Clay Weighs In On The Age Question

This conversation has legs (it even made the NY Times yesterday) and the latest post weighing in on it comes from Clay Shirky.

Clay says my first post was correct and my hedge in the second post was a "kind lie".

This is a classic Clay Shirky post, full of academic explanations combined with real world examples. But I still don't totally buy the argument that age/experience is a disadvantage for startups at the cusp of new technology.

I grew up getting my entertainment from the TV and my music from a turntable. And yet I've adopted the web as a native user and I think my instincts about where video and audio on the web are headed have been pretty accurate.

I don't think it's totally about age, it's about a mindset. If you are willing to throw out old habits and start anew, you can compete with anyone. But Clay is right that you have to unlearn a lot of things in order to do that.

Comments

[Adrian Bye]

I think you're both right.

However I believe you can overcome the age disadvantage (and combined with your experience, turn it into an even bigger advantage) if you keep your ears to the ground so you know what is working.

[jackson]

"old" is a mindset. The young bands I record keep me hip (your input not withstanding), but I keep my turntable close at hand. It's equally important to keep your roots alive as it is to surf the waves of innovation.

My ass is starting to hurt from sitting on this damn fence for so long.....

[Terry Jones]

I think mindset and energy level are hugely important, and of course correlated.

There's something I like to discuss about when interviewing tech people - I get them to describe what tools they use, and why. It's very revealing. It's also very important - you're considering working with someone on a presumably difficult long-term problem, and it's reassuring to know that they use the best tools available. If you were interviewing candidates to go mountain climbing with, you'd presumably ask them about what sort of equipment they prefer. It's the same thing when hiring tech people.

But there's a second level at which this line of questioning is also important. Anyone with the right mindset is going to have looked seriously at alternate tools. I don't mean just read the manuals, I mean they'll have used them, they'll know their strengths and faults, etc. They'll probably still be able to tell you about technical details of tools they used but have long abandoned. If you're not sitting across the table from someone who's spent serious time digging into alternate toolsets, you have to wonder how this person could ignore something so important. Yes, sometimes it's clear very early that some tools shouldn't be touched, and it's easy to articulate why, but sometimes you have to find out for yourself.

The best example to dig into is that most religious of issues - choice of text editor. That usually boils down to Emacs vs Vi, at least for programmers of a certain age (and that's what we're talking about after all). As a programmer, your editor is probably your most important tool, and you should therefore care the most about using the best tool you can, and invest a lot of time in deciding what to use, learning it, customizing it, comparing it, etc. A few times in a programming lifetime you may even change editors. When I meet people who are closed on this issue, I take it as a red flag - irrespective of age. When I meet people who've spent serious amounts of time thinking about it, using different approaches, etc., I take it as an important sign of plasticity - irrespective of age.

OK, this is just one example. But it's a good one. There are other ways to explore the same aspect of people. To my mind it's much more important than age.

[P-Air]

Like anything, I don't believe in absolutes. I know plenty of repeat entrepreneurs who have jumped into diff gaps in diff markets to succeed in exploiting their opportunities. I've seen young people make foolish entrepreneurial mistakes that they never recovered from.

Of course, when I look across disciplines, whether it be sports or the arts or even the sciences, youth certainly does have an advantage. Note, Albert Einstein's greatest discoveries were done when he was in his mid-to-late 20s. But we can also point to rare achievements by baseball pitchers like Nolan Ryan and Roger Clemens which occurred in their late 30s early 40s.

All I glean from this is that different people's internal frameworks operate in diff ways. While youth has the advantage of still being in the midst of structuring how they think about things, older adults who learned how to think, rather than simply becoming experts are also more apt to see opportunities that experts would miss.

At Carnegie Mellon, the original computer science undergraduate degree was called Applied Math, where they taught a two semester class called fundamental structures of programming, instead of spending time on specific programming languages. The premise was that syntax could be learned easily, but structure was the true value for being a good programmer and that took time to learn.

Entrepreneurship seems to have similar traits, and while does w/no prejudices can create an adequate structure much faster, it's the thinking framework of a person that is more likely to make the good/strong entrepreneur. As an advisor to 6 early stage companies, I find this to hold true.

My $0.02 :)

[P-Air]

sorry for that garbled last sentence... here it is again fixed:

"Entrepreneurship seems to have similar traits, and while someone w/few prejudices or experience can create an adequate structure much faster, it's the thinking framework of a person that is more likely to make the good/strong entrepreneur."

[Emil Sotirov]

I just want to add three things:

1. Despite my age (way over 40), I had trouble reading through Shirky's post - too explanatory for my taste (must be a good sign).

2. Something I posted on Michael Parekh's blog... The age differential between young tech founders and the "greybeards" covers what I would define as a distance between vision and execution. Covering this distance happens in various ways - very much depending on the complexity (and may be historical maturity) of the specific social, economic, and organizational machinery involved. By the time successful tech entrepreneurs start to retire (early 30s), young doctors are just fresh out of school spending endless hours as residents. Architects start building significant stuff typically over 50 and way up into their 90s.

