Archive for January 27th, 2010
What’s a Good Age to Start a Company?
This article was mostly inspired by Jeff Bussgang‘s article A Lost Generation of Entrepreneurs;
We have a lost generation of entrepreneurs. Not enough 20-somethings, or let’s even say under 35, have had the opportunity to see success at a young age and learn the important lessons of start-up leadership … When my partners and I tried to develop a list of today’s under 35 entrepreneurs who had started companies and seen meaningful success with them, it was a depressingly short list.
When I first started exploring the Boston startup scene, I was brash and arrogant. In fact, Scott Kirsner, publicly asked, “okay, you’re angry, what are you going to do about it” in response to a rant that the community wasn’t doing enough for young, first time entrepreneurs. When I asked James Geshwiler if he was committing Common Angels (he’s the Managing Director) to any support of young first-timers, he immediately went to quote the Kauffman Foundation report from late last year citing that the average ‘successful’ entrepreneur was 40. I used to get blindly frustrated at responses like that and wonder how were things ever to improve for young guys inspired to start interesting companies. But if you think about, it’s fairly logical right? 20-somethings can’t really be expected to launch, grow and run successful companies? A community or a society shouldn’t be supporting something that’s most likely going to fail?
Through my various interactions with people in the Boston startup community, especially with a lot of young peers launching companies, I started to wonder what really was the optimal age to start a company. A really close friend of mine took a year off from a top Boston engineering undergrad program to work on an education software-as-a-service technology. He and his team came up with something fairly interesting, but it’s a big project and startups are difficult. After much work, many lessons learned, he’s now back at school finishing off his degree, and ready to spend the summer at Google, possibly, and probably, leaving the dream of launching a company whilst still at school behind. Instead, he’ll probably go to Google after college, then to Harvard Business School a couple of years later. At that stage, he’ll have a bit of financial capital, be much more connected, and generally have far more knowledge to be in a much more optimal position to launch a great company. Am I sad that this would mean potentially one less young rock star Boston entrepreneur? Definitely. But do I think this is the right move for my friend. Most probably.
Given I haven’t started a successful company, am merely attempting to, I can’t properly answer the question in the title. What I will say is, without empirical evidence, there are a lot of early 20s (not to mention the freakish Mark Bao‘s of the world) in Boston, and I’m sure in a lot of other places, passionate about startups. There is an element of ‘it’s the cool thing to do’ (thinking back to the post Why for Students Entrepreneurship is the New Investment Banking) but there are more compelling fundamental reasons why the ‘supply’ of companies entering the marketplace founded by an early 20-something will increase by multiples in the next five years.
Is it best that a significant majority try and fail, but learn and try later in life, or are there solutions to this social phenomenon of young people going from lemonade stand to hiring their father’s friends.
