I agree the idealistic 20-somethings are important. I don't think they should be handed tens of millions of dollars and trotted out like show ponies.
The other 999 are doing free idea-invalidation.
And I mean, Wework is an ok business idea, the problem is the cult around the person (only to show it's not only a matter of age)
Not everyone in their 30s has kids. Many that do have plenty of money to start businesses. And lots of 20 somethings have kids.
Just because you’re not in a place to start a business doesn’t mean other people your age aren’t.
There are more twentysomethings without families, able to burn the candle at both ends, and not take a salary while a vision comes together than thirtysomethings. That isn’t an ageist proposition because it doesn’t imply many people in their fifties don’t do it.
None of the above are necessary for a founder. But they’re selected for, explicitly and implicitly, which means a random pool of start-up founders will tend to bias young.
I have a child and is going to have another one this year. I have this crazy idea that is big if true but 99.9% it would fail. I would totally do it if I was without a family. This idea is VC type idea.
Now I am working on some idea that is 99% going to feed my family but it is boring as hell and no VC would look at it.
My idea is to create a prediction market where people bet on REAL world events under REAL name with FAKE money. All predictions are public and we can rank every user's prediction ability in each category by his ROI.
I have created a MVP where people bet on cryptos: https://rankvestor.com/. I wanted to start with finantial market.
Now I have to stop this project because I am moving my family to Japan because I don't believe in the future of China. I have to work for a Japan company to keep my visa. In my spare time, I work on a Japanese study app that gives me some money every month.
BTW, if anyone likes this idea, feel free to take it and implement it :)
In some cases people are wrong or even crazy, but fundamentally I don't meet many 20 somethings with both the conviction that they are right, the organization skills to do the logistics, and the wisdom to not jump at pointless things.
I certainly didn't do it right when I tried to start a company at 19.
VC provides capital and connections.
Young founders provide ideas and work.
VC can't / doesn't want to have ideas or do the work, but young founders can't access capital and connections.
To speak to up thread, most people who have been working in industry for 20+ years limit their aspirations to what they believe is possible, which is far shy of what's actually possible. Thus, it takes a young/dumb/crazy enough founder to even take the shot.
Furthermore, by scaling and making multiple bets, VC packages risk into more palatable ranges for investors.
We can point at and decry excesses and metastisized business models on both VC and founder sides (e.g. SoftBank Vision Fund and Theranos), but the underlying bargain is fair and effective.
(There's also the financial risk, which for me is easier to absorb now. At 19 I didn't care, at 30 something I did, and now I'm lucky enough to not have to care much).
Even monthlies have a value in the worst case scenario.
It seems a very specific Venn intersection to utilize technology to a high degree, but also to imagine and prepare for its worst case failure.
Maybe the NZ tech-prepper crowd?
The off-site backup storage was required by several of our largest customers due to the critical nature of our software.
The risk from not being able to recover your data because of something wrong with your process (like, you are not backing up all the data you need) dwarfs the risk from backblaze to lose your data
Of course, that risk may be entirely acceptable; it's all about risk mitigation and trade-offs, not perfect security.
The solution is to do both, or all three (or n), where #3 is another backup process. And to test the backups of all processes by trying to read or restore them (onto empty disks) regularly.
I.e., somewhere on a continuum between zero or minimal and the above, depending on how critical your business is.
Because Murphy's Law.
Edited to add:
And how critical your job is (to you).
Of course there is much more to the whole issue, like funds, PHBs, etc.
- Bildert.
Back then I would climb for a couple hours in the morning for fun and then work until 8pm or later. Get beers, go to bed, do it again. Every day, most weekends, most holidays. It didn’t feel hard because it’s what I was meant to be doing. So much fun.
Now I can’t string together 2 focused hours. I’d rather take the kids to the park, or have to take someone to the doctor, or a sport, or whatever. Even if I had to work a “regular” job, the idea that I would work any harder than absolutely necessary, at the expense of time with my family? Not a chance.
I’m not saying you must be 20s or 30s or whatever. You just must care more about the venture than other things.
(In my experience).
Most of them are driven by hype and market trends, leading them to overgeneralize and make inaccurate predictions.
They swayed by the latest buzz in the industry and invest in companies that may not have a sustainable business model.
I'm skeptical if someone claims they understand steamrollers if they stand in front of one.
Time, will tell.
I believe this has more to do with American fondness of exceptional individualism and American dream, as media likes these stories.
You forgot to include Steve Jobs in your examples. But were these guys not actual nightmares to work for? Apparently this is not a red flag at all.
Of course there are many examples of billionaires who founded companies in their 20s as well (Box, Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe)… intuitively, I think there are a lot of factors (familial obligations being near the top, ahead of American “genius” bias) that tilt the scales towards younger founders.
As we were clearly made aware of in the last year, many unicorns of the last 5-10 years were little more than good marketing a Tier 1 VC footing the bill.
And if you’re a VC, weighing by market share makes sense.
- They are willing to work long hours and sacrifice the life they mostly don't have yet for a 1% chance of success.
- They haven't figured out that the risk preference of someone diversified across 100 startups is incompatible with theirs, and they won't push back as much against moon-or-bust strategies.
- They have the highest fluid to crystalized intelligence ratios of their life, giving them an advantage competing in novel areas where there is no preexisting knowledge, like enterprise sales. ;)
They also can be more easily convinced their idea will contribute to a more utopian future, rather than the mundane reality of the bait, switch and get rich tactics of those they’re indebted to.
This. 100% this.
Most founders are utterly ferrets having seizures and unfathomably out of their depth. The VCs are populated by former founders at the long tail of the Peter Principle.
All of VC is trying to make a product that looks attractive to public markets. VCs are in sales and public relations.
The most obvious signal of this is how they continually select a college dropout or 20-something as a “genius founder”. There are rare examples of this happening but a much more logical play is someone who has worked in their industry for 10+ years and made a lot of connections. The invention of the “dropout genius” was because public market investors like that story to mimic Gates and Zuckerberg. In reality 99% of 20 year old CEOs that are handed millions of dollars are fucking idiots and nightmares to work for, lacking any professional and managerial experience, plus the “anointed one” marking giving them unearned authority.
While I loved the free-money era as an entrepreneur, honestly the mal-investment is absurd and we need a cleansing of the charlatans in the tech industry. VCs are an area that needs to massively contract.