[3dFlatLander]

I'm older than these guys--late 20's, married, no kids (yet). I just don't see this lifestyle bring very practical for married/family folks. But then again, I've never heard any stories of people other than young singles doing stuff like this. Anyone know of any outliers like this in the valley?

[nostrademons]

I'm the same age but single, and I applied to LaL but realized that I just don't have the energy anymore to sustain the pace they want. I could've done it at 19, I probably could even have done it at 24, but now that I'm 29, I just can't code for 14 hours a day, let alone 20. (Actually, that's not entirely true - I've pulled 14 hour days for 4-5 day stretches working on a Google doodle or coming up to a launch, but I need like 2 weeks of recovery time afterwards.) Alas, I wasted my twenties on college and 3 failed startups.

It's certainly possible to start a company in your 30s - PG did it, founding ViaWeb at 31 and selling it at 34 - but it does seem like a bit of an uncanny valley without many founders. My theory is that people who are the type of person that's going to found a startup probably would've founded it by 26, and then if their first couple attempts failed, they're licking their wounds at 30 and trying to figure out how to give it another go.

Those same people often end up starting follow-up ventures much later, after the kids are self-sufficient. I have one friend from elementary school whose dad is working on his second startup at the age of 70. His first venture - founded at around age 60 - ended up IPOing at a market cap of several billion before crashing and burning.

[calbear81]

Most of our engineering and management team is married or with kids and are early Google and FB employees so there's no desire to have to go with this type of lifestyle. I admire the youth who can pull this off and I think it makes sense when you are bootstrapping a service that requires a lot of work to scale up quickly.