Ode to the "Older" Entrepreneur

I also think it's a slightly different environment for tech now than it was just 10 years ago. There seem to be more resources available for people who want to get started. But I think a stronger factor may be that these days people my age actually had the internet when they were younger, especially those of us who had technical training and internet connections in college. This isn't some new fad for me. It's life and potentially life-changing and industry disrupting if we do it right.

I guess many my age are content just writing enterprise Java code with one eye on their 401(k), but I'm much more interested in new technologies, languages and see so many possibilities out there.

In a hundred years the market will normalise to whatever the normal age for business owners is.

We've gone through periods of rapid change recently, and older entrepreneurs are just less familiar with the workings of the new stuff to be able to successfully compete. That will change as the current generations grow.

Also, I really do think that people are aging more slowly, 40 is the new 30 etc. Adolescence is extended; old-age is longer and healthier.

But, whether you have an advantage by being older is a question of the value of experience... although each new generation of tech seems to reinvent all the old stuff (so experience helps there), mastery of detailed workarounds is lost. Experience seems to have most enduring value in people and business-related skills, more than in programming. Other things that don't change much are laws and mathematics. Although this doesn't help mathematicians, who need to be creating new mathematics, my guess is that applied mathematicians would get better over time.

-realization that life is not a dress rehearsal

-determination to be successful in their own right, and to not spend the rest of their lives asking other people for permission to trade their precious time for wages

-awakening that most barriers to success are mental

-development of absolute belief that they alone are responsible for how they feel, how they act, and their success or failure at anything.

The big difference between this and other fields is the lower physical barriers to entry for young people. There are no licences required, no physical assets to acquire, no permission needed to build software. On top of that there is a positive feedback loop where other people are willing to listen to a young software entrepreneur, because young software entrepreneurs have had success in the past. If other industries had these low barriers to entry, I would expect to find young successful people across other industries.

The age distribution I think is just the varying age at which people 'get it'. For some young people, they come out of the gates with this belief system, either innate or cultivated by their parents. For others, it requires maybe starting a family and accepting the responsibility of the same, maybe getting fired from a job, maybe a mid-life crisis or a health scare. The reasons are varied but the outcome is similar - a shifting of focus onto what is important. Once the shift of focus happens and clear thinking emerges, the entrepreneur can emerge - at any age.

Now that it's becoming more practical to bootstrap yourself into existence on the side - primarily because of cloud resources, but also just because it's getting easier in terms of support structure - I think we're going to see more older entrepreneurs.

I mean, I'm 44 and I'm only now starting to get interested in startups.

[I tell my wife similar things about physics when she gets despondent about not getting ahead in the field fast enough. There, I really think that the daily grind of academia, plus the terrible burden of having a professional reputation, is what makes it impossible for older folks to contribute the big stuff.]

A) Its harder to put all of my eggs in one basket. When I was younger i could afford the time to do that (and had several successes doing that). Now, its more important for me to diversify my "entrepreneurship"

B) the way I do that is by finding the qualities that I had (in other young entrepreneurs) and investing in them at low valuations (so I feel as if I have the equity of a founder).

Most entrepreneurs I know in their 40s tend to do the same thing. Its a little bit easier (less late nights programming when I have two kids) and almost as fun and just as lucrative. Ultimately, my "business" now is my investments.

I prefer a binary distillation:

"Physical" - best from 18 to 40, peaking around 30 (with some exceptions)

"Mental" - best from 13 to 90, peaking almost anytime.

Almost every field is a combination, but I consider programming and business more "mental" than "physical". So as long as you take care of yourself, there's no reason why anyone's best work can't be ahead of them.

I'd be very surprised to find the best basketball player peaking at 40, but not surprised at all to find a programmer who did the same thing.