The next big thing (Dave's timeline of entrepreneurs)

http://www.scripting.com/stories/2007/06/17/theNextBigThing.html

by bootload • 19 years ago

8 11 19 years ago

pg• 19 years ago

Winer is wrong to say that Steve Jobs disproves Fred Wilson's hypothesis. No one doubts 50 year olds are good at running big companies. Fred was talking about who's good at starting new ones.

koolmoe• 19 years ago

Winer is not using the example of Jobs to refute the idea that younger people are good at startups. In fact, he acknowledges that younger people often have the willingness to accept risk and enthusiasm that their older counterparts may not have.

He's trying to refute Wilson's idea that younger people are developing the design patterns of the web while older people are used to reading the newspaper, watching TV and generally out of touch with what's going on with technology. Steve Jobs seems to be a pretty good example of a person whose ideas about technology have improved with age.

In any case, the idea that the average twentysomething is more plugged in than the average fortysomething may be valid, but it should be obvious that the situation changes when you are comparing individuals who are interested in and devoted to technology development.

Psyonic• 19 years ago

I'm not sure I agree with you that Steve Jobs ideas about technology have improved with age. His ideas 20 years ago were just as groundbreaking (for the time) as his current ones.

startupper2• 19 years ago

Aruba, Starent, Infinera are hot 2007 IPO's of note that were recently in the news. None of them were started by 20-somethings.

I think this site and the referenced bloggers have a software-centric focus. There may well be a significant number of successful 20-somethings in software businesses. But software is a subset of technology and one cannot apply the observations here to technology in general.

Consider this: the global market for communications equipment exceeds 1 trillion dollars -- there's a lot of opportunity there for domain specific expertise that often times requires an advanced degree and experience in the industry. Companies such as Qualcomm and Broadcom are other examples where the founders were well-established in their careers, i.e. not 20-something.

acgourley2• 19 years ago

To see eye to eye in this community you need to s/startup/webstartup/.

weel• 19 years ago

But it will be interesting to see if some of the business practices (very low initial budgets, early releases, &c) common in web startups might translate into other fields. At least one YC startup (sproutsys) appears to be doing pretty serious systems software, which is still software, but quite different from being a "web startup".

bootload• 19 years ago

'... communications equipment ... there's a lot of opportunity there for domain specific expertise that often times requires an advanced degree and experience in the industry ...'

And significant hurdles to market. In some ways you have to have balls to launch a hardware product. In coms, you have to create the software but the physical hardware as well. Much harder than pure software. You also have all the problems of creating & selling physical things, logistics, inventory, packaging. Yet more skills, risk & as you point out, more reward.

The next big thing (Dave's timeline of entrepreneurs)

Related Stories