[codethatwerks]

What is the parallel advice for a 40 year old? I guess the programming and tinkering stuff still applies. But university cannot be redone. Sure I can study but I wont have any connection to most young people. I’ll be the old guy. And this assumes I can afford the loss of income.

I assume a lot of start ups are started by older people too.

I think for older people an advantage is to solve older people problems. Like how sucky accessing all kinds of “adulting” things are from aged care to dealing with myriad systems with kids schools or any other problems that have inevitably been chucked at you. Some of these “startups” might actually be lobbying/political work for the good that doesn’t make money, some might be startups.

Also being older I don’t care about making a unicorn. I see that as an odd goal for a founder of any age but a great goal for an investor.

[emseetech]

Less startup, more starting a business.

The older I get the less I want to build a startup and more I want to start a business. Something that takes a little bit of capital, lots of hard work, gets some customers and provides goods or services, without venture capital firms and 100x returns and everything that comes with that, just a standard business.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI1SLHEC98I

[bruce511]

As you get older it becomes harder to start a business, simply because of financial concerns.

As a just-graduated poor student I was used to living on practically nothing. By 40 I had a mortgage, kids, wife etc. The penalty-for-failure at that age is substantial.

When I stopped getting a salary in my 20s my wife was earning so we just lived on her salary. That lasted a few years until the new business found its niche.

So, how to start a business later in life? Slowly and carefully. First do it as a side hustle. Night's and weekends. (Which is good to see if you still gave the energy for that.)

Price things "as if its full time". If you're selling ceramics on Saturdays figure out what your daily sales need to be and price accordingly. If you're teaching piano ditto.

Side hustles also let you experiment with marketing. See if the market will bear more than just a Saturday here or there.

When you can, take a paid vacation from your day job, and see how busy you are (and what income) from the eide hustle. Figure out if you enjoyed that more than the day job.

Save every penny from the dide hustle. You'll want at least 6 months of cash before you make the leap. 3 months to get income back up, 3 to look for a new job if it fails.

It's harder to start a new thing in your 40s. But it's also more likely to succeed, IF you plan and execute right.

[GeneralMayhem]

This is true if you require the same amount of income to maintain your lifestyle, but if you've been working in tech for 20 years, you have savings. I'm not in my 40s yet, but it's much more viable for me to take a risk now than it was when I was just starting out because I can afford to fail for a couple years without, you know, becoming homeless.

[epolanski]

This so much.

I'm 36 and I can afford to not work for many years with my savings.

It's definitely easier now for me.

[nerdponx]

I wish. My savings are all going to go into a house, kids' college, and my retirement. Not everyone on HN is making $300-500k TC for a decade before having their first child.

[satvikpendem]

Using savings when younger can significantly increase your overall retirement age. There, however, is also a risk of not starting a company in time (or having enough time to complete and perhaps exit a business) by waiting until you are fully retired. How one wants to slice that risk to reward ratio is up to them. My option is the higher parent's one, starting side hustles until slowly they take over my main income, such that I feel no loss of quality of life and I'd still retire when I want to. It is akin to rolling green-blue deployments rather than shut-down-the-server deployments.

[ed_mercer]

While I also consider myself lucky, not everyone works as a software engineer earning high salaries. Being older also (usually) means more responsibilities and less tolerance for risk.

[epolanski]

Very true, I think that while my savings are very good, I would have much less risk tolerance if I had kids.

[swah]

I wish we had an online space for talking to people with these concerns. Its much different for a single guy - he can make his 100k savings last years, specially if allowed to go back living with family.

[comatory]

You can do this if you're in US, salaries elsewhere for tech jobs are more inline with salaries for specialized professions (doctors, lawyers). They're still larger than other jobs but it goes nowhere near the levels of western/eastern US (exceptions exist ofc).

Then there's a question when you start a family, that's subjective and something you can control but the model of creating career and then having kids (in late 30s/early 40s) seems more common in US. If you have your first child in mid 30s, then few laters 2nd one for example, you still need to be very hands-on, attentive and provide at least until your late 40s/early 50s.

[ehnto]

You have a much better idea of what demand is tangible and grounded, which means you are in a great position to start a bootstrapped small business. Some people have been calling them boring businesses which is actually pretty exciting to me, since they are tangible machines you can put work into.

