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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
>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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.)
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
// 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
PG is remarkably consistent in his advice; much of his writing is about developing a nose for "what's missing" and having the chops and resources to attempt a solution.
Also, I think 'Google' in this instance is more for motivation rather than a literal comparison. He's leaving out the part that Google was founded by graduate CS students a) looking for a thesis, b) into node-link graphs, and c) inspired by academic citation metrics. Would PG advise anyone to go to grad school to learn how to find scientific-discovery-based startup ideas these days?
This is what is fundamentally missing from most talk about "tech" startups by VC types these days. They're not actually interested in the nerdy stuff, just in the "disruption" stuff.
L&S were, and they hired other people who were. They didn't start with a business idea, but with a technical one. They filled in the blanks on the business side after they survived the .com crash.
I didn't get to Google until 2011, but it became clear to me after joining that in the past they had gone on a very nerdy mission to hire all the nerdy people and collect them into one place to do nerdy things.
(Unfortunately that nerdy thing ended up being selling ads really efficient, but that's another story.)
My fundamental point is that the Google story is very unlike the kind of stories that YCombinator or a16z like. It started, like you said, as a set of intellectual/technical interests. The other stuff, that VCs today like, came later.
In a way they did the opposite of the usual advice. They started with the hammer (the tech) rather than the nail (the business problem.) They certainly didn't start with a "Like X but for Y" statement like seems to be desired by VC today. And they didn't look like the typical .com story at the time (which was usually: give us lots of VC $$ so we can sell something on the web that is currently not sold on the web, but we'll just use the $$ to buy customers and make no profit...)
I would posit that if today's Google came to YCombinator today they'd be shown the "no thanks" door.
> Unfortunately that nerdy thing ended up being selling ads really efficient, but that's another story.
The irony is that both the thing and its side effects were anticipated very early on.
"Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. ... It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media, we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers."
(The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, 1998)
Hopefully 2 Stanford CS PhD students hacking on their project would be funded by YC today :)
You bring up a good point about starting from the tech rather than the problem. Usually the advice from VCs is to start from the problem and iterate on the tech until you solve it. What was very fortunate for Google is that the tech translated into a great business problem. Open up any CS textbook and 'Search' is always a major section. It was also a great business because the problem is important, frequent, and had not been properly solved by the big players in the mid 90s.
"And then we realized that we had a querying tool..." (Page)
I think there's a connection here to the old adage that "small companies make it possible, big companies make it inexpensive".
The purpose of VC can be viewed as trying to take a company from nonexistent to big while skipping the small stage, but small is where the action really is.
Very interesting to hear your thoughts and experience.
I wonder if we really shouldn't make a bit more out of the fact that there are different types of startups: those that pick off low-hanging fruit really well, those that combine novel technology with novel problems (for instance, the recent YC LLM meeting note-taking / transcription service), those that are scientific-discovery based (see, for example the NSF Small Business Innovation Research program), etc. I am not experienced enough to create an ontology of startup ideas, but I think it'd be an interesting exercise.
The real trick that made Google possible, and the following web 2.0 era startups, was that linux and commodity hardware was all that was needed at the time so engineers could strike out on their own. Comparing it to the current ML era where you need many millions of dollars of data and many millions of dollars of hardware to compete, the guys that wrote the transformers paper are stuck in bigcorp and aren't going to be the next Larry and Sergey. OpenAI might be one of the few new big companies but it's run by a VC/CEO, not the engineers that figured the stuff out, and he had to sell half the company to Microsoft anyway.
Maybe? YC seems to have an inconsistent view on things that are research vs product. But it’s probably more nuanced than that. Search was a market though at that time. If you pitched an AI LLM before chat-gpt what would the odds have been?
I wouldn't fixate on the Google part too much. It's pretty clear he is using it as a common point of reference for 14 and 15 year olds. "You guys know about Google?, the giant company with the web site? Okay well let me tell you how companies like that are built."
Building a successful company depends on many things. The point made here is that you are unlikely to be expert enough, and motivated enough to build a successful business in an area you are not interested in, and haven't played around in. So to increase the amount of domains that you could create a business in from 0 to a small positive integer you should build things that interest you.
Of course if you have money, or know how to persuade people who have money, you can be something of an idiot and still develop a successful business. Usually you are not really developing the business in this case, more attaching yourself to a business that smart people are running for you.
In a pool of high school freshmen, most probably have a better chance of success following the first path, than the second.
Google in 1999 had the the fortuitous alignment of every possible factor: brains, Stanford connections, timing, extremely scalable and lucrative business model, funding, etc.
