Not 24. Not fresh out of a dorm room. Not someone who’s never felt the weight of a payroll they weren’t sure they could make.
The mythology of the young founder is real — and it’s misleading. It selects for a very specific type of company (consumer tech, social, gaming) in a very specific window of history. It doesn’t describe most of what actually works.
What 42 represents is compounded experience. It means you’ve been wrong about a market before and adjusted. It means you’ve hired badly and learned how expensive that is. It means you’ve had a product that worked and watched it stop working, and you survived that too.
[Email readers, continue here…] Endurance is underrated in a world that celebrates launch days.
The median time between funding rounds is now over 700 days — up from 450 just a few years ago. That gap is where most companies die. Not from bad ideas. From founders who planned for a sprint and found themselves in a marathon.
The founders who make it to year five don’t run faster. They pace differently. They build cash discipline before they need it. They make hard calls before the runway forces it. They surround themselves with people who have seen more cycles than they have.
Experience doesn’t slow you down. It just stops you from making the same mistake twice.
I’m a tad bit ‘older’ than the median, and starting another company.
I find that one other thing experience gives you is the knowledge of one’s own strengths and weaknesses. Play up your strengths in interviews. But, knowing your weaknesses may be more important for success, so you can plan and hire around them.
“Median time between funding rounds is now over 700 days”. Scary, but good to know.
I’ve been reading Berkonomics since 2011 (?). Always useful! Thanks for all your advice over the years!
Stan, thanks for being one of the very first readers! And for your compliment!
-Dave
Dave – More good advice.
Hey Dave,
I recently finished Jim Colin’s new book. He makes the case that he used to believe most of your creativity happened before you were 35. Now he believes most of it happens after your 60th year. It’s consistent with Peter Drucker Institute most of his work was written after he was 70 years old.
Thanks so much for giving voice to us “older“ entrepreneurs. 😎
You are completely correct, Dave. You are projecting an important message to all entrepreneurs, especially aspiring ones. I jumped in at age 57 with my slightly older wife, Jayne. Adding our son a year later provided the essential youth, but my wife and I were very young for our ages. We persisted through 25 years of winning and losing, while learning many things about running a business. Our son learned with us and now runs our company. My wife, a brilliant programmer, lawyer, and tax expert, died last year, and I retired five years ago.
While I am sad to leave the company that was like a child to us, I am enjoying discovering new vistas that aren’t as stressful, but equally challenging in other ways.
Jayne and I took many career risks before taking the ultimate plunge. We loved writing software. I put every ounce of my experience and ability into creating content for our 100% online (SaaS) science education. I wrote the patent application that led to a US patent for my ideas on how to teach science properly ONLINE. Videos of real experiments, from which students could take their own unique data to analyze, formed the heart of our system. After 25 years, we have not been duplicated.
Science educators who understand the pedagogy applaud what we have done. After so long a time building and rebuilding our system, we have vindication from Georgia. The Georgia Cyber Academy, a longstanding client, scored the highest average state science test score not merely last year, but for all time. They attribute their success to our system. I love leaving this legacy behind me.
The education market is one of the most difficult ones. We weathered the Great Recession despite that problem. Your final sentence sums it all up well. However, the company’s leaders must learn from their mistakes. The ones who cannot do this fail.
This may be the most valuable message you have written. You can hope for fast growth, but you must plan for the long haul. You cannot make the future; you must adapt to it. We had years of no salary as we built our system based on customer feedback. Some lessons were painful, but our passion saw us through.
I wish we had the wherewithal to have someone like you at our elbows while we built our company, but we had no choice but to go DIY. I am very proud of what we created when we chose to abandon a lucrative vocation (contract programming) to have real joy (and occasional pain) in our lives. People with the right personality should do it. We never took on investment or debt.
What’s next for Smart Science Education Inc.? I don’t know. I am living a comfortable retirement with plenty of energy left. I consult with my son often. K12.com is another long-standing client. We are looking for more clients like K12.com and Georgia Cyber. They are not low-hanging fruit. Despite having the best online science learning system anywhere in the world (not an idle boast), it’s not easy. (If it were, everyone would be doing it.)
Dave, I’ve never responded with such a long note. I’d love to have some advice from you after all these years of reading what you’ve written. I’m sure you can take only a passing interest in my business because it’s so small. What important step have we missed that would allow us to take our business to the next level?
Thank you for reading the above if you’ve made it this far.
Harry, of course I read your long post to the end. What a story! And thanks for your “most valuable message” comment. I retired from the Occidental College Board of Trustees last year at 84, after 29 years. The education market is in upheaval with a constantly reducing pool of applicants nationwide (but Oxy’s increased most each year), dealing with AI, managing personal coaching of students rather than a uniform program of teaching for an entire class, and much more. Congratulation to you and your recently deceased wife for having the courage to start your business at 57, and for your son’s interest and ability in taking over the business. – Dave