That depends on the person, really. When you are younger or have rich parents you can afford yourself larger risks and that in turn has a positive effect on your chances of success. When you get older and have more responsibilities unless you have a prior success you tend to become more risk averse and so less willing to start new companies and/or make the kind of decisions that would lead to either success or complete failure. Playing it safe is an excellent way to lose against a crowd of others that can afford to take risks: some of the will get lucky and beat you, even if most of them fail.

There are older, successful entrepreneurs, one guy I knew started his first company in his mid-50's and had a massive success but he's definitely the outlier. But most successful entrepreneurs I know started their first successful company in their 20's or 30's, rarely 40's. And most unsuccessful entrepreneurs have the exact same demographic...

A couple of things that I've seen really do help, but they still require a substantial investment in time and have an opportunity cost as well: work for one of the large, well paying companies for a while, save up a nest egg and use that as a jump off point if you weren't born into capital (though the risk of becoming addicted to that income stream is real and letting go of it will not be easy). Another is to first start a regular career in order to identify pain points in some industry or other and then later use that knowledge to create a product that addresses those pain points.

But that's not the kind of thing that you can spin out far enough for a book or a TED talk. I do believe that those two will increase your chances.

+1 on the nest egg. That's how I "bootstrapped", unsuccessfully, during Covid. And I got that close, some better timing and I might be running my own fleet of two leased feeder container vessels by now (seriously so, I already had offers for those). Bad timing kicked in, my prospective launch clients project fell through, and being bootstrapped meant I didn't have anything else in the pipeline. Which brought me to the single pivot I had budget for, and that resulted in, at most, a single person consulting business. I didn't want that, realized I like running operations much more than running a company running operations, burned the allocated nest egg and went back to employment. I am almost happy ever since!

Close call. And one other thing that nobody seems to mention either: success always comes at a price. Health, family & friendships, attitude, ethics. All of those can suffer when you're successful.

> But most successful entrepreneurs I know started their first successful company in their 20's or 30's, rarely 40's.

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

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

Discussion on HN here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18212409

Yes, I saw that when it first hit.

I'm sure they did a great job at researching that but it really does not match my experience at all. And I see a lot of start-ups (up to 50 / year) from the inside, at least a few hundred founders if not a 1000+ by now over the last 15 years. The bulk of the successful ones is late 20's to mid 30's.

This might be an illusion or a strong bias.

The younger ones are not alone ( the successful 45/50+ parents/mentors/etc are supporting them financially and more ).

Otherwise, without the experience of your 20s and 30s you cannot understand the world, you haven't build the network you need to succeed ( I am my own example), basically you cannot manufacture you "luck".

There might be something interesting here.

- people in the VC entrepreneur world are seeing mostly 20s and 30s be successful

- VC world is, as one previous commenter put it, swing for the bleachers

- researchers are saying average age of success is 45, so more than half are 40+

This seems to perhaps indicate (though needs research) that

- those 40+ prefer bootstrapped businesses

- bootstrapped businesses are over half the successful entrepreneurs, so tend to be more successful

Many things could be wrong with this:

- different definitions of successful

- research bias

- geographical bias

However, it's something that seems to bear investigation.

And if true, what is it that is driving the budding entrepreneur to think that to be more successful they need to seek VC funding, when it may actually be the opposite. Would you rather take a 1 in 1m shot at 1m/yr, or a 1 in 10k shot at 300k/yr? Numbers made up in the question of course, research needed to figure out what they are.

> But most successful entrepreneurs I know started their first successful company in their 20's or 30's, rarely 40's.

Jeff Bezos?

This is a myth. It is purported because most of the 30+ entrepreneurs are not vocal about their successes.

Bezos was 30.

38

Bezos was born in 64, he's a year older than I am and Amazon was started in 1993.

You can do the math for yourself.

Bezos once said in an interview that he was 38 when he started Amazon, after leaving DEShaw as a manager.

You really don't know when to give up do you? You're wrong, end of story.

> Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something. > Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on.

> Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about "meritocracy" and the salutary effects of hard work.

> Poor kids aren't visiting the carnival. They're the ones working it.

-madaxe_again, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15659076

it's really not. There are all kinds of entrepreneurs and most are not making weird iphone apps, but more conventional businesses that do somewhat work or fail. Rich kids don't necessarily do many throws, as they have the money to push even an unsuccessful idea for a long time. VCs may be the ones throwing darts. And poor kids do go to the carnival, you don't often see rich people going there.