He should! As I hope to convince people of next month, there’s a wealth of classical AI knowledge that’s just begging to be applied to modern systems. That’s not to speak of the wizardry happening in neuroscience and drug discovery right now…
Isn’t “you shouldn’t focus on science to start a good tech company” a good indicator that our conception of “tech” company is completely broken? That we’re really talking about ways to milk money from gambling billionaires, not change the world with successful products?
Google succeeded because they built a useful service and later were able to monetize it. Their timing could not have been better, searching the Internet at that time was horrendous.
Stanford was in the VC business long, long before. It's been told many times but Frank Terman set up much of the infrastructure to enable this back in the 1950s, building Stanford Research Park which housed Varian (microwaves and other RF), HP (some digital electronics stuff), and Lockheed (some bomb stuff). And that work built off the incredible investments into California infrastructure by the US military during WWII (https://steveblank.com/category/secret-history-of-silicon-va...), which followed some amazing investments in education, transport, and housing since the beginning of the gold rush.
But, in all honesty, if you want to identify single factors that truly contributed to Google not just surviving but thriving, I'd point at Jeff Dean. When he joined, Google was unable to update its index due to the design of the indexer. Jeff (along with Sanjay, or as many of us know him, "The Wise One"), built seminal software that enabled google to grow rapidly - not just updating the index faster, but doing search quality on logs, early ad experiments, and more. Obviously, other people played critical roles (Silverstein, /proc/bogdan, SRE Lucas) but IMHO if they hadn't had Jeff and Sanjay, google would have died back in 97 or 98.
> Stanford was in the VC business long, long before...
Not at scale. In the 1980s, Stanford's biggest IP revenue came from FM synthesis for musical instruments. In 1991, Stanford started up the Stanford Management Company to manage the endowment. Offices were on Sand Hill Road, out by the venture capitalists. That worked out very well. Enough so that SMC became the tail that wagged the dog. But that's a long story.
It's interesting that this piece mentions "to get really rich" as one of the primary motivators. Especially to high school students. I wonder if that's good advice or if society is better served by motivating students to start companies that make the world better.
I feel like there was a moment where “love was all you needed” and people just followed their passions with real careers as a backup. Hollywood pressed that view (or echoed it) into the zeitgeist and I’m not sure what the turning point was, but people started getting filthy rich. Almost as if the dormant culture combined with the internet made it possible to amass an absurd amount of wealth. Since then, whenever that is, it feels like it’s socially acceptable again to do be driven by earning potential and nothing else.
I agree with you, wanting to become “filthy rich” is abhorrent given all of the known implications that comes with. At the very least people should have some shame and keep that to themselves.
You get filthy rich by capturing as much of the market as possible by whatever means necessary and killing off competition - including user lock-in, artificial bundling, using successful past products to subsidize non-profitable new ones just to screw competitors etc.
Getting people to pay for something isn't the same thing as making the world a better place. You'd need to figure out all the effects and costs of the service to know if you're doing good or bad. Tobacco companies sell things that a lot of people desire, but the effect on society is surely negative. Same could be true for social media and many other types of services, but we don't know because we're not really trying to figure that out. The only question we ask when we are starting a business is "are people willing to pay for this enough to make a profit?". We don't ask if the effect of that service is actually good for society or the world.
I don't see any mention of being ready to completely pivot from your original, lofty mission ("best search with no ads") to exactly the opposite ("ads are money").
Google was a successful, unsustainable search engine before it was a successful business.
Facebook was a successful social network waay before it was a successful business.
Reddit was... You can see where I am going with this.
Anything that gets eyeballs will be paid for by ad placement. I think that's the "dirty" (open) "secret". Many industries are paid for by ads, not just tech companies. Though, tech companies have taken a huge chunk out of the entertainment industry as YouTubers, Instagrammers and TikTokkers (etc.) are now creating that entertaining content for the tech companies. All in an effort to capture eye balls.
And Hacker News is no different. Everyone who's on here long enough will slowly learn about Y Combinator. HN is an ad placement site for YC and YC affiliates. HN is much more than that of course, and that is why the ad placement works so well. Personally, I find the way HN is doing it tasteful. Moreover, it's not the only reason why HN exists, it's a synergy thing. With that said, there's still the same dynamic in there.
"Fool your users while you smother the competition with good tech" is an important part to Google's success: as PaulG mentions, Google is a good example because everyone knows about them.
People partially flocked to them (me included) because of their public stance on ads, and then they played me.
