I'm an outlier in a few different ways in life, and in my 40's, I am with startups as well. I didn't discover how satisfying being an entrepreneur could be until I really started trying it in my late 30's and now I can't get enough.
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.
The only reason it's skewed towards young people is because software is a VERY young industry! People who did not grow up with software just have less experience with software and are less likely to start successful companies around it.
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, people become far more risk-averse as their careers progress. This is particularly true in high-paying jobs like software development; its hard to walk away from $100k+ job to start your own project, especially with a wife and kids depending on you. The younger you are the more risks you can take.
Also, as you said, software evolves quickly. So its completely reasonable for a 25 year old to have mastery of a new and exploitable technology... makes for an interesting entrepreneurial dynamic.
Think there is a pretty significant component missing in analysis - more young people start companies. It could be that the success rate for older entrepreneurs is 3x of 4x that of younger - not assuming it is, but if young entrepreneurs are starting companies at 3x or 4x the rate of older, it might explain some of the anecdotal observations.
Oh, good point. BTW, I am not arguing that "older" entrepreneurs can't start huge wins, but rather, the very very big wins are anecdotally started by younger people (for SW, and in particular internet cos).
Another analysis I would love to see (if I have time will do it myself) - take the 20 largest SW or Internet companies started in the last 20 years. Graph age of founders vs. company outcome.
Adobe founders were in their early 40's. (born 1939 and 1940, founded 1982.)
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.
If you look at a variety of fields, you see that people within certain age groups tend to do better. Most productive ages for: Gymnasts: teens, Mathematicians: teens to late-20s, Physicists: early 20s-early 30s, Biologists: late 30s-40s, Literary authors: 40s to 60s.
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.
The data suggests to me that "mental" has at least two, narrower peaks - the Mathematician/Physicist peak (maths are theroetical physics are quite similar in practice) is quite distinct from the Novelist's peak, and that therefor they exercise different mental abilities.
My take on this applies to just about any field with regards to entrepreneurship. A successful entrepreneur doesn't emerge until the person 'gets it'. What I mean by 'gets it' is an esoteric combination of these factors:
-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.
I think it's probably because to take that plunge and go all-out with a venture (which is how most tech startups work) you can't really have kids and a wife and a mortgage and the need for health insurance weighing you down and dividing your attention.
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.]
As an "older" entrepreneur (I'm 43), I can say a few things:
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 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.