All my attempts at starting a SaaS when I was younger were basically me building a cool thing and then yelling into the wind. I am looking for a more concrete market for my next venture, and it doesn't have to be cool or cutting edge.

[Solvency]

That's a romantic idea until you realize you're now dealing and subservient to the dredges of society, the worst kinds of customers, the worst kind of people. Far worse than a niche market specialized technology sales prospect. Get ready to have a new contempt for humanity. Get ready to be raked over the coals by Yelp.

[boringg]

Man you gotta get outside more often. Most of the world doesn't work in tech and has for thousands of years and surprise doesn't suffer from a new level of contempt for their fellow human.

[gnicholas]

GP didn’t actually mention what kind of business (B2B or B2C, tech or another sector) — the description was broad enough to encompass my IP licensing business, which is about as tech-focused as it gets.

[sandspar]

Lol hell yeah brother my local coffee shop regulars are well known for being the dredges of society.

[codethatwerks]

Coffee shop? Customers fine, but health inspectors and rent increases are your antihero. As well as too much competition.

[tomhoward]

There's a study that often gets shared around, purportedly "Debunking the Myth of the Young Entrepreneur", showing data that most successful startup founders start their companies in their mid-to-late 40s, including tech/social media companies.

It depends a lot on how you qualify and categorise founders, companies and "successful", but of course you can understand why it can be somewhat truthful: people in their 40s have had 2-3 decades to build up experience, networks and a track record, making it much easier to build a team and attract investors and initial customers. I'm sure almost all of these founders in their 40s have had at least some partial success in their past.

So it still affirms that it's best to start as young as possible, allowing time to experiment with ideas, markets, co-founders, etc. I've seen plenty of founders bounce from one-to-another-to-another startup from their 20s to their 40s, each one being vastly more successful than the last.

But as you point out there are still all kinds of opportunities to build new products to address needs that are overlooked by younger founders, so you should absolutely go for it if you're inspired.

I feel the same as you about being less interested in "unicorn"-scale success after 40; as you mature, have kids, experience illness in your family and become more observant of problems in different segments of society, you become much more focused on just providing well for your family and doing some good for the world than having to be some kind of all-conquering hero.

If you want to connect privately to talk more about what kind of company you want to build and how best to go about it, feel free to get in touch (email in bio).

[luc4sdreyer]

> "Debunking the Myth of the Young Entrepreneur"

There might be others, but this one is clear and to the point:

The Average Age of a Successful Startup Founder Is 45

https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-succes...

[throwoutway]

Give yourself a break. When I studied in uni I was stuck at tables with 'old guys' and 'old ladies' and I had a lot of respect for them. They paid attention, wanted to learn, were there to learn. When I didn't understand something, I asked them before I asked the teacher and they generally were happy to help. I have fond memories

[llm_trw]

>Also being older I don’t care about making a unicorn. I see that as an odd goal for a founder of any age but a great goal for an investor.

Looking at the state of open source software today a google is simply impossible because the ecosystem has rotted from the inside.

Look at how much effort it took to write the cgi-bin scripts google started with vs whatever flavour of the week JS framework you have to use now.

Not sure what the solution is but we need fewer sheep in development and less permissive licenses so developers doing unglamorous work can capture more of the value. There's a reason why every shop which supports massive open source projects is running away from legacy licenses as fast as they can and that reason is Amazon.

If you don't care about developers from the user side of things it's just as bad. The GPL in the age of cloud services does as much to protect user freedom as the MIT license did in the 1990s.

[ramraj07]

Creating something from scratch is so much easier today than it ever was, and I’ve been creating crap for decades now. All the fancy JavaScript crap is purely optional. You can still write something in CGI if you want. My last prototype I wrote with Vue and JQuery and as pure html and .js files. It was an absolute blast! And the users loved it! Have you tested streamlit? FastAPI? Everything is so easy now.

[llm_trw]

Today if I were to write a cgi script it would have to send json payloads to the JS front end because round trip latency on phones is between 100 to 500ms to hit a dns server. I was getting lower latency on dialup in 1996. On my desktop it's 2ms on a bad day.

You can't just use HTML because browsers have mutated to fat clients for a X like protocol which is a mishmash of html, css, js, and whatever else someone's decided to throw on top of it.

We're using screwdrivers as axes and everyone is acting like this is some type of acceptable outcome.

