Ah, to be forever 34 and eight months.
I hate to say it, but it’s rarely what you do or what you say - it’s how you do it and how you look when you say it.
These days I look like a mature, sensible businessperson, but I’m still the same twelve year old jackass I always was.
Like interview feedback, it's generally useless advice because people make emotional decisions rather than rational.
I would think bias is more likely to get eliminated the further up the funding ladder you go (i.e. sure this person might not look like me, but the numbers prove he knows what he/she knows what their doing).
However at the angel stage, there's so much room for subjectivity that I can't believe bias doesn't play a role.
I got turned down by one VC because "they don't invest in India". My startup is registered in Delaware, I pitched him in US and I am not even Indian citizen
My aim is to replace human labour with machine learning in supply chain logistics so it would be ironic if he thought like that
Keep things as simple and single functionality as possible. If you can't explain your startup in one sentence, it's doing too much
I had a client around 2008-2009 (he was around 40 at the time and successfully launched several companies) who wanted a website/web app which basically was doing crowdfunding and videoconferencing (plus shared board and documents)
Yeah, I said basically and here we are getting a lot of functionality. I spare you the rest.
Needless to say after 2 years and a half of discussion and meetings and « what about we add that functionality ? », money ran dry and the whole thing never launched.
These days I might have an idea for a feature in my head and pitch it to people as if it exists to gauge interest. If it seems like it's a clear winner I build it into my product. If not, I'm not writing any code.
I don’t discuss which DB to use. I straight away use SQL.
TiDB (distributed)
CockroachDB (distributed)
Crate (uses SQL but isn't even relational)
They all use SQL.
Picking between these and more established SQL databases is worthy of discussion.
Heck, based on what I see on Hacker News, picking between the established ones generates a lot of discussion, usually with people preferring Postgres over MySQL, etc.
Then there's SQLite, which is completely different again.
OP probably has a favourite database as a go-to regardless of the application, but for some projects SQLite might be a better fit than the others, for example. That would warrant discussion.
In conclusion, I believe you were too harsh to TekMol.
Edit: Fix autocorrect fails and add clarity.
If you consistently try to build businesses through side projects, or other means, there's a good chance you're getting better at it as the years go by.
So it shouldn't come as a surprise to find you may eventually succeed.
Personally I just read it as “young person pretty sure that young people are smarter”.
They are different people.
> All of the old people were young people once.
All ex-Communists were once Communists, yet Communists and ex-Communists are still different people.
every 10-15 yrs or so, you are a different person entirely.
search for dan gilbert. here’s his ted talk. https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_you_are_always_changin...
The abstract: Many observers, and many investors, believe that young people are especially likely to produce the most successful new firms. We use administrative data at the U.S. Census Bureau to study the ages of founders of growth-oriented start-ups in the past decade. Our primary finding is that successful entrepreneurs are middle-aged, not young. The mean founder age for the 1 in 1,000 fastest growing new ventures is 45.0. The findings are broadly similar when considering high-technology sectors, entrepreneurial hubs, and successful firm exits. Prior experience in the specific industry predicts much greater rates of entrepreneurial success. These findings strongly reject common hypotheses that emphasize youth as a key trait of successful entrepreneurs.
To me, "prior experience" favors B2B startups and those tend to be founded by 40-something entrepreneurs. (I made a previous comment about this.[1])
In contrast for B2C, many observers (VCs like Bill Gurley, Fred Wilson, etc) have noticed that experience doesn't necessarily help consumer-facing internet companies and viral smartphone apps. (E.g. Twitter founder Ev Williams started Medium at age 40 but it's still losing money and it's not as successful as Twitter.)
The counterintuitive conclusions about median age of 45 may be happening because the study doesn't group the data between B2B vs B2C. It's the B2C startups that have more exposure in mainstream media and they dominate pop culture conversation. The numerous B2B startups become hidden as a sort of "dark matter" in the business universe because they probably comprise most of the successes but ironically get the least amount of news coverage.
But I also understand why you would want to invest in a 20-something. On average, they are going to be more aware of emerging tech, and guided with the right advisors can get a company off the ground and then supported with the necessary pieces.
- High-tech/low-tech. It makes a difference if the entrepreneur simply glued together existing technologies, or invented a new technology.
- The amount of investment money.
- The amount of failed companies of the entrepreneur.
There's several independent variables (money / trial and error / twitter following / coding ability etc ...)
this clickbait paper makes it sound like age is the independent variable. when age is merely CORRELATED with these independent variables. Age itself is of little importance.
You may as well say:
"A person who has already started 5 startups is 4.9X more likely to found a successful startup than a person has never founded a startup before"
Google "Multicollinearity" before you vend BS clickbait.