Starting a startup at 25, 35, or 45 is not the same decision

Hi everyone,

Starting a startup at different ages leads to very different financial outcomes, even with the same exit. I modeled a FAANG engineer’s career using real compensation data and conservative assumptions. The post includes some detailed scenarios on how a "weak exit" (the most common outcome) affects retirement age and net worth trajectory.

https://nauma.ai/blog/p/starting-a-startup-at-25-35-or-45/

Feedback is welcome!

4 comments

[ 7.8 ms ] story [ 31.0 ms ] thread

g-b-r 7mo ago ↗

You should probably resend this as a link?

Centrino 7mo ago ↗

Feedback about a technical aspect of your blog, not about the contents of the article: unfortunately the HTML title of the page is not the title of the article, but the title of your website. As a consequence, when I print your blogpost to a PDF file to read it offline at a later time, the filename of the saved PDF has no clues whatsoever about what the article is about.

pesfandiar 7mo ago ↗

The financial gains from starting a startup have a wildly varied distribution. The analysis won't be very practical if we assume any meaningful exit at any age. Not sure how a "weak exit" is considered the most common outcome.

alx_sukhanov 7mo ago ↗

A good exit used to seem boring: we already know the family will be financially very well off. That said, it would be interesting to move away from deterministic modeling and build a stochastic version, where we explicitly account for probabilities of success as a function of age, integrate RSU appreciation, and incorporate target net worth.

I suspect there’s a net worth threshold at which, probabilistically, pursuing a startup becomes more likely to get you there than staying in big tech.