[nicoburns]

You absolutely can just use HTML. You're writing this on HN that just uses HTML and is one of the more responsive websites on mobile connections.

You can't make as rich an interavtive experience as you can with JS, but you never could.

[llm_trw]

Just because a site is responsive doesn't mean it's HTML. The fact that a lot of people assume that you can't have a responsive site with JS is all the indictment of $current_year front end development you need.

These are some of the JS functions HN runs in the background, on top of the CSS:

    function $ (id) { return document.getElementById(id); }
    function byClass (el, cl) { return el ? el.getElementsByClassName(cl) : [] }
    function byTag (el, tg) { return el ? el.getElementsByTagName(tg) : [] }
    function allof (cl) { return byClass(document, cl) }
    ...

[nicoburns]

I didn't say you can't have a responsive site with JavaScript, I said that you can have one with plain HTML. HN may use JS for a few things (upvotes?), but it's mostly full page reloads including for loading threads and posting comments.

[niutech]

No need for JSON and JS, you can use pure HTML streaming: https://lamplightdev.com/blog/2024/01/10/streaming-html-out-... and pure CSS interactions like tabs, accordions, dropdown menus.

[xisthesqrtof9]

I agree.

I think the parent poster was referring to how much noise there is, and I'd agree. The moment you start learning, just the fanciest stuff is shoved down your throat. So you just assume its the best and roll with it.

I find myself tinkering more with PHP now that I've been using js for the past 7 years.

[mynameisnoone]

> Looking at the state of open source software today a google is simply impossible because the ecosystem has rotted from the inside.

The Oxide route is one of the better approaches for backend. "Apple" of enterprise OSS, but I think their ambitions are too small. Prefab containers full of seamless and modular amounts of each food groups: CPU, GPU, RAM, SSD, HDD, interconnect, and uplink all in and managed. Not rack-up but dirt-up and totally managed offering IAM, VMs, 12factor PAAS, serverless, volumes, and object storage with multitenancy, accounting, security, data lifecycle, config management, appropriate redundancy, and other cross-cutting concerns harmonized in a way that is necessarily managed but sufficiently customizable.

Frontend, the trick is standardizing on the least fragile tools that are widely used enough. Churn on tools and dependencies is a distraction and a time waster.

[dragonwriter]

> Looking at the state of open source software today a google is simply impossible because the ecosystem has rotted from the inside.

There’s lots of reasons a Google is impossible to start today (the main one being “Google exists, whatever the next explosive startup-to-giant is [0], it will look nothing like Google, and such things aren’t cookie-cutter, each is sui generis), but the explanation you offer above is… unconvincing as a bare conclusion, but maybe could be fleshed out with more description and support.

> Not sure what the solution is but we need fewer sheep in development and less permissive licenses so developers doing unglamorous work can capture more of the value.

The two halves of this sentence are in tension, and the first seems more reasonable than the second.

> Look at how much effort it took to write the cgi-bin scripts google started with vs whatever flavour of the week JS framework you have to use now.

You don’t have to use a flavor-of-the-week JS framework in place of cgi-bin scripts. (And, in some ways, the lowest-friction backend options are lower friction to get up and running than cgi-bin scripts on a server you set up, because you’ve got things like “serverless” FaaS hosts.)

[0] OpenAI?

[satvikpendem]

But, no one is forcing you to use the latest JS framework, you can still write cgi-bin scripts if you wanted...

There is no need to follow the trend du jour, it is some fallacy that you're describing that somehow it's easier then than today when the technology is largely backwards compatible.

[throwaway2562]

> Not sure what the solution is but we need fewer sheep in development and less permissive licenses so developers doing unglamorous work can capture more of the value.

This is the nuts of it.

[eggdaft]

Sounds like you might want to start a lifestyle business. You should read and listen to everything by Rob Walling, especially his “stair step approach”. Wish someone had told me this at your stage.

For meeting founders, find someone in the area you’re interested in and build stuff with them. Also consider using the YC founder network, but they may be too ambitious for you.

Lifestyle businesses are probably less dependent on cofounders for success.

You’ll need to work hard at your tech skills if they’ve atrophied. The good news is, this part is incredibly fun.

[rwalling]

Here are a couple links if you want to get started with my work, all focused on bootstrapping profitable SaaS companies:

[Stair Step Method of Bootstrapping] https://robwalling.com/2015/03/26/the-stair-step-method-of-b...

