[SeamusBrady]

Hah! As someone who is nearing their forties I find this Silicon Value obsession with youth quite interesting. I live in Ireland and I have never even been in the States, so my opinions should be taken with a pinch of salt :)

I know of plenty of successful "older" entrepreneurs here, even in IT. We don't have this cult of the under 25s here as much I think.

Perhaps VCs like under 25s because they are just easier to manipulate? Or is it just another sign of a culture that is worryingly obsession with youth and staying young at any cost?

[mikeleeorg]

An angel investor once shared candidly with me that if he were evaluating two teams competing in the same market, where one was young & inexperienced and the other was old & experienced, he would invest in the younger team.

His explanation was that building a startup is incredibly hard & time-consuming, and a vast majority of teams fail. A younger team would have a lower burn rate, be able to work all hours of the day to get things done (for better or worse), and be more likely to stay with the startup life after several failures.

An older team generally needs more of a salary for financial obligations (especially those with a family, mortgage, etc), wouldn't be able to work as many hours (especially those with a family), and might be able to survive a failure or two, then give up and go back to a FT job somewhere because of their already-established connections.

Whether you have the same mindset or not, this may be the mindset of many investors in Silicon Valley. And perhaps journalists & industry bloggers too, which would explain why the media here tends to emphasize younger cofounders.

[jacquesm]

The media emphasizes younger co-founders because it makes for a much better story. Rags to riches before you're 25 sounds so much better than the same before you're 60.

[_delirium]

I think there's also a disproportionate media focus on the really big successes, which do seem to have had pretty young founders: Apple (21 & 25), Microsoft (19), Google (24 & 25), Dell (19), Amazon (30), etc.

[pelemele]

Jobs biggest success came when he was over 45 and honestly, we are not talking here about stuff like break-thru cancer cure, new kind of alternative energy or similar. We still use the same network stack (TCP, 1974), the same web markup language (HTML, 1990) and the same programming languages as our fathers (C++, 1979, PHP, 1995, SQL 1987).

[einhverfr]

Well, we aren't using my grandmother's computer programming language much (Fortran).... Thank goodness ;-) hahahahah

[dgabriel]

Actually, Fortran is pretty widely used in the sciences. If you're working with R, you're probably doing some Fortran stuff, too.

[einhverfr]

One thing that's really bothered me about this narrative. My business has tried lots and lots of things. Most fail. A few succeed. Some fail because of issues getting the right people together. Some fail because the ideas aren't as viable as I thought. Some fail because I don't have the ability to position them. However, the path to success really is littered with failures. This can put stress on a marriage, etc. However, it is important for everyone in a business of any sort to recognize that there will be way more failures than successes.

Also I think every new business fails before it succeeds.

I would expect those with more life experience to get this lesson more often than the young people who have not yet experienced the intimate relationship between success and failure. If I were an angel investor and some day I might be able to be, I'd look much more at how founders saw failures than what their ages were.

[mikeleeorg]

I'd look much more at how founders saw failures than what their ages were.

Great point. A failure in itself is not as valuable as the lesson learned from that failure.

[einhverfr]

It's not just the lessons learned from it. It's how you conceptualize of failure and how you work your way through it to success. Sometimes failure doesn't happen because you make a mistake. Sometimes it is a natural phase on the way towards success.

When I am asked about starting a business, the first piece of advice I give is "your business will fail. It will run out of money. If you want it to succeed you have to be prepared to run it for a while after it has failed."

[lelele]

> An angel investor once shared candidly...

Candidly? Really?

I agree with the previous poster that youngsters are naive and much easier to be taken advantage of. I've been exploited in my younger years in ways which would not work anymore with my current me.

Moreover, older entrepreneurs are more likely to start sustainable businesses, that is businesses which will steadfastly grow, whilst VC may be more interested in business which will grow exponentially. You may end up wasting your younger years, which are irreplaceable, they have wasted just their money, of which they have plenty.

Youngsters throw themselves at entrepreneurship, and by the sheer law of great numbers, some of them will succeed. Seriously, how may business started by the young make it big?

[einhverfr]

The flip side to this is that older teams, more aware of their limits, may play a more conservative game, funding more carefully from operations, and the like. This means also less of a need for VC funding, and it means less of an opportunity for VC's to leverage successive rounds to dilute founder's shares.

In other words, lower risk, lower rewards.

[mikeleeorg]

I couldn't find the article, but I read somewhere that the rate of success for older entrepreneurs is higher than for younger ones, because of their accumulated experience and wisdom. There's definitely a flip side.

[danbmil99]

this.