WingNews logo WingNews
top | item 39761108

(no title)

codethatwerks | 1 year ago

What is the parallel advice for a 40 year old? I guess the programming and tinkering stuff still applies. But university cannot be redone. Sure I can study but I wont have any connection to most young people. I’ll be the old guy. And this assumes I can afford the loss of income.

I assume a lot of start ups are started by older people too.

I think for older people an advantage is to solve older people problems. Like how sucky accessing all kinds of “adulting” things are from aged care to dealing with myriad systems with kids schools or any other problems that have inevitably been chucked at you. Some of these “startups” might actually be lobbying/political work for the good that doesn’t make money, some might be startups.

Also being older I don’t care about making a unicorn. I see that as an odd goal for a founder of any age but a great goal for an investor.

discuss

order

prisenco|1 year ago

Less startup, more starting a business.

The older I get the less I want to build a startup and more I want to start a business. Something that takes a little bit of capital, lots of hard work, gets some customers and provides goods or services, without venture capital firms and 100x returns and everything that comes with that, just a standard business.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI1SLHEC98I

bruce511|1 year ago

As you get older it becomes harder to start a business, simply because of financial concerns.

As a just-graduated poor student I was used to living on practically nothing. By 40 I had a mortgage, kids, wife etc. The penalty-for-failure at that age is substantial.

When I stopped getting a salary in my 20s my wife was earning so we just lived on her salary. That lasted a few years until the new business found its niche.

So, how to start a business later in life? Slowly and carefully. First do it as a side hustle. Night's and weekends. (Which is good to see if you still gave the energy for that.)

Price things "as if its full time". If you're selling ceramics on Saturdays figure out what your daily sales need to be and price accordingly. If you're teaching piano ditto.

Side hustles also let you experiment with marketing. See if the market will bear more than just a Saturday here or there.

When you can, take a paid vacation from your day job, and see how busy you are (and what income) from the eide hustle. Figure out if you enjoyed that more than the day job.

Save every penny from the dide hustle. You'll want at least 6 months of cash before you make the leap. 3 months to get income back up, 3 to look for a new job if it fails.

It's harder to start a new thing in your 40s. But it's also more likely to succeed, IF you plan and execute right.

ehnto|1 year ago

You have a much better idea of what demand is tangible and grounded, which means you are in a great position to start a bootstrapped small business. Some people have been calling them boring businesses which is actually pretty exciting to me, since they are tangible machines you can put work into.

All my attempts at starting a SaaS when I was younger were basically me building a cool thing and then yelling into the wind. I am looking for a more concrete market for my next venture, and it doesn't have to be cool or cutting edge.

Solvency|1 year ago

That's a romantic idea until you realize you're now dealing and subservient to the dredges of society, the worst kinds of customers, the worst kind of people. Far worse than a niche market specialized technology sales prospect. Get ready to have a new contempt for humanity. Get ready to be raked over the coals by Yelp.

tomhoward|1 year ago

There's a study that often gets shared around, purportedly "Debunking the Myth of the Young Entrepreneur", showing data that most successful startup founders start their companies in their mid-to-late 40s, including tech/social media companies.

It depends a lot on how you qualify and categorise founders, companies and "successful", but of course you can understand why it can be somewhat truthful: people in their 40s have had 2-3 decades to build up experience, networks and a track record, making it much easier to build a team and attract investors and initial customers. I'm sure almost all of these founders in their 40s have had at least some partial success in their past.

So it still affirms that it's best to start as young as possible, allowing time to experiment with ideas, markets, co-founders, etc. I've seen plenty of founders bounce from one-to-another-to-another startup from their 20s to their 40s, each one being vastly more successful than the last.

But as you point out there are still all kinds of opportunities to build new products to address needs that are overlooked by younger founders, so you should absolutely go for it if you're inspired.

I feel the same as you about being less interested in "unicorn"-scale success after 40; as you mature, have kids, experience illness in your family and become more observant of problems in different segments of society, you become much more focused on just providing well for your family and doing some good for the world than having to be some kind of all-conquering hero.

If you want to connect privately to talk more about what kind of company you want to build and how best to go about it, feel free to get in touch (email in bio).

throwoutway|1 year ago

Give yourself a break. When I studied in uni I was stuck at tables with 'old guys' and 'old ladies' and I had a lot of respect for them. They paid attention, wanted to learn, were there to learn. When I didn't understand something, I asked them before I asked the teacher and they generally were happy to help. I have fond memories

llm_trw|1 year ago

>Also being older I don’t care about making a unicorn. I see that as an odd goal for a founder of any age but a great goal for an investor.

Looking at the state of open source software today a google is simply impossible because the ecosystem has rotted from the inside.

Look at how much effort it took to write the cgi-bin scripts google started with vs whatever flavour of the week JS framework you have to use now.

Not sure what the solution is but we need fewer sheep in development and less permissive licenses so developers doing unglamorous work can capture more of the value. There's a reason why every shop which supports massive open source projects is running away from legacy licenses as fast as they can and that reason is Amazon.

If you don't care about developers from the user side of things it's just as bad. The GPL in the age of cloud services does as much to protect user freedom as the MIT license did in the 1990s.

ramraj07|1 year ago

Creating something from scratch is so much easier today than it ever was, and I’ve been creating crap for decades now. All the fancy JavaScript crap is purely optional. You can still write something in CGI if you want. My last prototype I wrote with Vue and JQuery and as pure html and .js files. It was an absolute blast! And the users loved it! Have you tested streamlit? FastAPI? Everything is so easy now.

mynameisnoone|1 year ago

> Looking at the state of open source software today a google is simply impossible because the ecosystem has rotted from the inside.

