[grellas]

The best entrepreneurs are ones who work in their field first, gaining valuable real-world knowledge and experience for a decade or more.

I don't think one can meaningfully say that the "best" entrepreneurs come in one type or another. Certainly the YC juggernaut tends to confirm that young entrepreneurs can be extremely able and can lead ventures to spectacular forms of success.

But the statement above emphasizes for me what has always seemed obvious and yet has often been brushed aside in, let us say, the impetuousness of youth: that is, that experience can and often does make a huge difference for entrepreneurs and it is a mistake to ignore its value in assessing startup prospects.

Someone, somewhere, somehow needs to have "been there before" for a startup to work in a big, complex, and disruptive field such as those targeted by the most promising startups. If it is not the founders themselves, it is those with whom the founders surround themselves. If those persons are not there, it has been my experience (having represented countless founders) that the founders will tend to stumble around to their detriment. I believe the main value of the YC network, for example, is that it gives young entrepreneurs precisely the sort of connections and guidance by which they can connect up with and be guided or even mentored by those with solid experience in their respective domains. Without that, their chances of flubbing it are magnified by a lot. A VC with deep domain experience can add similar value, with or without YC, but of course its connections with key VCs is one of the ways that YC links its entrepreneurs with seasoned hands in a given field.

It follows ipso facto that entrepreneurs who are older and can bring direct experience to a venture will also often have it over younger, inexperienced ones. The opposite may be true as well and that the value of such experience in any given case may be limited or worthless. My point is that having key experience, when it is authentic and coupled with the right level of talent, is extremely valuable and should be eagerly welcomed when brought to the venture by older entrepreneurs.

We learn from our mistakes. That is a recurring theme on this forum. Those lessons don't simply take the form of "fail fast, fail often" because the virtue is not in the failing as such but in the lessons learned from the process - and that same virtue attaches to any quality experience by talented people who have tilled the soil in their areas of expertise for lengthy periods. That group may or may not be the "best" entrepreneurs but there will certainly be large numbers of them who will wind up being among the best by virtue of the depth and expertise that only quality experience can bring.

[freshhawk]

> I don't think one can meaningfully say that the "best" entrepreneurs come in one type or another

Of course you can, if the data supports it. If they had explicitly added terms like "the best entrepreneurs generally tend to come from people with many of these attributes" would that make it meaningful?

They were taking those as a given, since it's obvious that they apply when you compile data like this.

Just because a map is not the territory doesn't mean the map isn't useful.

And rejecting the data driven answer and then filling in your own interpretation retroactively is not a good way to arrive at conclusions that turn out to be correct.

[sirclueless]

> And rejecting the data driven answer and then filling in your own interpretation retroactively is not a good way to arrive at conclusions that turn out to be correct.

That sounds like the scientific process to me. You look at a bunch of data points and say, "I'm going to reject the notion that this is an arbitrary correlation, and hypothesize that in fact there is some underlying cause X that drives the correlation." Then you control for everything else and do an experiment.

In tech startups, this might mean saying, "I think age doesn't actually matter, what matters is that someone in the founder's immediate circle (perhaps oneself) has a wealth of domain information." That's a perfectly testable hypothesis, even though the experiment would be expensive and difficult to do cleanly. You just take a bunch of older and younger founders, and have them found companies outside their domains. Some of them you provide with VCs and advisors with plenty of domain knowledge, others you just give money. If the domain knowledge proves more valuable than the age, you have confirmed your hypothesis. If the age matters more than the domain knowledge, you have rejected it.

Now of course you wouldn't find older entrepreneurs who would willingly forgo VCs and advisors with domain knowledge, and most founders choose industries they are familiar with. But maybe you could find some markets where this happens naturally. Maybe you could do an analysis of some industry like online education or fashion or something where you have a mix of types of founders, and see who has success. In any case, rejecting correlational data in favor of testable underlying causes is fundamental to scientific induction (it is only the difficulty of actually controlling ancillary variables that makes this practice hard to apply to sociological hypotheses).

[freshhawk]

> That sounds like the scientific process to me.

> Then you control for everything else and do an experiment.

What grellas was doing was coming up with alternate explanations based on intuition and rejecting the conclusions of those that did do an experiment. And he was doing so retroactively. That makes it not science, but what is often called a "just so story" and is technically called the ad hoc fallacy.

Speculation about how to do a better experiment is a great discussion to have, but both yourself and grellas are moving towards a perfect solution fallacy, where you are ignoring the data you have now, that tells you something interesting in favour of waiting for some ideal study in the future (that can somehow test underlying causes in a sociological problem, which is, as you say, extraordinarily difficult).

This is a normal reaction to cognitive dissonance, find a flaw in the source that contradicts what you believe (it's correlational) and then you don't have to change your mind while you wait for a perfect solution. Seems to make sense but what you are actually doing is believing the narrative that has less evidence and then rationalizing that belief.

The idea of an accelerator actually running a controlled study is an interesting one, but the structure of such a study would mean that you would be very confident in getting lower returns than normal for that cohort. Maybe you would discover something that made it worthwhile from the data, but likely you would not. It would be great for everyone if someone did it, but no one wants to literally sabotage young entrepreneurs in order to maintain valid controls. Maybe you could use the same ethical arguments that medicine uses ... but it would be a hard sell.

[stcredzero]

> Certainly the YC juggernaut tends to confirm that young entrepreneurs can be extremely able and can lead ventures to spectacular forms of success.

The spectacular success comes from a slim minority of the YC pool.

[philwelch]

That's true for any sufficiently large collection of startups that isn't selected on the criteria of having already succeeded.

[stcredzero]

And a large part of that is going to be due to luck. I don't think it's all due to luck, however. I think there are certain qualities people have, and what people call a certain "chemistry" small groups of such people have.

Depending on how much luck you think is involved, those qualities can either be common or rare. I think they're becoming more rare in the Bay Area startup environment, as notoriety and money attract more people who are pale imitators of the outward forms of success. (Already, it's considered a great advantage to come as someone already part of a group.)

In this way, the Bay Area is no better or worse than many other locales where economic, cultural, or intellectual movements have cropped up. It's also, obviously, not a single monolithic "scene." But as the population of doppelgangers increases, there's the possibility that something akin to "herd immunity" may kick in, where small groups of people with the right qualities will find it difficult to meet. Already successful people will find it harder to "infect" other susceptible people with success.

I note that YC has decided to reduce their "class size."

[snambi]

YC entrepreneurs are successful with the support of YC. Will they be as successful without YC? probably not.