Without claiming things they did the opposite from, one can't help but wonder if they would have ever succeeded? And would that have made them a story to tell at all?
He left out the part about starting your company at a unique point in history where a generational technology shift was taking place that also happens to be a time when antitrust laws had recently been enforced (making your main competitor wary) but were about to be completely ignored for the next 20 years, so you could exploit your initial market position and engage in anti-competitive behavior to grow huge.
Or the part where your parents are professors and provide the educational opportunities and financial freedom to take risks that 99% of people don't have.
I don't mean that to even sound bitter or cynical, but it's just a fact if you look at most founders, even the ones that fail miserably.
There is always an excuse. The parents are professors, or upper middle class dentists, or your mom does charity for United Way and managed to become the leader of the charitable organization and managed to meet some exec from IBM. Given how diverse these professions are and that they basically describe a slightly upper middle class family, im gonna guess their children account for more than 1%.
The happiest entrepreneurs I know got advanced degrees, had a solid career, developed plenty of contacts, then launched something in their 30s or 40s with substantially less risk than taking a punt on knowing what problems were worth solving while at University, or taking a punt on finding the right person to start a company with while at University, or taking a punt on having the wide range of skills required to actually make a company work without ever having any work experience.
This is the sort of hype that drew me in when I was younger and I think it's damaging. The real way to start Google is to be smart, hard working and incredibly lucky. IMHO the best way to start a company is to be smart, hard working and patient.
I agree, it is damaging especially when you don't have a wealthy relative to fall back on.
I spent 3 years trying to keep a startup afloat after graduating from college. Most of my peers own a (some of them multiple) house now. I have 75k in my savings.
I have a somewhat comparable history: I've taken a decade to get to the point where my bootstrapped SaaS ARR income is about to surpass my full-time consulting income.
It has taken about a decade of switching back and forth between consulting and working on the SaaS until I run out of money. Some consulting stints took a few months, others a few years, depending on our needs.
As I grew older, our needs and risk aversion in the family increased, so I just took on longer or more financially interesting consulting assignments, to grow a bigger buffer and allocate some extra assets.
I'm quite sure that, if I had just been consulting the last 15 years, I would already have been able to retire (owning more real estate and other assets).
However, my life would have been very different, and every single time I took on an ad interim assignment, I noticed the impact of my SaaS building experience was a big plus for my consulting assignments...
I'm not saying it's all rainbows & unicorns - building a SaaS is romanticized a lot, but IME it's an infinite game that requires a lot of grit, and as you grow you move the goal posts, so you're always in "hard" mode -, but I beg to differ that it has led to a more interesting life for me personally, as I tend to get bored quickly.
I have a few friends that built, sold, and could retire, but every single one of them has started building something new...
You need to love playing the game and be willing to sacrifice things, as the odds are typically against you.
To quote Simon Sinek "The only true competitor in an infinite game is yourself." [0]
>The real way to start Google is to be smart, hard working and incredibly lucky. IMHO the best way to start a company is to be smart, hard working and patient.
Reward requires effort, but effort does not guarantee reward.
It's a fact of life that we really should teach our kids instead of the nonsense that effort will be rewarded.
You're overestimating the importance of talent and underestimating the importance of luck.
Not saying Larry Page and Sergey page aren't talented - clearly they were/are very talented people. But they were also extraordinarily lucky. To take another example, if Gary Kildall had been a slightly more ruthless businessman and IBM had had a little more foresight, Bill Gates would not be a billionaire.
Agreed, BG actually come across as fellow less smarter than several people I know, he does not have profound insights, and keeps repeating trite stuff.
This essay is for kids. Many successful founders have likely listened to inspiring talks like this when they were kids. In places like Stanford or the prestigious high schools they come from.
The people who read here can read it for clarity and the chance that they can show this article to a smart nephew to inspire them. Like I just did.
Readit News
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.
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
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.
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.
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).
There might be others, but this one is clear and to the point:
The Average Age of a Successful Startup Founder Is 45
https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-succes...
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.
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.
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?
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.
This is the nuts of it.
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.
[Stair Step Method of Bootstrapping] https://robwalling.com/2015/03/26/the-stair-step-method-of-b...
[Podcast] https://startupsfortherestofus.com
[Book] https://saasplaybook.com
[YouTube] https://microconf.com/youtube
The link above links to the article I was going to post. Just adding the headline here, since it was missing.
Go big or go home, it’s no fun to chew bones.
As years that remain shrink, you have to pick and choose the battles you want to fight.
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.
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.
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.
