[beat]

The problem is, founders tend to try to solve problems they've experienced and understand. For the twenty-somethings that are the public face of "startup founders", they may not understand international trade or enterprise health care or other big problems, but they understand dating. So they write dating apps.

And then, by the time they've acquired enough real-world professional experience to actually understand some interesting and high-value problems, they have a mortgage and kids and don't want to eat ramen like they did when they were 22.

[rcarrigan87]

Despite the echo-chamber of SV and tech media, most successful founders are older, with real world industry experience.[0]

This data probably doesn't reflect the insane number of 20 somethings chasing ideas in markets like the dating space right now. Most of them fail.

I work in the senior care market and I'm shocked there aren't more businesses being started around that market. It's absolutely huge with endless opportunity. But I guess that kind of proves your point...

[0]https://hbr.org/2014/04/how-old-are-silicon-valleys-top-foun...

[exelius]

Yeah, you're right. But if you look at the really big companies, nearly all were started by young founders (Facebook, Google, etc.) And that's what kids (and the media) focus in on.

IMO experienced founders are great for building a cash cow business worth $1 billion or so. That takes hard work and a billion dollars is a fucking lot of money, so it's nothing to scoff at. But it's not primarily what VCs are interested in: the VC model is built off of small equity stakes in $10 billion+ IPOs.

To have a $10 billion+ IPO, you need to invent a market, and young kids are great at that because they don't see the limitations the market has placed on us. Most don't have the fucking slightest about finance or money, which can be an impediment if you're trying to create a product in an existing market, but if you're building a new market or category, short-term viability matters less.

That said, there are a lot more ideas that can turn into successful $1 billion companies than ideas that can become $100 billion companies. So your odds are a lot better at starting a successful business if you learn how first.

And to your point about senior care... most VCs who don't focus on health care avoid it entirely for similar reasons they avoid dating apps. You can either go the medical device/biotech route and spend hundreds of millions on lawyers and regulatory approvals, or you can go after the provider side of things. The healthcare IT space is pretty saturated and very fragmented, so it ends up scaling like a consulting business (which VCs are also not fond of).

[rcarrigan87]

All good points. For the record, I was more talking about any product or service aimed at the 65+ crowd (not necessarily healthcare specific). It's a very underserved group of individuals who also happen to have all the money!

[alaskamiller]

Where are these 10 billion dollar ipos and these billion dollar businesses that investors don't want to touch?

What are these magical markets invented by oh-so-spry out-of-box-thinking unburdened-by-reality type of kids?

[ansible]

I think they're talking about things like WhatsApp, Instagram, and SnapChat.

If you had asked me about each of them before I'd heard of them, I would have told you that they are all solved problems. That SMS, email, and the existing photo-sharing apps are "good enough".

However, these companies are apparently solving people's problems (hence the large userbase for each), even if I personally don't use them and don't quite understand the value proposition that each provides.

[umeshunni]

Except that WhatsApp was started by a 30something experienced founder pair.

[billyhoffman]

This.

My startup is part of the ATDC Select program/incubator in Atlanta. There are roughly 30 companies around various verticals. I'm in my early 30's and I'm among the youngest of the founders. Many of these people are in their late 30's/40's/or more and been through multiple startups.

(funny enough maybe 20% of the companies are healthcare related, so maybe there are doing what they know)

Maybe in other places startups are a only-kids game, but not here.

[beat]

Minneapolis is a bit like that, too. I think the real interesting angle here is the enterprise. We are to Fortune 500 as Silicon Valley is to startups - there are more Fortune 500 HQs per capita here than anywhere else in the world, including the Bay area, NYC, London, and Tokyo.

It's still a fledgling movement, but I think we will see more and more startups here emerging from the corporate giants, developing new tools to meet their needs.

[madcaptenor]

See for example http://academicvc.com/2013/07/05/startups-for-grownups/ regarding the idea that Atlanta startups aren't just for kids.

[balls187]

> This data probably doesn't reflect the insane number of 20 somethings chasing ideas in markets like the dating space right now. Most of them fail.

Without being ageist, I think that you see a disproportionate number of younger founders simply because their current situation better allows for taking risks. When you have a family and are are responsible for at least 1/2 the household income, that choice becomes a lot harder.

My theory is that age is only a proxy for success, given that most businesses fail because they run out of money. Older founders may have access to larger war chests than younger founders.

[cookiecaper]

Older founders' main contribution is a larger war chest of experience to draw from, even if they also have larger personal networks and some personal savings to make them less dependent on the seed-stage investor. I personally believe that if investors were more willing to make the startup calculation reasonable for stable adults, we'd have far better results at the macro level. 20-somethings are cool, but they are still very young and very naive. It seems most non-tech industries have already internalized that. Tech will eventually mature into that realization as technically-adept generations age.

