[beat]

I came up with the idea for my startup when I was 47. I don't expect it to be able to make a living at it until I'm 49. Age? Pffth. Then again, I'm not hacking together "Facebook for cats" and hoping for some zeitgeist to make it magically successful while buckets of venture capital rain down on my head, either.

A college kid would never have come up with what I'm building, because they wouldn't realize the problem I'm trying to solve actually exists. It came to me because I've been in the software industry for nearly two decades and have seen the same problems, over and over. I'm solving a real problem that I understand really well, with a straightforward monetization strategy from obvious customers. It's not something that could be knocked off in a weekend by a couple of dudes at a weekend hackathon.

The experience to see substantial problems and the patience to work on them comes with time. Don't worry about getting old.

That all said, my 40s have been the best creative period of my life, by far. I feel like all the things I learned and experienced in my first 40 years were just setting me up for what I can do today.

[elmuchoprez]

"A college kid would never have come up with what I'm building, because they wouldn't realize the problem I'm trying to solve actually exists."

This is such a key point. Sometimes it takes years, if not decades, of experience to even know that the problem exists. Put another way, if the problem can be solved by a 22-year-old with no experience in the field, there's a good chance they've misunderstood the problem.

[snorkel]

... And years of work experience to understand organizational dynamics to setup a healthy business helps too. It's more than the idea that matters, but can you build and run the team that will make that idea a reality. I know that when I was fresh out of college I didn't understand organizational dynamics at all. I've read many examples of young startups failing because of rookie management mistakes.

[6ren]

Yes, coming up with the problem is often the hard bit.

But it happens the other way too, in that many young inventors tackle problems because "they didn't realize they were 'impossible'". More knowledgeable folk can do this too, but it requires a certain... disrespect for authority. Like Einstein's flexibility with time and space (though he was young then; he didn't make breakthroughs in later life, possibly because he himself became an authority).

Fortune favours the delusional.

[beat]

It's not a matter of "didn't realize it's impossible". The problem young startup entrepreneurs have is they don't realize that valuable problems exist. Valuable problems tend to be industry-specific and narrowly defined, so you need to be at least aware of the problems of an industry, and the existing solutions/workarounds. Without industry experience at anything but being a college student and reading HN, how are you going to find problems to solve? That's why you see so many me-too social apps. You solve what you know, and if your most extensive experience with computers is Facebook and Twitter, that's your space for problems.

There are a couple of other factors to consider. First, there are problems that can be solved with new tech that couldn't be solved with old tech. The web opened up a huge front of new solutions over the past 10-20 years. Mobile is opening up another wave of solutions.

And finally, consider the "aspirin or vitamin" question. Vitamins are tempting, but aspirin sells better. Me, I'm working in more or less the monitoring space for configuration management. My key competition isn't other monitoring tools, it's the DevOps movement and automation tools like Chef and Puppet. When people have enterprise configuration management suck, those are the recommended solutions. But they're vitamins being sold as aspirin. Simply getting to where there's organizational buy-in to go to DevOps or to automate what was once manual is a whole fresh sort of pain. My competitive advantage is a near-painless dose of aspirin - immediate relief without having to change the whole model.

Ain't no college kid coming up with that.

[thisrod]

There's an obvious reason for Einstein to have gotten stuck: the subject of his later research, a quantum theory of gravity, really was too hard. The problem remains open today.

[chasing]

cough(Soylent)cough

[wahsd]

Soylent lulz as if that hasn't been done and done again. It's just snake oil under different name.

[aianus]

Please point me to an existing product I can buy today.

I've never looked forward to a product launch as much as this.

[DanBC]

Ensure (http://ensure.com/)

Fortisip (https://www.nutricia.co.uk/fortisip//)

[aianus]

Which Ensure is formulated to replace food entirely? As far as I can tell, if I drank enough ensure to get 2400 calories, the other nutrients would be out of wack. As in, a given portion does not have the same DV% of each nutrient.

I'd never heard of Fortisip but from what I can tell it and ensure are both considerably more expensive than regular food, and actually more expensive than eating out.

[gotrecruit]

EAS Myoplex? There are a myriad of other Meal Replacement Powders on the market that has been around for decades, some of them designed to completely replace meals with specific ratios such as 40/40/20 (protein, carbs, fat) or more commonly, low-carb versions. Seriously, go to bodybuilding.com and look under the meal replacement category and you'll find a bunch of products that has figured this shit out decades before soylent.

[rusabd]

fatty fish or fatty meat

[david927]

I'm 46. I came up with my idea at 28 but it was complex and ambitious -- and it just kept growing and changing. It was chaos in my mind. But I would work on it, and then come up a level, see things from a higher perspective and everything would shrink and consolidate, gain order and orthogonality. This happened over and over, till I got it down to nothing. This took a huge amount of time and there is no way I could have come directly to it at 28.

I'm as creative and as smart as I was then, I don't think that has changed. But I'm wiser now -- about Computer Science, about systems -- and I have that perspective, which has made all the difference.

[gotrecruit]

just curious but are you saying you founded a startup at 46, of which the original idea was conceived when you were 28?

[pkteison]

I think you should pivot, catcanhazitrainbook.com is available, and the growing acceptance of domestic purrtnerships is nothing but pure up and to the right. I agree, college kids don't realize that felines have been marginalized in the new twerking paradigm - and how unfair is it that we send all these tweets around with no cats to chase them? You can get out in front of this and really change the world with your rockstar ninja buckets of vc fueled distributed map reduce haskell most viral housepet centered social network ever.

[danthewireman]

> That all said, my 40s have been the best creative period of my life, by far.

Agreed. Wrote my first novel in my 40s.