Interesting article in the New York Times about the ages of successful startup founders, as you can imagine it caught my interest.
Unlike my previous startup in the late 90s (a small half dozen person consulting firm that made people money but didn't otherwise go anywhere), we have had to recruit and find people in a situation where our money is tight and a steady revenue was not expected for some time. Hopefully it is sooner now that we've launched, but our beta is free for recruiters right now.
Talking to local developers especially, it is very difficult to get someone who is experienced, skilled, and willing to jump out of a job with a nice cushy salary to take a chance on a startup. Often they have mortgages, families, are starting to use their medical benefits more often, and if they've been at the same company for more than five years they've built up a lot of skills that are purely useful in navigating the structure and politics of that company.
Someone moving from Microsoft to Google, or Amazon to Microsoft, etc. is not nearly as big of a transition. They're all big, successful companies that are developer-oriented. All have great benefits, all will pay competitive salaries, and all have very interesting problems to work on.
Enter a startup. We went to a University of Washington career fair last fall to recruit, and our pitch was: We can't tell you what we're doing or in what field or anything specific about the problems, but we have big interesting problems to work on and we promise it will be fun. Also, we can't pay well but equity is part of our compensation package. Uh, and no benefits yet.
The amazing thing is we got someone (Lincoln Ritter, the top notch developer who has damn near single handedly built a professional web UI from a sort-of working ugly skeleton I had built from scratch before he joined us) and he's turned out even better than the high expectations we had for him. But it isn't an easy sell, and you know that the people who join are taking a big risk doing so.
But Lincoln had just finished his Masters and was starting his PhD program and felt like he was in a perfect place in his life to take the chance on a startup. What about senior programmers who had a cushy deal at a large company? The sell is much harder, and in a way you figure that the majority of people working at big companies are already self-selected to be more risk-averse.
They're in a big, safe company. Chances are they wanted to be there and at least part of the reason was because they didn't want the ups and downs of startups, free-lance consulting, or small companies.
So why are so many more successful startup people young? There's less downside and more upside for them, and I think that's a big part of it. Another thing is that they don't have some bad experiences that have told them stuff isn't possible, when really it is just hard or not possible in the situation it was tried. That doesn't mean they'll succeed, but they will try. You can't succeed without trying, and if enough young people try some of them will succeed, and some will succeed huge ala Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc.
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