startupper

This is OK but I'd be more interested in seeing where these companies started out -- in a dorm room, around a kitchen table... any place else?

Excellent point. On a related note how does one legally manage vesting in the case of a merger between two startups? I'm considering a merger with another founder. My startup has been around for a little longer. Any thoughts?

"and can stand up to a million users isn't worth anything until somebody finds it useful."

Often times it takes a team and not an individual to build something somebody wants. The complexity lies in its functionality and it does not have to do everything for everybody.

If I am not mistaken you are referring to scaling production and marketing and possibly premature diversification while I am referring to scaling development to meet the needs of that initial customer base.

Extrapolating these little nuggets of wisdom to every situation is meaningless. For instance it simply does not apply to a startup that is looking to build something complex. And in that case you absolutely need to scale before someone else does and pushes you out of the game. Small before big does not make sense, unless small is a meaningful and reasonable number.

So FB makes:

15.8x10^9(pageviews/month)x0.01x0.04/100 + 0.25x15.8x10^6 = $4x10^6 per month on ads?

So their annual revenue is just under $50x10^6 or $50 million.

Note: this assumes one ad per page.

"If I were LinkedIn, I'd sell. Facebook is going to crush them."

Where's the intersection? I like linkedin. I've had a few recruiters and business folks contact me through there. I'd be very reluctant to put my career stuff on fb. Perhaps some people mix business and pleasure?

Welcome to the world of helicopter parents.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter_parents

http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/employment/2007-04-23-...

Good comment. A recent article from businessweek talked about the 10 top employers favoured by new grads. Three of them were fed. agencies, one established accounting firm, google, etc. New grads crave job security, comfortable lifestyles, cars, houses and growing bank accounts. After racking up large student loans you can't blame them. And this would be a major impediment to them starting a business in general.

I think this article refers to maybe 0.05% of new grads.

Congrats YC and Zenters!

"You don't just do things - You work together."

this is correct.

How long have you been married?

Is your wife employed and does she have a stable career?

Do you have kids?

Do you have a modest lifestyle that can sustain long periods of no income?

Does your family have health insurance?

Has your wife had any exposure to the entrepreneurial culture -- i.e. have her brother/sister/father/mother been a company founder?

There was a discussion on this earlier.

We are working on a wireless hw/sw/fw startup. Of late I've had at least one Web2.0 person express an interest in working for us. I expect we'll find many others who find the web startup scene boring.

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.

A large fraction, e.g. 1/5 can still be a minority.

You missed his point. What he is saying is that age should not be a matter of significance.

Yes there are a few inaccurate generalizations here. Another gem is: "Only a disproportionately minute number of discoveries traditionally came from directed academic research. "

Having said that the essence of the article is quite interesting.

Please include some people from the infrastructure world. Founders of companies like Cisco, Juniper, Qualcomm, etc. Even smaller chip companies. How did these people get started?

Here's an example of someone interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Bechtolsheim

And another: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascade_Communications

This writer uses Tivo as an example of something that could not have been founded by older people. Well actually Tivo was founded by Silicon valley veterans Barton and Ramsay. Not exactly young. More like 40+ somethings. Bad example.

Why not start one when you are 10?

Seriously though, I started my first one when I was 11 -- and no, it was not a lemonade stand ;). Profitable too.

nice url: http://www.where.com/

I wonder how much they paid for that...

An observation based on what and/or who? The counter-examples in this case are numerous:

Tesla http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla Feynman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman

" Arguably, the same thing happens in science. Great fundamental discoveries are most often made by brilliant scientists in their 20s."

Have you heard of Perelman? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigori_Perelman

This assertion has little to no scientific or mathematical basis.

Here's how you too can make up a sensational headline: 1) Start with an assumption 2) collect data points that prove your assertion -- leave those that don't out of the calculation.

There is no 'right' age to start a company. No age is too old.

-KFC was started by Col. Sanders when he was 50 something.

-John Warnock co-founded Adobe when he was 42.

There are many more examples, but those are only a couple off the top of my head.

EDIT: The comments in the valleywag piece contain a few more examples like Jim Clark.

What is old is new again. From the article:

"The Valley's new wisdom: don't fund anyone over 30."

Eerily reminiscent of Bubble 1.0.

What happened here?

"Schmidt and founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin together hold 66.2 percent of Google's total shareholder voting power, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing. All three are members of the board of directors, which has recommended that shareholders vote against the proposal at the company's annual meeting on May 10."

Yes, we are working on a wireless startup -- not an application but infrastructure. This includes hw, sw and fw. soldering irons, oscilloscopes, etc. ;)

Is this like Infogami 2.0?

The beginning of the end of Web 2.0. Sigh.

It depends what your definition of a "founder" is... http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=20187

Does it mean the person or the group of people who conceived the idea?

The initial team who implemented it and brought the idea to reality/first prototype?

First X 'employees'?