[Podcast] https://startupsfortherestofus.com

[Book] https://saasplaybook.com

[YouTube] https://microconf.com/youtube

[atentaten]

Anything on B2C?

[eggdaft]

Classic Hacker News moment. Thanks Rob, love everything you do! Your recent SaaS Playbook is awesome.

[xhrpost]

https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-succes...

[jh00ker]

"Research: The Average Age of a Successful Startup Founder Is 45"

The link above links to the article I was going to post. Just adding the headline here, since it was missing.

[garyiskidding]

Thanks, this is the link I've been looking for with regards to this thread.

[halienm]

H

[happytiger]

Wow, the older I get the more ambitious I get about what to build. A lot of the companies I created in my 20s and 30s I wouldn’t waste my time on in my 40s. I’m so the exact opposite it’s kinda funny.

Go big or go home, it’s no fun to chew bones.

[kamaal]

That Steve Jobs advice of saying no to a lot of things seems such a natural thing to do as you age.

As years that remain shrink, you have to pick and choose the battles you want to fight.

[happytiger]

That’s interesting. Aging hasn’t been limiting my thinking about time remaining. Maybe it should. It’s been pouring on the gas about enjoying the ride as much as possible instead. Worry less, lean in more, focus on defining a success that is yours in a way that’s deeply meaningful.

[navane]

I think PG addresses this subtlety where he says: "when you're young it's easier to know what you are interested in, than what people need." This inverts as you get older.

[xyzelement]

// Also being older I don’t care about making a unicorn

You can use that term as a proxy for delivering large impact to the world. It's approximately the same thing. If you do something like "aged care" and "dealing with kids schools" in a way that helps millions of people, you'll end up a billionaire whether you want to or not.

I don't use the term "unicorn" but I think keeping score in financial terms helps because that's how you know you've delivered something people want and at scale. If you remove money out of the equation it's easier to fool yourself thinking you're making some difference and you're not.

[dtnewman]

Counterpoint: Rudolph Hass, creator of the original hass avocado, barely made anything from it. I’m not gonna say that the Hass Avocado had more impact than Apple or Google, but it’s definitely more impactful than any $1-10 billion company I can think of.

[teaearlgraycold]

Isn’t the story that some crazy old seed man gave him a Hass seed and we don’t really know where it came from?

[b112]

Such a Californian, colloquial tale.

I'd had never seen an avocado in any grocery story growing up, never tasted it until I visited California.

Is this "changing the world"?

Well I suppose it could be, after all myriads of people have never used or even heard of slack.

[codethatwerks]

You can fool yourself with money too. Often it is more profitable to do the unethical thing.

[mewpmewp2]

But perhaps he doesn't want to make THAT much impact. Some decent impact would be fine, of course. It seems a lot of responsibility to have impact on millions of people, might lead you down the road of drugs and alcohol, killing your health to be able to handle it.

If I have a business that impacts millions of people, then every hour I spend on it, would have huge influence, and if I don't spend the hours on increasing that percentage, I'm also letting down millions of people.

[waveBidder]

But unicorns and the people who fund them are all about disconnecting from actual returns today, and caring about projected returns in 10 years. Accidentally becoming very popular is great. Aiming for that as the goal distorts the business into something unsustainable and inevitably leads to enshittification.

[mynameisnoone]

Same boat here.

I would suggest using your network and consider a path of least resistance such as building a side-business while working that either solves niche enterprise problems or makes enterprise capabilities more manageable for small businesses.

Starting a business is really easy. The bullshit that every business needs to do isn't particularly magical or mysterious. Don't get too invested in the bureaucratization process, but also be sure to implement what needs to happen just in time.

Find cofounders from your friends and coworkers, and go to startup events. Find people who you respect and who respect you, have integrity, and are the most fun. It's important to find people who don't turn into arrogant SOBs or raging sociopaths when large sums of money become involved. Honesty, awareness, navigating/prioritizing ambiguity, and conflict resolution skills are damn important.

Avoid external funding if at all possible unless it unblocks time-to-market that would otherwise miss market time or grow too slowly to survive. (Growing slower is often easier and more sustainable!)

Have sensible cost controls that are pennywise and poundwise.

If not changing the world or building a startup per se, focus on building a business that something people want. ;@] Expect it to take 20x longer, 50x more effort, and 4x more money than you think.