The Oxide route is one of the better approaches for backend. "Apple" of enterprise OSS, but I think their ambitions are too small. Prefab containers full of seamless and modular amounts of each food groups: CPU, GPU, RAM, SSD, HDD, interconnect, and uplink all in and managed. Not rack-up but dirt-up and totally managed offering IAM, VMs, 12factor PAAS, serverless, volumes, and object storage with multitenancy, accounting, security, data lifecycle, config management, appropriate redundancy, and other cross-cutting concerns harmonized in a way that is necessarily managed but sufficiently customizable.

Frontend, the trick is standardizing on the least fragile tools that are widely used enough. Churn on tools and dependencies is a distraction and a time waster.

dragonwriter|1 year ago

> Looking at the state of open source software today a google is simply impossible because the ecosystem has rotted from the inside.

There’s lots of reasons a Google is impossible to start today (the main one being “Google exists, whatever the next explosive startup-to-giant is [0], it will look nothing like Google, and such things aren’t cookie-cutter, each is sui generis), but the explanation you offer above is… unconvincing as a bare conclusion, but maybe could be fleshed out with more description and support.

> Not sure what the solution is but we need fewer sheep in development and less permissive licenses so developers doing unglamorous work can capture more of the value.

The two halves of this sentence are in tension, and the first seems more reasonable than the second.

> Look at how much effort it took to write the cgi-bin scripts google started with vs whatever flavour of the week JS framework you have to use now.

You don’t have to use a flavor-of-the-week JS framework in place of cgi-bin scripts. (And, in some ways, the lowest-friction backend options are lower friction to get up and running than cgi-bin scripts on a server you set up, because you’ve got things like “serverless” FaaS hosts.)

[0] OpenAI?

satvikpendem|1 year ago

But, no one is forcing you to use the latest JS framework, you can still write cgi-bin scripts if you wanted...

There is no need to follow the trend du jour, it is some fallacy that you're describing that somehow it's easier then than today when the technology is largely backwards compatible.

throwaway2562|1 year ago

> Not sure what the solution is but we need fewer sheep in development and less permissive licenses so developers doing unglamorous work can capture more of the value.

This is the nuts of it.

eggdaft|1 year ago

Sounds like you might want to start a lifestyle business. You should read and listen to everything by Rob Walling, especially his “stair step approach”. Wish someone had told me this at your stage.

For meeting founders, find someone in the area you’re interested in and build stuff with them. Also consider using the YC founder network, but they may be too ambitious for you.

Lifestyle businesses are probably less dependent on cofounders for success.

You’ll need to work hard at your tech skills if they’ve atrophied. The good news is, this part is incredibly fun.

happytiger|1 year ago

Wow, the older I get the more ambitious I get about what to build. A lot of the companies I created in my 20s and 30s I wouldn’t waste my time on in my 40s. I’m so the exact opposite it’s kinda funny.

Go big or go home, it’s no fun to chew bones.

kamaal|1 year ago

That Steve Jobs advice of saying no to a lot of things seems such a natural thing to do as you age.

As years that remain shrink, you have to pick and choose the battles you want to fight.

navane|1 year ago

I think PG addresses this subtlety where he says: "when you're young it's easier to know what you are interested in, than what people need." This inverts as you get older.

xyzelement|1 year ago

// Also being older I don’t care about making a unicorn

You can use that term as a proxy for delivering large impact to the world. It's approximately the same thing. If you do something like "aged care" and "dealing with kids schools" in a way that helps millions of people, you'll end up a billionaire whether you want to or not.

I don't use the term "unicorn" but I think keeping score in financial terms helps because that's how you know you've delivered something people want and at scale. If you remove money out of the equation it's easier to fool yourself thinking you're making some difference and you're not.

dtnewman|1 year ago

Counterpoint: Rudolph Hass, creator of the original hass avocado, barely made anything from it. I’m not gonna say that the Hass Avocado had more impact than Apple or Google, but it’s definitely more impactful than any $1-10 billion company I can think of.

codethatwerks|1 year ago

You can fool yourself with money too. Often it is more profitable to do the unethical thing.

mewpmewp2|1 year ago

But perhaps he doesn't want to make THAT much impact. Some decent impact would be fine, of course. It seems a lot of responsibility to have impact on millions of people, might lead you down the road of drugs and alcohol, killing your health to be able to handle it.

If I have a business that impacts millions of people, then every hour I spend on it, would have huge influence, and if I don't spend the hours on increasing that percentage, I'm also letting down millions of people.

waveBidder|1 year ago

But unicorns and the people who fund them are all about disconnecting from actual returns today, and caring about projected returns in 10 years. Accidentally becoming very popular is great. Aiming for that as the goal distorts the business into something unsustainable and inevitably leads to enshittification.

mynameisnoone|1 year ago

Same boat here.

I would suggest using your network and consider a path of least resistance such as building a side-business while working that either solves niche enterprise problems or makes enterprise capabilities more manageable for small businesses.

Starting a business is really easy. The bullshit that every business needs to do isn't particularly magical or mysterious. Don't get too invested in the bureaucratization process, but also be sure to implement what needs to happen just in time.

Find cofounders from your friends and coworkers, and go to startup events. Find people who you respect and who respect you, have integrity, and are the most fun. It's important to find people who don't turn into arrogant SOBs or raging sociopaths when large sums of money become involved. Honesty, awareness, navigating/prioritizing ambiguity, and conflict resolution skills are damn important.

Avoid external funding if at all possible unless it unblocks time-to-market that would otherwise miss market time or grow too slowly to survive. (Growing slower is often easier and more sustainable!)

Have sensible cost controls that are pennywise and poundwise.

If not changing the world or building a startup per se, focus on building a business that something people want. ;@] Expect it to take 20x longer, 50x more effort, and 4x more money than you think.