This seems to be major selectivity bias. Let's call the development of the internet a major technological revolution. How many successful startups have emerged over the time since that revolution began? AOL was started in what, the early 90's? Yahoo was started in the mid-90's. Google was started in the late-90's. Facebook was started in 2004. Twitter, 2007? AirBnB, 2009? Stitch Fix, 2015 or so?
The idea that there's a small window to create a valuable startup right after a tech revolution has begun seems to make sense at first glance, but after more thorough investigation pretty much falls apart. There's never an easy time to create a company like that. It requires intelligence, connections, luck, execution, persistence, and a million other factors.
Put another way, if anyone could go back to 1995 knowing what they know now, I would bet that almost nobody could recreate Google or Facebook because of all the hidden difficulties of launching them that is glossed over now that we are 15+ years out from their launches.
Meanwhile, a guy like Bill Gates would probably have enormous success in pretty much any line of business (albeit not at the scale that Microsoft has had), but far greater than the average founder.
Most technology revolutions have an "epicycles upon epicycles" structure, where the revolutionary technology spawns many other revolutionary technologies, sometimes decades later. The microcomputer, for example, was a revolutionary technology in 1975, and within a year had spawned two of the current tech giants (Microsoft and Apple). But whither Visicalc (1979) or Adobe (1982) in that narrative? It took time for the public to adopt microcomputers and the development platforms to stabilize before you could really build on them and create successful applications.
And then the microcomputer itself spawned the WWW, which actually was developed on workstations (1989) before microcomputers were powerful enough to run it, but gained adoption (Netscape, 1995) when consumer OSes started shipping a TCP/IP stack. A whole slate of massive web companies were spawned in 1995 (Netscape, Amazon, EBay, Yahoo, Google) because they were in a place to catch the technology revolution - but Facebook didn't get started until 2004 and AirBnB didn't take off until 2009, again because it took time for social practices to catch up to the technology.
The lesson for entrepreneurs, perhaps, is to pay careful attention to the world as it exists when you're founding your company, and look at where the trends are going. There are certainly worse times than others to found a company, and they're often towards the end of a technology wave: 2001/2002 was absolutely brutal to Web 1.0 companies, and I can't think of a single mobile startup founded in 2013-2015 that succeeded. But Ethereum, Consensys, Gemini, Brave, and other blockchain startups founded 2014-2015 are doing great; you just had to catch the next technology wave instead of the previous one.
And MS-DOS is based in part on CP/M's design: "MS-DOS paternity suit settled: Computer pioneer Kildall vindicated, from beyond the grave" http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07/30/msdos_paternity_suit... "Last week, a Judge dismissed a defamation law suit brought by Tim Paterson, who sold a computer operating system to Microsoft in 1980, against journalist and author Sir Harold Evans and his publisher Little Brown. The software became the basis of Microsoft's MS-DOS monopoly, and the basis of its dominance of the PC industry. But history has overlooked the contribution of Kildall, who Evans justifiably described as "the true founder of the personal computer revolution and the father of PC software" in a book published three years ago. In a chapter devoted to Kildall in Evans' They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine: Two Centuries of Innovators, Evans related how Paterson "[took] 'a ride on' Kildall's operating system, appropriated the 'look and feel' of [Kildall's] CP/M operating system, and copied much of his operating system interface from CP/M.""
If you want to get away with such things, it helps to start rich, of course: http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/ "William Henry Gates III made his best decision on October 28, 1955, the night he was born. He chose J.W. Maxwell as his great-grandfather. Maxwell founded Seattle's National City Bank in 1906. His son, James Willard Maxwell was also a banker and established a million-dollar trust fund for William (Bill) Henry Gates III. In some of the later lessons, you will be encouraged to take entrepreneurial risks. You may find it comforting to remember that at any time you can fall back on a trust fund worth many millions of 1998 dollars."
And to have free legal advice from his father (a lawyer).
Contrast all that with the hypocritical letter Bill Gates wrote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists "As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid Is this fair? One thing you don't do by stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. MITS doesn't make money selling software. The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free?"
So wrote the millionaire dumpster diver who could afford to write free software his whole life -- but chose instead to resell an OS that ripped-off someone else's hard work (one reason IBM may have wanted to keep an arms-length distance from MS-DOS instead of buying it outright). Those are hypocritical words to anyone who knows more of the story, but brilliant marketing -- including the rhetorical deception about how much time free software developers might have (such as ones at universities or government labs or students like, then, Linus Torvalds).
[Stuff I previously mentioned here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15772233 ]
To be clear: just because Bill Gates did stuff like that in his teens and 20s does not mean he would do stuff like that now. He many have grown as a person in many ways over the past few decades (e.g. the Gates Foundation).
Sure, the connections probably helped him stay out of trouble, go to better schools, etc. But to say that he owes his success to his wealth is absurd. I would argue that extreme wealth for most people would inhibit ambitions, not enhance them.
I would also argue that today most entrepreneurs wouldn't peruse publicly available Github repos to learn how to code, let alone dumpster dive for printouts of code to study. Some might view that as playing dirty, I would say it shows an incredible amount of ambition and drive. After all, he could have been getting drunk at Harvard and studying pre-law like everyone else was there in the 70's.
One of these companies does not belong... :)
Jobs specifically was a much, much better CEO in middle age than he was in his youth. I think the same is true for Bezos. These folks were outliers when they were young, and they were even more extreme outliers after decades of experience.
Also, Gladwell's conclusion is only true for 2 of the 5 companies mentioned.
These people succeeded despite themselves and became better with age. These all fit with the OPs argument.
Because most people learn their skills when they are young (and most don't pick up new technological skillsets after ~30), the logical consequence is that the young tend to be more tech-savvy.