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Also, I think 'Google' in this instance is more for motivation rather than a literal comparison. He's leaving out the part that Google was founded by graduate CS students a) looking for a thesis, b) into node-link graphs, and c) inspired by academic citation metrics. Would PG advise anyone to go to grad school to learn how to find scientific-discovery-based startup ideas these days?
L&S were, and they hired other people who were. They didn't start with a business idea, but with a technical one. They filled in the blanks on the business side after they survived the .com crash.
I didn't get to Google until 2011, but it became clear to me after joining that in the past they had gone on a very nerdy mission to hire all the nerdy people and collect them into one place to do nerdy things.
(Unfortunately that nerdy thing ended up being selling ads really efficient, but that's another story.)
My fundamental point is that the Google story is very unlike the kind of stories that YCombinator or a16z like. It started, like you said, as a set of intellectual/technical interests. The other stuff, that VCs today like, came later.
In a way they did the opposite of the usual advice. They started with the hammer (the tech) rather than the nail (the business problem.) They certainly didn't start with a "Like X but for Y" statement like seems to be desired by VC today. And they didn't look like the typical .com story at the time (which was usually: give us lots of VC $$ so we can sell something on the web that is currently not sold on the web, but we'll just use the $$ to buy customers and make no profit...)
I would posit that if today's Google came to YCombinator today they'd be shown the "no thanks" door.
The irony is that both the thing and its side effects were anticipated very early on.
"Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. ... It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media, we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers."
(The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, 1998)
You bring up a good point about starting from the tech rather than the problem. Usually the advice from VCs is to start from the problem and iterate on the tech until you solve it. What was very fortunate for Google is that the tech translated into a great business problem. Open up any CS textbook and 'Search' is always a major section. It was also a great business because the problem is important, frequent, and had not been properly solved by the big players in the mid 90s.
"And then we realized that we had a querying tool..." (Page)
The purpose of VC can be viewed as trying to take a company from nonexistent to big while skipping the small stage, but small is where the action really is.
I wonder if we really shouldn't make a bit more out of the fact that there are different types of startups: those that pick off low-hanging fruit really well, those that combine novel technology with novel problems (for instance, the recent YC LLM meeting note-taking / transcription service), those that are scientific-discovery based (see, for example the NSF Small Business Innovation Research program), etc. I am not experienced enough to create an ontology of startup ideas, but I think it'd be an interesting exercise.
I disagree. The AI stuff seems pretty nerdy. Same for GitHub and other levels of abstraction. The disruption talk is just the branding by the media.
Building a successful company depends on many things. The point made here is that you are unlikely to be expert enough, and motivated enough to build a successful business in an area you are not interested in, and haven't played around in. So to increase the amount of domains that you could create a business in from 0 to a small positive integer you should build things that interest you.
Of course if you have money, or know how to persuade people who have money, you can be something of an idiot and still develop a successful business. Usually you are not really developing the business in this case, more attaching yourself to a business that smart people are running for you.
In a pool of high school freshmen, most probably have a better chance of success following the first path, than the second.
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Isn’t “you shouldn’t focus on science to start a good tech company” a good indicator that our conception of “tech” company is completely broken? That we’re really talking about ways to milk money from gambling billionaires, not change the world with successful products?
Nope, ended up going to scientific-discovery-based-startup-ideas-R-us instead, by client demand.
2. Use Stanford bandwidth for your web crawler.
3. See how AltaVista does it; they're in downtown Palo Alto.
4. Get 100K from the guy who founded Sun.
5. Move into the space above the bike shop in Palo Alto. (9 major startups began there.)
6. Get more funding from the guy who founded Amazon.
7. Sell search ads.
8. Profit!
Google had good timing but importantly, a good product and market fit. Prior search engines sucked in comparison with obnoxious monetization.
"Build a search engine so good all nerds on the early Internet abandon AltaVista and switch to it, no marketing required."?
which?
But, in all honesty, if you want to identify single factors that truly contributed to Google not just surviving but thriving, I'd point at Jeff Dean. When he joined, Google was unable to update its index due to the design of the indexer. Jeff (along with Sanjay, or as many of us know him, "The Wise One"), built seminal software that enabled google to grow rapidly - not just updating the index faster, but doing search quality on logs, early ad experiments, and more. Obviously, other people played critical roles (Silverstein, /proc/bogdan, SRE Lucas) but IMHO if they hadn't had Jeff and Sanjay, google would have died back in 97 or 98.
Not at scale. In the 1980s, Stanford's biggest IP revenue came from FM synthesis for musical instruments. In 1991, Stanford started up the Stanford Management Company to manage the endowment. Offices were on Sand Hill Road, out by the venture capitalists. That worked out very well. Enough so that SMC became the tail that wagged the dog. But that's a long story.
