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A comment on Thread on Andreessen Horowitz and 'zero interest rate phenomena'. Parent comment

Re:Thread on Andreessen Horowitz and 'zero interest rate phe... by smugma on Tuesday February 21, 2023 @10:01AM (#34881920)
I started with: “How many unicorns were founded by people in their 30s? The biggest example I can think of is Larry Ellison” but it was easy to come up with so many more examples: Benioff, Reed Hastings, Bezos, Reid Hoffman.

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.

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Re:Thread on Andreessen Horowitz and 'zero interest rate phe... by maxerickson on Tuesday February 21, 2023 @10:23AM (#34882135)
Lots of smart people in there 30s and 40s with family obligations and also "it would be fun to" money.
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Re:Thread on Andreessen Horowitz and 'zero interest rate phe... by ElfinTrousers on Tuesday February 21, 2023 @01:13PM (#34884587)
I've heard that if you look at _successful_ startups, not necessarily unicorns but ones that grow into solid companies on a firm financial footing, the average age of the founders was in the middle 40s.
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Re:Thread on Andreessen Horowitz and 'zero interest rate phe... by colinmorelli on Tuesday February 21, 2023 @02:14PM (#34885533)
I would wager a guess that if you actually based success on revenue/employee, operating margins, and overall "healthy" business criteria, the number skews probably even higher.

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.

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Re:Thread on Andreessen Horowitz and 'zero interest rate phe... by ElfinTrousers on Tuesday February 21, 2023 @02:39PM (#34885896)
I would bet the same way.
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Re:Thread on Andreessen Horowitz and 'zero interest rate phe... by smugma on Tuesday February 21, 2023 @08:34PM (#34890357)
If you weight by market cap, Apple, Microsoft, and Google (Meta to a lesser extent) make it really hard to beat.

And if you’re a VC, weighing by market share makes sense.

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Re:Thread on Andreessen Horowitz and 'zero interest rate phe... by ElfinTrousers on Tuesday February 21, 2023 @11:06PM (#34891495)
...what do either of those have to do with anything?
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Re:Thread on Andreessen Horowitz and 'zero interest rate phe... by smugma on Tuesday February 21, 2023 @11:36PM (#34891706)
They all had founders in their 20s (technically, Gates and Zuckerberg were 19).
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Re:Thread on Andreessen Horowitz and 'zero interest rate phe... by ElfinTrousers on Wednesday February 22, 2023 @08:08AM (#34894865)
None of them have anything to do with the kind of companies we're talking about.
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