3. I was in my 20s when I read the Chinese saying about knowing being forgetting. I totally bought into this. I really stopped trying to retain information in my head. This helped me living through 3 countries, 4 languages, 9 cities, over 20 addresses, 4 American states, 2 professional fields, and my own 4 start-ups.

[Charlie Crystle]

Interesting that VCs like to invest in entrepreneurs with success records. And there's a reason why--we know how to cut through the bullshit.

[Terry Jones]

In my last comment I should have noted that I think it's fairly clear that openness of mind and energy level do correlate strongly with age.

A related area in which I think common wisdom has real problems is with learning languages. It's almost a cliché that children can learn languages much faster than adults. But that's almost certainly not true. Yes, children can rapidly learn the accent and the idioms of a language in ways that adults probably never can. But as for speed in learning to speak, understand, and write, in a new language, I'd take an adult over a child any day - given the same amount of time working with the language. The adult has by far superior resources: they can pay for lessons or tutors, they can use the internet, they can use dictionaries and "501 verbs" helper books, they can ask for explanations in sophisticated ways, they can form discussion groups, and, most important, they understand (or can learn about) grammar.

I learned Spanish, from scratch, starting at age 33. I studied on and off (mostly off) for about 5 years. Ten years later, I have kids aged 5 and 7 who speak four languages fluently, including Spanish. Although I'm less fluent than they are in Spanish, I know vastly more about the language, I have a much wider vocabulary, I can read and write decently, I know more grammar than lots of native speakers, etc. I had the massive advantages of age and experience. My kids will certainly become far better Spanish speakers than I will ever be, but it's going to take them a while (probably ten years total) to overhaul even my modest headstart. A lot of what you read about kids having learned languages with a few weeks or months exposure is just nonsense. If you don't speak a language yourself it's very hard to judge how good someone who's apparently speaking the language actually is.

So is there the equivalent of an entrepreneurial grammar that only older folks have access to? I don't think so. But it's clear that experience can count for an awful lot, and also that received wisdom can be badly flawed.

The language learning analogy is far from perfect. The gap in maturity and reasoning power between a child and an adult is far greater than that between an older adult and a younger adult, so the younger entrepreneur clearly isn't at as much of a disadvantage as a kid facing a new language is. Kids typically get immersed in new languages due to circumstances beyond their control and they have no choice but to learn. Adults usually do have those choices and typically choose to avoid that kind of turmoil. So things are certainly not equal in terms of level of application, necessity, immersion, etc. It's also not accurate because while most young (and old?) founders are not successful, virtually every kid that gets thrown in at the deep end with a new language is going to become an extremely fluent speaker, given time.

There are many other distortions which make it hard to draw conclusions. We should consider the proportion of successful older-founder companies to the proportion of successful younger-founder companies. E.g., if younger founders, through boundless naivety and energy, are starting 20x as many companies but are actually 4x worse at it than older founders, then just looking at the raw numbers will make it look like the younger founders are in fact 5x better. As usual, we tend to make a big fuss over successes and ignore, or not even be aware, of failures. We tend to make much more fuss over successful young founders (see e.g., Anshul Samar). Responsible adults with families to feed are also probably more apt to notice when their peers found companies that flop; whereas when kids do it it's unremarkable.

For all these reasons, I think the conventional wisdom regarding the advantages of youth as a founder is highly questionable.

[Tom]

Does this mean that if I listen to my New Wave 80's music on my IPod I have crossed the chasm? lol

[Timothy]

The relationship of age to entrepreneurship is very interesting, so I took a very cursory scan for empirical research. The papers I found suggest that age and rates of entrepreneurship generally have little to somewhat negative correlation. They are probably using a broader definition of entrepreneurship than this discussion though. Here is the post.

[paul pangaro]

i like clay's observations very much [i also posted a version of these comments at corante.com]. i think of the issues like this:

- evolution 'works' because of the distinction between what HAS changed in the environment and what HAS NOT changed. [not everything changes at once; if it did, evolution would NOT work.] focusing on the change opens mindspace to figure out what has changed. this becomes the basis for insight, that is, a new way to find 'fit' with the environment that is necessary and sufficient. all other focus on change is potentially diffusing of energies.

- change requires new language to 'see' it. [old language has been optimized to solve the old problem; by definition it can't solve new classes of problems.] for certain classes of change, the insight that leads to viable 'fit' with a changed environment is a language or model that simplifies observations and points the way to effective action. i find using age and experience as frames to understand this is confusing. there is a connection, surely; but i find it more useful to think about evolution and language, as per above, than age etc.
---
yes, the brain is more plastic at younger ages. but learning a language at age 5 does not require prior knowledge. successfully running a n-th generation web service may.

correlations and statistics are useful models [i.e., languages] for only certain types of systems.

i find it difficult to have a coherent conversation via web posts. perhaps fred or someone can organize a public venue for real-time conversation.

