[spokey]

Spoken with the false confidence of youth.

Here's a few examples of fairly revolutionary achievements post-30, even within the relatively narrow field of tech startups:

* Jimmy Wales was 36 when Wikipedia was founded. Larry Sanger was 34.

* Steve Jobs was 30 when he founded NeXT, 31 when he took over Pixar, 40 when Toy Story, their first major film was released, and 42 when he returned to Apple and led them to a major market turnaround, OS X, the iPod/iTunes, the iPhone/AppStore, etc.

* Jeff Bezos was 30 when he founded Amazon, 37 before it turned a profit.

* John McCarthy was 31 when he first designed LISP.

* Marc Benioff was 35 when he co-founded Salesforce.com (I don't know how old his cofounders were.)

* David Winer was 33 when he founded UserLand, 41 before they started offering web publishing software.

* Larry Ellison was 33 when he founded Oracle, 35 when they made their first sale, 40 when Oracle became an ACID-database.

* PG was 40 when YCombinator first launched.

That's just off the top of my head (I had to look up the dates) and I don't particularly pay attention to the age of tech company founders. I'm sure there are dozens of better examples.

For a more comprehensive survey, see http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1431263

I actually kinda hope you're trolling with this comment, you're way off base.

[lsb]

You're refuting it with examples of men in their mid-30s? That's quite an interesting definition of old age.

[python123]

Why don't you actually read my comment? I said that old people with no achievements aren't going to suddenly become great entrepreneurs.

Jimmy Wales - extremely successful options and futures trader

Steve Jobs - I forget what company he was involved with before NeXT, but I think it was pretty big

Jeff Bezos - one of the top people at D.E. Shaw, right under Shaw himself

John McCarthy - programming languages don't really count as entrepreneurship, but I'm sure you could find many examples of old people creating languages

Marc Benioff - youngest VP in Oracle history

David Winer - I really have no idea what UserLand is

Larry Ellison - ok, fine. I guess if you're trying to make Oracle, it's ok to be old. I don't mean that as a slight to Oracle, but I don't think Oracle's story applies to web startups.

PG - I didn't say anything about old people not being able to become investors

[spokey]

Now I know you're trolling. Good day.

[python123]

How on Earth is that trolling? I completely refuted your argument, and you can't respond so you call it trolling. None of those people were 30-year-old career software engineers who had achieved nothing and dreamed of entrepreneurship. They were all already successful.

And I know Hacker News is mostly that type of person, but you people need a reality check. You can downvote all you want, but it won't change anything. I bet you really wish it could because forums like this are probably all you have left. You're going to wake up tomorrow and do what you're doing. I'm going to wake up tomorrow and do what you dream of doing.