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Comment by startupper | Hacker News Reader

Aruba, Starent, Infinera are hot 2007 IPO's of note that were recently in the news. None of them were started by 20-somethings.

I think this site and the referenced bloggers have a software-centric focus. There may well be a significant number of successful 20-somethings in software businesses. But software is a subset of technology and one cannot apply the observations here to technology in general.

Consider this: the global market for communications equipment exceeds 1 trillion dollars -- there's a lot of opportunity there for domain specific expertise that often times requires an advanced degree and experience in the industry. Companies such as Qualcomm and Broadcom are other examples where the founders were well-established in their careers, i.e. not 20-something.

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'... communications equipment ... there's a lot of opportunity there for domain specific expertise that often times requires an advanced degree and experience in the industry ...'

And significant hurdles to market. In some ways you have to have balls to launch a hardware product. In coms, you have to create the software but the physical hardware as well. Much harder than pure software. You also have all the problems of creating & selling physical things, logistics, inventory, packaging. Yet more skills, risk & as you point out, more reward.

To see eye to eye in this community you need to s/startup/webstartup/.

But it will be interesting to see if some of the business practices (very low initial budgets, early releases, &c) common in web startups might translate into other fields. At least one YC startup (sproutsys) appears to be doing pretty serious systems software, which is still software, but quite different from being a "web startup".

Yes, to be totally fair I should say "web or software startup" qualifier, but I found it less elegant to type. And really, it seems to be the rare exception among either YC Companies or just discussions on this site. A sign of the times, perhaps, but still a point on the semantics of "startup" around here.

Honestly I found it annoying for a while, until I realized it would be a waste of time to qualify the term startup every time when it's clear what the domain of conversation is.

From what I can read on their recruitment page (http://sproutsys.com/careers.html), SproutSys seems to plan cool stuff!

Regarding web startups: well, a few of them are quite innovative but most of them are indeed uninteresting copies of copies of copies... It's boring.

So, who is working on something else than web stuff here? Any hardware startups?

There was a discussion on this earlier.

We are working on a wireless hw/sw/fw startup. Of late I've had at least one Web2.0 person express an interest in working for us. I expect we'll find many others who find the web startup scene boring.

Exact, the thread is here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21107

"Of late I've had at least one Web2.0 person express an interest in working for us."

Well, you have a second interested person now! But I'm not a web 2.0 person; I'm an embedded software developer (and I, too, find this whole web hype very boring). Where can I find more info? Your profile is empty :(

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