As industries mature, the barriers to entry (and domination) increase. Again, as a logical consequence, the youngest industries (which have the youngest practitioners due to the above) has provides best opportunities for entrepreneurs.
As a result, would-be entrepreneurs of Google/Facebook/Amazon stature are going to skew young. And seeing as starting a Google/Facebook/Amazon requires as much (if not more) luck as it does entrepreneurial talent, it only makes sense that the group who holds the most lottery tickets is going to hold the most winning lottery tickets.
Notice that the above logic requires zero assumptions about the relative skill of older or younger entrepreneurs. It's mostly just a numbers game.
My suspicion is that, "per capita", older entrepreneurs who have kept up with the most recent technological advances are more likely to be successful than their younger counterparts... but I'll be the first to admit I'm just idly speculating.
That is not my experience with people close to 40. There have been so many changes in the last 10 years, so if they hadn't kept up, they would be out of a job.
In 2008 the typical webapp where hosted on a physical server with server side generated content for desktop users (old versions of IE was in the majority).
There has been such a shift in the required skills and mindsets that many underestimate how different the daily work of a developer is now.
In the 1960's you probably could have flipped a coin between tech and advertising.
VR technology was also thought to be a revolution a decade back and it hasn't really delivered. Or take crypto for instance. Is it a financial revolution that will build a mega-corp like Amazon or Google in the upcoming decades or will it slowly fade away.
My conceptual problem was back then I couldn’t imagine people paying a monthly fee to access the Internet.
Apparently Americans have A LOT of disposable income.
Never underestimate how willing other people are to spend money on things that you consider frivolous.
The trap is to accidentally consider your values as universals. You haven't known obsession until you've hung out with some model railroad guys.
From the 1970s to today:
Microsoft OS, Apple Macintosh, Dell PCs (a star that faded but was once dominant), Amazon shopping, Google web search, Facebook social network, plus all their competitors dotted in between.
The Middle Ages, for one. Most of human history has been characterized by episodic innovation bookended by centuries of zero growth.
For comparison the European dark ages had quite a bit of progress in algebra, farming etc, but again covered several hundred years so progress was slow.
The "European dark ages" had literally zero progress in algebra, it was Boethius's De arithmetica in the Quadrivium for six centuries until Fibonacci's Liber abaci introduced the hindu-arabic numbers, which he learned in what today we call Algeria. And then algebraic methods (BTW "algorithm" comes from the name of al-Khwarizmi, "algebra" comes from "al-jabr") were unknown in Europe until Robert of Chester translated Khwarizmi's "Hisab Al-jabr w'al-muqabala" to Latin from the original in Arabic. There was zero progress in algebra in Europe for six centuries because they had no algebra. After that (there was a bit of a divide between abacists and algebrists), people doing algebra in Europe used that book until the printed arithmetics/algebras of the 16th century. All of them do mention their sources: you can download them in google books and look it up.
Really though any progress over 500 years is all it takes to avoid complete stagnation. https://plus.maths.org/content/lost-mathematicians-numbers-n...
PS: Now they where not building the kind of great feats of engineering that gets you geometry progress, but their accounting systems got really complex.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_science_in_the_Middle...
You can't really do stats on outliers without binning stuff into a histogram. The 5 sigma entrepreneurs were probably young just out of survivor bias. The guy who cofounds Fairchild semiconductor and gives it his name (Sherman Fairchild) doesn't count as the world's greatest semiconductor entrepreneur because he died significantly before his cofounders did.
http://mitsloan.mit.edu/uploadedFilesV9/180325%20Age%20and%2...
I also want to point out that the research paper doesn't DEFINE success as purely market cap/company valuation. (It makes for some nice opening drama/reader intrigue by the WSJ, though.)
Instead, SUCCESS is defined by the following:
"Our primary outcome measures include (a) employment growth, and (b) sales growth, while we also consider (c) exit by acquisition and (d) initial public offerings.
In the main text, we will emphasize employment growth, denoting a high-growth new venture as one that achieved a given threshold of employment 5 years after founding. We examine employment thresholds based on the Top 10, 5, 1, or 0.1 percentile."
For more, if want to do a startup with the advantage of some original research that is not yet a fad or hot topic, research you are likely the only who will do it, there's no rush, under 30 won't have the prerequisites. The problem to be solved doesn't have to be new, hot, or a fad but in whole or in significant part so far just solved poorly or not at all and where some good research can get the first good or a much better solution.
Such research is not the well worn path down Sand Hill Road to $1 T, but so far not even Sand Hill Road has such a well worn path. There are only a few $1 T cases or candidates so far; the patterns are not attractive; and from elsewhere, especially US national security, research has a much more promising track record. Uh, for Silicon Valley, how old was Shockley? How old was Tukey when he did the FFT? How old is Irving?
A less experienced person doesn’t know the “rules” they are breaking.
In the opening line the article states that the 5 largest tech companies were founded by those age 30 and lower. Why? The article isn't very helpful here. It seems to say that they are anomalies, which is a little unsatisfying.
> "one may reconcile the existence of great young entrepreneurs with the advantages of middle age by noting that extremely talented people are also extremely talented when they are young."
So they destroy the myth of the young founder, by perpetuating the myth that these founders were superhuman (extremely talented is the word they used). As evidenced by valuations of their companies continuing to rise as they got older.
I find Malcom Gladwell's conclusion more satisfying: When the internet was born, these people were closest to it in - in part because they were young.
I'd extend Gladwell to argue: In once in a lifetime technology revolutions, the young may be advantaged in creating a handful of super valuable companies. And those companies are so central and their small head start is so so powerful, that those companies succeed, at times in spite of their founders.
My conclusion: If you happen to be in college during a technological revolution, you won the lottery and should start a company. Otherwise, you are better off learning, accumulate resources, and founding late in your career.