[scardine]

Being naive - in the sense of looking the world through the eyes of a child - is one of the best qualities in a founder because startups are so counterintuitive.

How many grown-ups with lots of industry experience said no for young Microsofties, Googles or Facebooks?

- A social network for college students? What a stupid idea!

[beat]

Look at it this way... older founders may be less likely to create a unicorn, but they're more likely to create a business.

[fsk]

I'm more interested in starting a business that has a 90% chance of being worth $10M than a business that has a 1% chance of being worth $1B.

A business that has a 90% chance of being worth $10M isn't suitable for VC.

[cookiecaper]

>Being naive - in the sense of looking the world through the eyes of a child

This is not the sense that I meant. I meant naive in the sense that they're ignorant of many subtle but important behavioral practices in both corporations and people, and that they often haven't developed much personal discipline. It's not their fault, of course; they're just young. Youth is good for its zeal, but corporations should generally not be run by zealots, they should be run by mature, calculating, and sensitive persons (and very few young people qualify). Zealots belong in the marketing and sales departments.

By the age they become founders, I think most people have had most of the child-like wonder beat out of them, and in fact I think the early and mid 20s are a dark time for a lot of people, with the pressures of exiting the scholastic world and entering the professional world, frequently with a beast of debt on their backs, and the rejection and failure incumbent in trying to date and find a lifelong companion.

[balls187]

Founders aren't children. They are typically post college graduates. And they typically must include one that has an engineering degree, hopefully with some pedigree to it.

[alaskamiller]

Microsoft invested in Facebook 3 years after it was made at a 15 billion dollar valuation and everyone laughed.

[beat]

I feel that pain. I just spent months building the alpha of my own software, making no money with grownup expenses. Then my wife got laid off, so I had to jump in and get another dayjob so someone would be making money.

I don't really have access to any sort of a larger war chest. What I do have is a much better idea than Snapchat for Drunks, because I have a lot of real-world professional experience, and I know how to actually build complex software, because I've been doing it for decades.

My killer is overcoming the cautious nature of too many years in the enterprise. It's easy to overbuild and not be lean.

[fsk]

>I work in the senior care market and I'm shocked there aren't more businesses being started around that market. It's absolutely huge with endless opportunity. But I guess that kind of proves your point...

Senior/health care is heavily regulated, making it hard to innovate and undercut legacy providers. "Uber for old age homes" just doesn't work.

[JonFish85]

Transportation is fairly heavily regulated as well. Someone could probably do an Uber for old folks that ignores laws and pushes the liabilities onto "independent contractors".

[TheOtherHobbes]

Maybe. But a few scandal stories will kill that idea.

Everyone wants a cab. No one wants a geriatric care home - not even when they're living in one.

Having said that, I recently discussed some possibilities with a couple of local care home owners. Currently there isn't enough smartphone take up to make some obvious ideas viable, but that will start changing soon, and then there may be some very rich pickings to be had.

This is the real reason Apple etc are piling into health apps. The biggest buyers won't be marathon-running twenty year olds, but scared-of-death >fifty year olds.

[tjr226]

Hey, I'm interested in chatting with you about the opportunities you see... I'm not in SV and would be happy creating a sub-$1bn company.

What's a good way to get in touch with you?

[bliti]

I'll gladly chat about that market over email. It's always interesting to learn about such things. Where should I email you?

[ci5er]

> they have a mortgage and kids and don't want to eat ramen like they did when they were 22.

Not only that, it's very tiring being an old fart and being told that you don't "get it" by a 27 year old VC who does want to fund an app. Maybe even a dating app. OR being told you don't "get it" by a young Stanford grad that really thinks it would be cool to rebuild an entire 3M patient record data set in MongoDB and access it with something written in Javascript on NodeJS. Fun times.

[beat]

I remember some years ago, talking with a couple of experienced co-workers about a young and frustrated manager we worked with. He was very talented, but also hotheaded. Someone suggested that what he needed was a good death march... without the experience of being expected to do something actually impossible, he just didn't know why we would all drag our feet on things so much.

He's since had a failed startup, which I hope tempered him some. So very talented, but not sufficiently scared.

[tomphoolery]

Most dating sites also end up being a very one-sided battle. That is, most of the women are sitting around waiting to get a torrent of messages and most of the men are sending messages to basically every girl that they see. They play the numbers game, and it's all about how big of a net you can cast. I don't foresee any dating site being more successful than the current heavyweights until they can get rid of "fishing" so women aren't unmotivated to go on the site and men aren't wasting their time sending the same message to 1,000 different people.

[beat]

And at that point, they're competing not against automation, but the very human process of "Wouldn't those two make a cute couple?"

