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How old is too old to start a company, or create and market a killer app?

8 points by k0n2ad ↗ HN
I've heard many times that "You're never too old," but it's often obscured by frequently hearing about teenagers and college kids making a fortune with their start-ups (started coding when they were 9, etc.). What about people who've past these stages in their life? Any motivating success stories?

13 comments

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jacquesm
I know several people that only really made it big when they were in their 50's. I think for the most part those are relatively conservative businesses, not billion dollar affair from 'winner takes all' bets, but simply identifying a niche, building a product and then selling the hell out of it. (and with not billions I mean earning several million annually before taxes, which I think is pretty good by any standard).

The businesses that you start when you're 20-30, 30-40 or 40-50 in many ways reflect the amount of energy and the knowledge that you've gathered over the years.

tptacek
Teenagers and college kids making a fortune is newsworthy. People making a fortune during their prime earning years isn't. You don't have a real question. You're too old to start a company when you're you're too old to work a full-time day.
brk
My experience says that the teenage and college success stories are the outliers. But, they make for good press, just like a plane crash is more sensational than than 5000 individual daily car crashes (I just made the 5000 number up, but you get the point).

Too old would be 1 day before death, but you never know when that will be, so you might as well get started.

lacker
Sam Walton started Walmart when he was 44.

Harland Sanders started Kentucky Fried Chicken when he was 61.

Sakichi Toyoda started Toyota when he was 59.

It's not really rare at all to start successful companies when you're older. Just go look at the history of big companies and you'll find plenty of examples.

DanielBMarkham
IIRC, Sanders used to drive a beat-up old car around to all of his franchisees, checking to make sure the gravy was just perfect and the chicken was being made correctly.

When it wasn't, they said that he would curse enough to make a sailor blush, kicking pots and pans all around the kitchen, having a terrible fit. In really bad cases, he would take his "special equipment" back with him.

The reason he ended up going big was because he couldn't keep track of all the payments and legal paperwork by himself. The lawyer that ended up being a partner was told to go help clean out a desk -- and found it stuffed with checks totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Not sure of the veracity of that story, but it makes for a colorful anecdote! And it reinforces the #1 quality of good startups: focus on delivering value to the customer and the rest will work itself out.

anamax
However, Walton had been a successful manager for similar stores (IIRC, Ben Franklin) at both the store and area level before. Sanders had been in the food biz for decades as well. (I don't know about Toyoda.)

They started their "make it big" biz later in life, but they'd been in their biz for decades.

Nwallins
When did you stop beating your wife?
joshu
I would not recommend starting a company to anyone over 135 years of age or older.
CyberFonic
When you run out of imagination! Can't get motivated. Have no passion. For some it's at 19 for others at 99!
lsemel
Availability heuristic and confirmation bias. It's not big news when someone who's 51 strikes it rich, but it's unusual when someone 21 does. So that what gets reported and that's what comes to mind when you think of starting a company. If you looked at the news you'd think everyone who's rich got there by starting a hot startup in college (or got a big Wall Street bonus), but it ain't necessarily so. Take a look at books like "Millionaire Next Door" for some more balanced info on the kinds of companies people start and what age they become wealthy.
k0n2ad
Well, yes and no - I think that becoming a millionaire at 20 is much more common now than it was 100 or even 50 years ago - especially since the advent of the www.
bigiain
I think it's much more about "when do you have too much responsibility to risk crashing and burning?" rather than just "how old"? A 22 year old with a wife and kid and mortgage and student debt is probably less able to focus and take chances than a cashed up 50 year old without those responsibilities.