[P2]

There's something oxymoronic about this, how can ol' farts say anything useful on this subject - it's all veiled self defense - unless you've a VC, in which case you get the last laugh. Anyone with a life (in an entrepreneurial sense) won't have cycles spare for such musings.

No it's not age directly, it's ego. With age some learn how much it can hurt to be humiliated (the rest just go numb), youth have that to discover. Hence their fearless greed. This is a conversation about unbridled capitalism isn't it. We're talking about the ladder to the right hand of Mammon.

After humiliation fear, comes the realization that life expectancy and the integral of the quality of life curve does not correlate with being a money mega-stardom.

Evan older and who cares a damn, so why not let the brakes off and have a go (leaving enough in the kitty to survive in old age, come what may). But it's too late, the gray cells are gone and everyone will laugh. So buy a slice of the luckiest ego slaves, let them work for you, spread the risk, have fun.

A corporation is a creature, it's lifecycle can milk in money, sometimes in spectacular proportions, always at the expense of others (there's no Geneva Convention in business, no mercy). That some person's name is attached to a large chunk of ownership is not that relevant. It is just a bank number that earns public panegyrics, it's the American way and we're proud of it.

But always we use tuned hindsight, conveniently turning our blind eyes to the vast majority of seed corn that failed to germinate, however young, or more precisely forgetting to keep hold of our imaginations in crediting the winners with luck rather than genius. We like our winners to be giants.

What it comes down to is having a go, speed, naivety, greed, ambition, luck and more luck. Add a generous portion of history re-writing. Success and money begat more of the same. It helps to be a natural exploiter of other people's life force, ideas, skills and experience.

Clay Stirky has it, older people can't let go of their mental capital. Time does this. Consider some distant relative you meet at a funeral, you mutter polite nothings for 5 minutes and go your separate ways. Now repeat once per year for a dozen years, each time meeting the same person to share a few content free words "... wasn't it Jenny's wedding that ... oh didn't it so rain at David's graveside ...". Now the 13th meeting approaches, but you bump into a new face, you talk in depth about work and life, substance and humanity. Come the 14th year, your lumbago keeps you away, you reflect on the people there - which carries the significance? - the 5 minute content free person, because time has hallowed the memories, given them magnets. You grand niece will always be a bimbo, your great aunt was a pillar of society.

As Alan Kay put it in '83, the best thing for software quality was removable disk pacs, in those days of crappy backups, a dropped disk meant going back to raw principles and redesigning from the ground up, which of course would embrace the present and future as no evolving system can.

So if you have the hunger but suffer from alopeci, grab a wig, lie through your back teeth to the VCs and run for the money like one possessed (all will be glossed over if you win). If you want to retain your legitimacy and status, friends and pension, stay safe, buy on the rumor, and gossip.

[p-air]

OK folks, lets up the ante, it's beginning to look like 20 year olds are too old too. In case you haven't seen this, here's a 13 year old entrepreneur who is expecting to make $1M in revs by the end of...MIDDLE SCHOOL!!! I'm betting he'll do it :)

Here's the YouTube video link fm his interview at TieCON: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qhJrdizQw8

[cooper munroe]

Hi Fred,

I have been following this discussion on your blog, and the media outlets that have picked your theory up, with interest. It feels like, inherent to this discussion is an assumption about who entrepreneurs are -- and that assumption, from many sources, appears to be wholly absolute.

I am a first time entrepreneur, I am a mother in my 40s and I have four children. My business partner, whom I have known and worked with for 20 years is also a mother in her 40s. We are as young, and new and open to ideas as anyone, without ANYTHING holding us back. We came to be “founding mothers” of our internet company after years of a combination of high level corporate America and the motherhood place of infinite possibility where we are now. I feel like my business partner and I operate on an exciting, healthy, smart, fresh slate. There is nothing that will get in our way, except, maybe - from what it sounds like - the fact that we aren’t guys in our 20s and everyone thinks we should be.

[Wesley]

Of course VC's are ageists (or perhaps better to say exhibit investment behavior consistent with ageism since they don't have anything against mature founders, they just don't like to give them money). The ageism of VCs is no less than that exhibited by film studios, record companies, ad agencies, etc. It's called business and it they believe that mature individuals make better startup investments you can bet that's what they'd be focusing on. But apparently they are not--hence the very telling investment patterns.

[Frank]

Perhaps most people behave as described, but the type of entrepreneurs you and Clay are talking about are not normal people. Clay agrees that he is talking about the type of entrepreneurs that invent big things. I'll call them inventors. So to return to the the bag of balls metaphor, inventors, as a group, are much more forgetful in the way they analyze the world! More specifically, inventors are good at unlearning things. So young inventors have less to unlearn but more to figure out. Old inventors have more to unlearn but less to figure out. It is all a wash.

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