I can't speak to "over 50," but I can speak to "over 40." I founded my first software startup in 1995 while I was still an undergraduate. I had the good fortune of timing it so that after a year and a half of toil and obscurity we hit the wave of the dotcom boom, and I was able to establish myself as a proven serial entrepreneur and have been able to found a series of moderately successful tech companies over the years. I'm 42 now, and I'm currently getting a new startup off the ground with three other co-founders who are also in their early forties. We have the good fortune of all having had at least one big success in our careers, but I can attest that our experience has been valuable, and we haven't had a particularly hard time raising money.<p>I mention this because I think that there are a lot of people between 40 and 50 right now who are the first generation of true digital natives (for example, I have no idea what it was like to work in a pre-email office). Many of us weathered the dotcom boom and bust. From where I'm sitting, this cohort is quite well equipped to found successful tech companies, despite the fact that we tend to have families and children.
VCs tend to break investments into two classes: "Better, faster, cheaper" and "Brave New World"<p>The "Brave New World" ideas put 25 year olds on equal/better footing than 50 year olds, since they tend to be everything new.<p>The "Better Faster Cheaper" ideas leave the 50 year-olds with the advantage: They have a better sense of what the market wants, and what features are important/not important, since they've been working in the field about 6 times as long.<p>There's difference which is much bigger though: VC's can take much bigger advantage of a 25 year old than a 50 year old.<p>Edit: Notice the article was about an iPhone EKG (better, faster, cheaper) + 50 yo who used his own money.
I'm going to guess--I have no proof--that entrepreneurs over 50 tend to be looking for a technology to meet a specific market need that has been eating at them for a long time, while those under 25 are more likely to be looking for a market need they could address with the brand new tech skills they've been developing.<p>If I'm right, they could make pretty good partners.
I'm amazed no one has commented on the fact that the pool of potential entrepreneurs under the age of 25 is incredibly small (most kids ages 0-18 aren't out there starting companies, and a big chunk are in college) versus if you're 50+ there is a much bigger pool (reasonably ages 50-75) and you probably have the means and connections to be more successful.<p>I'm surprised it's only twice as many...
Wadhwa must be taken with very large grains of salt as he is relentlessly pushing an agenda which is probably not completely accurate. How are they defining entrepreneur here? Including dry cleaning shops and law practices? And are they having the kind of success as Zuckerberg, Gates, Jobs, Page/Brin, Yang/Filo, Omidyar, Musk, and on and and on and on?
One thing that struck me about this article is the anti-pattern : Describe the distribution in words, then don't show the chart / graph.<p>I refer to "Twice as many successful entrepreneurs are over 50 as under 25; and twice as many, over 60 as under 20. ... ". That takes a bit of parsing and visualizing to actually make sense of, and is pretty central to the topic of the article.<p>That sentence describes some sort of log-normal bump distribution. But you'd want to compare it to the some-sort-of-lognormal distribution of population per age to draw a conclusion.<p>The assumption may be "our readers are too math-dumb to read a chart". If true, why is that? Most people can read a map, so I wonder what percentage of people can read a population distribution and make some sense of it. How can it be improved?<p>[ I created GridMaths.com [ early demo stage], so I'm actually interested in how to get Math concepts across to young people. ]
If the data was collected in the last 10 years, I would be curious as to what percentage of the over 50 crowd of entrepreneurs had their existing retirement plans affected by the last two economic downturns, thus influencing their decision to go into, and in some cases back into, building businesses.
My first reaction is that this makes sense if you're counting restaurant owners, etc. Also, the media isn't going to draw attention to someone of average age doing something average, so the misconception seems expected, although I've met very few 50 year olds hacking away on their Web 2.0 startup.
It's also likely people over 50 have more money saved, so it's just easier for them to start a company. Both because they can use savings for living expenses and because potential investors are happier when the founder has some skin in the game.