-
Website
http://venturebeat.com/ -
Original page
http://venturebeat.com/2007/03/26/start-up-advice-for-entrepreneurs-from-y-combinator-startup-school/ -
Subscribe
All Comments -
Community
-
-
Top Commenters
-
Popular Threads
Bizarre. Mr. Zuckerberg is advocating that companies practice ageism. Anyone 40 years or older who has been turned down for a job at FaceBook now has cause for a lawsuit claiming age discrimination.
ok, this cat is in for a fall. mentally, he probably needs to be medicated, and who, besides college cranks, he was an idiot for not selling out.
>>he said Google Video was a bad product...
ok, gmail is an fpos, gmail cluster is an fpos. beta for how long?
>>tread cautiously with venture capitalists... saved 2500 bucks here by not going (yes I was invited), that is all I needed to hear.
Ho hum...
I would say he should have learned something last time around in the late 1990s, but then I realize he was *12* at the time.
This resonates the best with my own approach to startup: "Founders should create naturally viral businesses"
It has nothing to do with age and everything to do with cost and desire to work hard. OK Mr. 45-Year-Old with a wife and three kids, are you interested in coding at the office until 11 pm on a Wednesday hopped up on Mountain Dew for $60k a year? No? AGE DISCRIMINATION!!!
The advent of IDEs and Open Source has enabled the IROoC punk squad to generate reams of "code", of largely questionable quality, often characterized by a ham-handed assembly of open source fragments.
A lot of these defects are forgiven or masked by high-performing hardware and large bandwidth. This is irksome to us Fossilized Coots who had to perform intellectual calisthenics and have an intimate understanding of the quirks of the underlying compiler to be able to run our code in RAM the size of a matchbox.
Young coders are productive in the sense that they make mistakes with stupefying speed and regularity and can generate multiple iterations of slop while laboring under delusions of mastery. Statistically speaking though, the little macaques do occasionally churn out Shakespeare.
8-)
...and let's be honest here, shall we? Your success is due to a good idea, timing, and hard work...none of which has anything to do with age.
Hire only young coders? Reminds me of that car sticker I've seen on the back of RVs that reads, "I don't know where I'm going, but I'm making great time!"
Nuff said.
McAdoo's tip of defining your business in one sentence is something every start-up needs to take to heart. Over at Nearbie www.nearbie.com we use "History connects you" to explain the idea behind our start-up, and to some degree how it works.
Buchheit's 'experience matters more than money' idea is true, but only in the very few instances when who ever puts up the money doesn't care about the return. And while working outside of the context of reality can be beneficial for certain areas of a start up's life span (say a very unusual UI, or even a bold pricing strategy), being to far out there won't help young entrepreneurs to learn what they need to know in order to build a business.
Coders need to develop easy-to-use platforms that marketers can use, to make their own lives easier.
Marketers need to understand marketing. Coders need to understand code.
http://www.paulgraham.com/hiring.html.
Answer: Don’t worry.
That's not my concern. I'm worried I'm too old. Ironcally, PG's words gave me reason to not worry anyway.
www.npost.com
And as far as Startup School's ethics go- I don't think you have to worry about a huge moral conflict. Y Combinator is a sweatshop that cheats companies out of significant portions of their ownership. They don't mind a harmless remark about target hires.
I don't think young people are smarter than older people. In math, there's a legend that a mathematician's best work is behind him at 30; false, in most cases. What happens, in creative disciplines, is that people become more risk-averse as they get older-- especially those with astounding success early on. (They become "insiders".) Those who are able to avoid this generally don't decay unless they become inactive. Most startups are launched by young people due to risk attitudes, not some sort of superior intelligence.
Mark Zuckerberg's talk was pretty offensive on the age issue, but he is half-right. I don't think a 40-year-old with a family would be a fit for his company, and surely he realizes this. In fact, I realize this is an abrasive assertion, but I think the set of people who would consider working for facebook at age 40 probably isn't as good within its age group as the set of young people who would apply. Young people don't like hiring older people as employees-- advisory and independnt consulting roles are different-- not because of some universal defect that sets in with age, but because the Paul Grahams and Mitch Kapors of the world are not looking to work for Mark Zuckerberg.
Paul Graham's argument in "Hiring is Obsolete" isn't that younger people are smarter than older people, but that age and effectiveness are only loosely correlated, while most 20th-century style corporations tend to overemphasize age/experience and downplay talent.
http://www.robert.shedd.us/content/2007/03/26/s...
The audio quality isn't amazing, but it seems to get the point across. Anyone, hope this is of interest to those who couldn't make it, or those who want to relive parts!
Clearly we're not in bubble 2.0. Young arrogant CEO's are clearly not a sign of irrational markets. Never. Seriously.
Signed,
CEO of Kibu.com
But clearly anyone willing to sacrifice their free time, health, family, or dreams for the dreams and goals of a CEO/company is a valuable resource. As some of us mature, realizing the things that are really important in life and seeing a much bigger picture, we often find less value in coding 80hrs a week on a products with very little or questionable social return.
I am not certain that I would classify someone willing to sacrifice their health, social life, and dreams for the dreams of someone else intelligent.
In my experience, I have found the person who must keep their job at all costs because of too many outside responsibilities, to be the least valuable and the least trustworthy. I prefer a company of well balanced workers who posses a wealth of experiences beyond the cubicle.
You learn much more from failures than you do successes. Often times HUGE successes can be attributed to non-repeatable factors (explosion of internet, real estate market boom, etc) where most failures are caused by decisions that could and should have been done differently (related to product, partnerships, employee, monetization plan, etc).
Having MZ providing insight on how to run a successful company is the same as asking an wildly successful investor (circa 2000) how to make money in the stock market. That advice would probably have been something like: "leverage to the gills and invest entirely in CMGI, CSCO, redhat, net2phone, blah, blah blah... -These are the companies of the future..." 2 years later you would have lost 75% of your investment.
http://iinnovate.blogspot.com/2007/05/max-levch...
Max gave some interesting insight on Paypal alums.
Min, on behalf of iinnovate
WAIT HERE, young people are utilizing facebook for better communication, for sharing their interests, finding friends,...one word, for better social life.
While at the same time Mark also believe in "I have only a mattress and my job no social life, nothing else" style of life.
He has no clue as what makes a happy life. Hopefully he is still 22 and he is interested in Philosophy, so maybe he can fix his view of world later in his life.
http://www.ptsell.com/christian-louboutin-chris...
·  Monogtam Canvas City Bags