I agree with you, wanting to become “filthy rich” is abhorrent given all of the known implications that comes with. At the very least people should have some shame and keep that to themselves.
You get rich by offering a good or service that society desires.
You get filthy rich by capturing as much of the market as possible by whatever means necessary and killing off competition - including user lock-in, artificial bundling, using successful past products to subsidize non-profitable new ones just to screw competitors etc.
Google was a successful, unsustainable search engine before it was a successful business.
Facebook was a successful social network waay before it was a successful business.
Reddit was... You can see where I am going with this.
Anything that gets eyeballs will be paid for by ad placement. I think that's the "dirty" (open) "secret". Many industries are paid for by ads, not just tech companies. Though, tech companies have taken a huge chunk out of the entertainment industry as YouTubers, Instagrammers and TikTokkers (etc.) are now creating that entertaining content for the tech companies. All in an effort to capture eye balls.
And Hacker News is no different. Everyone who's on here long enough will slowly learn about Y Combinator. HN is an ad placement site for YC and YC affiliates. HN is much more than that of course, and that is why the ad placement works so well. Personally, I find the way HN is doing it tasteful. Moreover, it's not the only reason why HN exists, it's a synergy thing. With that said, there's still the same dynamic in there.
It's because ads pay, one way or another.
Still pivoting for monetisation is important.
People partially flocked to them (me included) because of their public stance on ads, and then they played me.
Without claiming things they did the opposite from, one can't help but wonder if they would have ever succeeded? And would that have made them a story to tell at all?
I don't mean that to even sound bitter or cynical, but it's just a fact if you look at most founders, even the ones that fail miserably.
There is always an excuse. The parents are professors, or upper middle class dentists, or your mom does charity for United Way and managed to become the leader of the charitable organization and managed to meet some exec from IBM. Given how diverse these professions are and that they basically describe a slightly upper middle class family, im gonna guess their children account for more than 1%.
I mean, it's not the worst thing he could do but it would be great if he at least acknowledged the privilege filter once in a while.
The happiest entrepreneurs I know got advanced degrees, had a solid career, developed plenty of contacts, then launched something in their 30s or 40s with substantially less risk than taking a punt on knowing what problems were worth solving while at University, or taking a punt on finding the right person to start a company with while at University, or taking a punt on having the wide range of skills required to actually make a company work without ever having any work experience.
This is the sort of hype that drew me in when I was younger and I think it's damaging. The real way to start Google is to be smart, hard working and incredibly lucky. IMHO the best way to start a company is to be smart, hard working and patient.
I spent 3 years trying to keep a startup afloat after graduating from college. Most of my peers own a (some of them multiple) house now. I have 75k in my savings.
It has taken about a decade of switching back and forth between consulting and working on the SaaS until I run out of money. Some consulting stints took a few months, others a few years, depending on our needs.
As I grew older, our needs and risk aversion in the family increased, so I just took on longer or more financially interesting consulting assignments, to grow a bigger buffer and allocate some extra assets.
I'm quite sure that, if I had just been consulting the last 15 years, I would already have been able to retire (owning more real estate and other assets).
However, my life would have been very different, and every single time I took on an ad interim assignment, I noticed the impact of my SaaS building experience was a big plus for my consulting assignments...
I'm not saying it's all rainbows & unicorns - building a SaaS is romanticized a lot, but IME it's an infinite game that requires a lot of grit, and as you grow you move the goal posts, so you're always in "hard" mode -, but I beg to differ that it has led to a more interesting life for me personally, as I tend to get bored quickly.
I have a few friends that built, sold, and could retire, but every single one of them has started building something new...
You need to love playing the game and be willing to sacrifice things, as the odds are typically against you.
To quote Simon Sinek "The only true competitor in an infinite game is yourself." [0]
[0] https://twitter.com/simonsinek/status/1433808001375277080?t=...
Reward requires effort, but effort does not guarantee reward.
It's a fact of life that we really should teach our kids instead of the nonsense that effort will be rewarded.
Or at least that's how I always read it in my head.
Not saying Larry Page and Sergey page aren't talented - clearly they were/are very talented people. But they were also extraordinarily lucky. To take another example, if Gary Kildall had been a slightly more ruthless businessman and IBM had had a little more foresight, Bill Gates would not be a billionaire.
The people who read here can read it for clarity and the chance that they can show this article to a smart nephew to inspire them. Like I just did.
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