I like setting up my friends. Lots of people do. I've had some success at it, too (a couple of marriages, even). And I suspect, although I have no evidence, that friend-driven setups and blind dates are more likely to succeed than dating sites are.

fwiw, Grindr got around that particular problem by focusing on gay men. But that's a large niche, really.

Beyond the problem of men drowning women in messages, there's a question of the quality of those messages. The crap I see my female friends get online from dating sites is appalling. So many men have no idea how to approach women and make themselves appear attractive - and many of them have no idea just how much competition there is. Meanwhile, women have to plow through dozens of dick pics, hoping to maybe find one guy worth talking to. Their odds aren't any better, but for different reasons. Sigh.

[Kalium]

Hi. I am a male. I have seen how abysmally low the typical message quality a woman receives is. I learned from it.

Sad to say, what I learned is that given the sheer quantity of low-quality messages, investing in message quality is a poor decision. The quality may be significantly higher and there may be an elevated chance of a response... but the odds of the message being read at all are quite slim.

The chance of an unread message getting a response is, obviously, zero.

[klipt]

Well I wish I had a friend who tried to set me up. Instead I spent about 6 frustrating years getting nowhere with online dating, then eventually lucked out with the right girl, and only now do I get the 'cute couple' comments.

[Kalium]

There's a wrinkle that makes it worse. Specifically, sites that deliberately invert the power dynamic run into the problem that when women must initiate all communications, you don't get a lot of communications. Tinder avoids this by requiring blind consent from both parties.

What do both have in common? Women feel they have the power. In the case of Tinder, women have the power, don't get spammed, and men devolve to the common case of spammy behavior.

It's the best of both worlds. Or worst, since users tend to be exactly as shallow as their technology allows.

[onion2k]

I'm sure you could solve that by "spam filtering" people's inboxes, just with a slightly tweaked heuristic model. People would get fewer messages but they'd be of a much higher quality. To be honest I'm surprised sites don't already do this.

[asnyder]

Co-founder of a relatively new service (http://www.meshbetter.com) that incorporates this via our unique "Mismatch" technology, while it protects women and gives them better experiences, our data shows that Men don't necessarily learn from this.

[Kalium]

OKCupid tries something similar with its filters. Men lie their asses off to get around it.

[onion2k]

I'm talking more about filtering on the message content than filtering based on account settings. For example, if a message is 90% the same as the previous 3 messages the user sent just silently redirect it to /dev/null. Users would quickly learn that a cut'n'paste approach gets rapidly diminishing returns. That alone would slow down a lot of the men who just spam messages to every woman on the site, improving the experience for them while leaving the genuine men on the site unaffected. But I'm sure OKCupid could do much cleverer things.

[Kalium]

Users would quickly adapt. Something simple like spinning syntax would address that. I agree, OKCupid could be more clever, and build systems much harder to get around.

That said, I don't think the incentive is there for them to do it. Even if they removed 100% of all spammy behavior, I don't think it would solve the problem of message volume. If we assume that skimming a profile and writing a personalized message takes five minutes, a "genuine man" user is able to churn out a dozen messages an hour. Women would get less than the hundreds of messages they get today, but still far too many to work with.

From what I've seen, there's a basic contradiction at the heart of online dating. In general, women only want to be contacted by men who they are attracted to and interested in. Also in general, men live in fear of being ruled out and missing their chance with a woman they find interesting.

No spam filter can help you there.

[woah]

Do you mean the multiple choice questions? Or do they actually have message filtering?

[Kalium]

Last I knew - and it's been a while - you could set filters on criteria such as age to avoid getting messages from users you wanted to exclude.

But yes, the multiple choice questions are subject to the same problem.

[jaredsohn]

Here are the choices for message filtering (they updated it over the past year or so): gender, age range, whether they are located nearby, whether they are single, match %

Also, if the user pays for A-list they can filter on: how long the messages are, hide if it contains certain words, filter by attractiveness.

[balls187]

As someone working on International Trade, I will say Dating is an interesting and big problem. Partly caused by the rise of online dating, but also because The world is moving in one direction, and effective dating is still stuck in the old way of doing things.

[beat]

The problem is, the only part of dating that can be obviously optimized is meeting new people - increasing the size of the pool, and increasing the quality of the pool (and in the case of Tinder, increasing the accessibility of the pool by optimizing the mobile experience).

I've been married for 22 years, and introduced couples who wound up getting married themselves. Relationship chemistry is difficult and tricky business. Large parts aren't quantifiable. For my own marriage, it really boils down to my spouse keeps me stable, and I make her take risks. We're better people together than we are individually. That's not something you can solve with an app.

[zeeshanm]

It may be true, generally speaking. I am 25, have mortgage, and am not working on a dating app. Although, I did give an SMS-based dating service a shot for a day and then put it aside.