Fred Wilson: The Age Question (Why younger founders have an advantage)
avc.blogs.com
avc.blogs.com
So sure, if you're trying to start another MySpace or FB, it helps to be younger and more familiar with the latest technology trends. But there are countless startups for which that isn't relevant.
I do have at least one idea which is not consumer-oriented... My problem is that since these domains are not in-your-face advertised, or talked about here, it's harder to evaluate the market and the competition.
Plus, these apps usually need promotion of some kind, word-of-mouth doesn't really spread otherwise.
And that's without even thinking about vertical markets. For example, I think if you sat down in a room with an industry expert in, say, the oil & gas industry and a few smart hackers, you could come up with a way to apply computer science to improve oil and gas prospecting. There are dozens of similar vertical markets, where some smart hackers with a modicum of domain-specific knowledge could really make a pretty significant improvement on the state-of-the-art, IMHO.
The group-think among certain communities on the Internet toward consumer-oriented, Web 2.0, advertising-dependent web startups is really pretty amazing -- I just get terribly bored reading about all the different people building Web 2.0 task management web apps and similar junk. There are lots of other kinds of startups out there -- it's just that YC doesn't focus on funding them, and TechCrunch doesn't cover them, so this particular community of developers never learns about them.
If I combined my experience and knowledge now with my enthusiasm from back then, I'd be an industry titan.
Nothing's really that interesting anymore, and when virtual reality gets good I'm locking myself in a room with my virtual girlfriend and staying there.
Today students take computers for granted. Most students now can't program at all.
You say that like it's a bad thing. But it's really a good thing, for both the general population and also for those select few who do know how to program.
(Also, I'd bet that the percentage of students who can program is a lot higher now than it was when you were in junior high.)
Personally, I would consider a startup targeting old people exciting, and maybe older founders would have an advantage there.
So younger entrepreneurs without a CS degree might have an advantage in that regard.
The solution IMO is to make CS degrees more balanced, encouraging more creative application-level thinking.
There is no cookie-cutter approach that will yield originality.
I suspect it's because these things are said to be functions of "intelligence" and "creativity."
They're not.
So why don't schools teach students how to have good ideas?
Most decisions about what to teach are presupposed by emergent systemic factors.
Take, for example, time_on_task. Our educational system is designed around the idea that achievement is a function of ToT.
Fortunately, this isn't a philosophical belief. It's an empirically testable claim. A claim that has, in fact, been tested again and again.
Unhappily, the results are pretty much what you'd expect. No correlation.
So how many credit hours does it take to teach someone how to write insightfully? Or have good business ideas? If you can't put a number on it, colleges essentially aren't allowed to teach it. By law, actually. (Think about how financial aid works, and the rules concerning whether or not you can be on your parent's health insurance.) PG himself has said that he basically won't fund you unless you've been in the classroom a certain number of hours -- the number required to graduate.
So how do you learn these skills?
The answers aren't really in any one book, but if you take a year off from college and sit in the local cafe reading every decent book on the subject ever written, you'll more or less figure it out.
Of course you'll lose many friends, your parents will hate you, you won't have health insurance, and everyone will generally think of you as a loser. But that's another issue entirely. :-)
edit: By "intelligence" and "creativity" I just mean things that can't be taught, not literally that success is zero percent innate.
Plus it's probably just not that teachable. I think the most you can do is teach people where to look for good ideas: where to find cracks in conventional wisdom, what types of questions tend to produce fruitful answers, and so on.
BTW, YC doesn't care how much time people have spent in classrooms. The reason we like graduates is simply that they can't retreat to school if things get tough.
1) I often see woodchucks walking along the breakdown lane of the highway, but very rarely do I see them run over. I bet there's something interesting going on there.
2) I put a terrarium in my freezer, and after a year a worm in the bottom was still alive. I bet there's something interesting going on there.
And so on.
It might be the case that entrepreneurship is a "weak patterned" field, i.e. that there are only patterns in bad ideas. For example:
1) No one wants to use my product.
2) My product costs more money than it makes.
3) There is no way of implementing my product.
4) It's like MySpace but for knitter's in Canada! (Going from general demographic to niche demographic)
5) It's like MySpace but with this cool new feature! (It's a feature, not a product)
6) It's like Google, but with a tag cloud! (Doesn't give a better answer to the user's questions)
And so on. Just looking through other people's bad ideas I think we can easily find 20 or 30 common patterns.
So even if it's not possible to teach what a good idea is, it certainly is possible to teach "the funnel method" of eliminating bad ideas.
And while there may be no patterns in good ideas, I think that, as you suggested, there are some very clear patterns in where good ideas come from.
Incidentally, I have this theory that most good business ideas start with "I have this theory..."
(I have this long list of books that should have been written, but haven't been.)