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Comment by borski | Hacker News Reader

The confusing part to me is that YC started by appealing to college-age kids in Boston. Has the focus changed?

It's possible he's getting older and seeing college age youth as children more than before.

Also, there is a bit of a difference between a high school student, a college freshman or sophomore (<21) and someone graduating college (22,23). Small numbers, but there are different degrees of experience, maturity, and being just a little more past the "exploratory" phase.

The article clearly stated that he wasn't speaking for YC. Nor was he talking about success rates. He was recommending that young people explore the world more before getting caught up in a single idea.

Everyone has this “my opinion is my own.”

Not really sure why all the downvotes... I understand he wasn't speaking on behalf of YC, but the man started YC. His opinions matter, and it appears to have changed from when he started YC, and it's an interesting thought to discuss.

Not only was their first unicorn/public company started by college students (dropbox), arguably some of the largest companies of the recent era were started by college kids (facebook).

Another datapoint, average age of a successful startup is 45. No mention of median

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

This could be just a weird statistical bias. Founders start businesses at all ages, but the younger you start, the more tries you get before one of your businesses succeeds. And once your business is successful, then you're unlikely to start another.

This would make successful founders tend to be older than unsuccessful founders, but it's like always finding something in the last place that you look, or (happened to me) you're most likely to get injured on the last ski run of the day.

> And once your business is successful, then you're unlikely to start another.

Let me FTFY: once you start a successful business, it's unlikely that another you start will be nearly equally successful.

Most entrepreneurs are serial ones, and successful ones -- particularly those who leave their business behind (e.g. by acquisition) tend to try again. But contrary to popular belief, having a successful business in your past doesn't make it easier to make your new ventures successful -- it just makes it easier to start one.

Well, if we assume that there are few successful founders, but enough people to skew the average age higher, then the oldest a few people to shift _that_ much could be are ~90. Since that is unlikely, it's likely that the median is close to the average.

What's the median ?

It could be the case that over the entire portfolio of YC companies they've made money more consistently from more mature founders, and they're seeing fewer successes from young founders now. Dropbox and Facebook are more than ten years old.. What successes have YC had in the past 5 years?

I would also argue that the pains a social network or a cloud drive solve can be pretty well experienced by a college or younger kid. Many industry specific pains require industry specific experience.

Drew and Arash were both 24 when DropBox was founded. Drew already had a couple years of work experience at the time (notably with Bit9, which is a security company that basically reverse-engineers ALL the things - see the connection with DropBox's early success?), and had founded one previous company, an SAT test prep business.

Some. Not most.

If that's the average, the only way it'd be "some, not most" would be if there were a bimodal distribution significant young portion and a significant older portion >35.

Your forgetting that the college kids of them only had to know basic php and JavaScript to build a server + front end web UI. Now it’s at minimum 2 years to learn the deep fundamentals of react/redux/graphql then tying it into lambdas on the backend , maybe another year of study to learn full kubernetes integration , then another year to fully grasp how to set up and side chain in a deep learning pipeline with proper selection of production grade ML framework. Learn them all then choose which one works best. After that to reach youth in mobile sector , take 1.5 years to fully learn iOS and android native platform builds . Etc etc . It’s not that college kids are too young . It’s that they need to take the recommended time to learn and deploy all the necessary tech to launch a successful startup!

EDIT: this was a \s piece but obviously it went over some peoples heads lol

You can still start with plain old html, js, Ajax and a data store. Once, you reach some scale or in parallel, you can hire someone else to do it. There is a lot of open source tech now, which was not available before.

Startup companies need to understand their customers and solve a real and valuable problem. The tech stack is simply a means to that end. There are a vanishingly small number of customer problems that require years of tech proficiency across a wide range subjects to build a successful product.

Propagating nonsense about needing to have deep understanding in widely different fields (ML! DevOps! Frontend!) is not only patently wrong, it is needlessly discouraging.

Now it’s at minimum 2 years to learn the deep fundamentals of react/redux/graphql then tying it into lambdas on the back end, maybe another year of study to learn full kubernetes integration , then another year to fully grasp how to set up and side chain in a deep learning pipeline with proper selection of production grade ML framework. Learn them all then choose which one works best. After that to reach youth in mobile sector, take 1.5 years to fully learn iOS and android native platform builds.

By which time the web crowd will have moved on to something else.

...even more floridly complex and requiring an even longer time to use well. I think we’ve already contracted the Average Hot Lifetime to less than the Effective Learning Period.

I think you're exhibiting some wishful thinking there. It's still not hard to create a FB MVP with tuts.

For a "marketing" style startup you just need very basic tech. For a more "high-tech" startup - yes you will need a whole bunch of hard to master tech, although not necessarily the stuff you mentioned.

Most of that isn’t necessary until you’re pretty far into the game. I’d argue that the barrier to starting a startup gets lower every year.

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