+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.