on HN like to think we can look past the grammar and poor sentence structure and judge someone by their github account or code quality - In reality humans are not built to evaluate others that way during first encounter, and most people you interact with in a startup (like customers) do not care about the code.
>and most people you interact with in a startup (like customers) do not care about the code.
Exactly. Technical debt is your problem; not the customers.
Right now, to the average person you're probably a wizard. (And to some of your colleagues if your skills are of sufficient quality.) Nobody questions a wizards magic as long as it works. (Except in the edge case where it is indeed your colleagues observing.)
The best magic requires sleight of hand and people skills to perform.
EDIT: And since were all listing our ages here, 16.
I've only been to one tech conference, but it made me feel better about just getting into the startup world in my late 30's. One demographic I saw at the conference was a whole bunch of young, really smart developers who had no idea what to focus their skills on.
People with strong experience in a particular field can have a valuable perspective on what kinds of problems are worth solving in their field. They also know what solutions have been attempted in the past, and why those solutions were not ideal. This kind of knowledge can help a startup avoid the mistakes people have made in the past, and create a more effective product or service.