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There's no golden age to start a company, but there is definitely a timer on when we can withstand failure. The question is — when does that timer expire for us?

As it happens, our numeric age isn't really what's driving our "Founder Expiration Date" — it's about how our age may reflect our relative appetite for risk. That's really a nice way of saying "What's the oldest I can be before I'm too old to recover from failure?"

Age Erodes Risk

Every year that goes by is another year we can't get back. When we're in our 20's and starting a company, we have our entire adult life to make up for the risk of failure. In many cases, we may not have a family or even a mortgage to worry about. At most, our failure may result in some lost years and a shitty make-up job afterward. It's not awesome, but it's very survivable.

But then we enter our 30's, and often we start taking on those wonderful liabilities, and now for the first time if we muck it all up, there are real consequences. Moving back in with our folks at 25 wasn't fun, but moving in with them at 35 is a whole lot less fun. That said, while we have consequences, this is still the only time in our lives where we have more years in front of us than behind us. It's a great time to manage our downside risk (time) but it's also the last time we get to gamble like this, so we have to make it count.

Over the Hill and Under the Gun

But then in our 40's something really starts to challenge us — if we burn these valuable years, we really don't have a ton of time to make up for them. Not only that, but our dependencies have dependencies. We're thinking about funding college educations, weddings, and, what's this — retirement?

Now it isn't just about maximizing our upside, it's about being legitimately concerned about our downside because we're burning our best income-earning years, and at the other end of those years finding a promising gig is going to be harder and harder.

At this point, if we miss, there's a fairly good chance that we will permanently change our financial trajectory for life. It's not about "I can make this up later" it's more about "I may never get the opportunity to have that major trajectory again." On top of that, our support structure is mostly eroded, meaning if things tank, we're on our own.

Retired not Wired

As we round the corner into our 60s and beyond, we're no longer thinking about risk in the same way. Every dollar we "lose" as either burnt up investment capital or a lack of potential income is a dollar we will almost certainly never earn back. Not only that, we're pretty damn tired, deservedly so, because we've been grinding for 40 years straight!

Our appetite for risk is almost entirely tied to how well we may have set ourselves up in the past for future failure. We may have put away some nice savings or some sort of residual income stream. Maybe we can afford to roll the dice because our bills are going to get paid either way (nice work if so!)

At this stage though, the conversation turns to "If not now, when?" where we can't kick the can down the line any longer. These are the highest stakes we'll ever take on, and yet, it's also our last time to bet the farm.

Assessing Risk, not Age

Every one of these stages is a balance of our risk, not our age. As we enter different epochs of life, we have to assess how willing we are to lose and suffer the consequences of that loss at that stage. There's nothing stopping us from trying at any age, only what we are willing to withstand if things don't work out.

If we continue to believe we can manage our downside, then we confidently start at any age.

In Case You Missed It

What to Expect in the First Year (podcast). As Founders, we think we know how our products and businesses will look and function for years to come, but as with time, it's nearly impossible to expect the unexpected.

Why No One Tells Founders "It's over, move on." No one ever actually tells Founders it’s okay to quit. No one except other Founders, of course.

Retiring Early is a Broken Concept Retiring isn't really our end goal, so we shouldn't aspire to it. What we really want is to shape our life the way we want it to be.

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This is how I always think about, fragment life into stages, so that I can't get lost in time. I am 41, and I made a statement to my self, that when I enter 40s and still don't have a running business, I would better not try again. But after spending my 30s studying and collecting data for my startup, it was hard to drop all that effort, so I gave it one more push, until I launched my startup on my 41th birthday. Hopefully i will begin to collect the fruits I have planted.

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I'm 65 and Adsonica is my third startup. My first was in 1978 using data gathered from film processing labs to measure quality. I spent many years at Prime Computer, PictureTel and on my own as a consultant. The main issue is systemic ageism in the venture community - I've seen more eye-rolling and disrespectful behavior than I care to recount. One Junior Partner even suggested that I wouldn't be able to work late at night. Until there are funds to back middle and late-middle age founders we're going to lose a lot of good ideas and inter generational collaboration.

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This would be a lot better if you could cite some statistics and facts to support these claims. E.g., what does it mean to be "tired"? How would we assess being "tired" in our own life and work? You could easily argue that once your kids are out of your house, you start being a lot less tired. There's a lot of sociology around the cadences of a life.

I think it would also help if you could differentiate risk profiles by other dimensions such as gender, ethnicity, geographical location. Indeed, lifespan is affected by all of these dimensions, so the very notion of setting up milestones at 40, 60 years is pretty iffy.

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Hello Wil: I'm in the third year of a startup and am 74. Circumstances have to be reasonably well aligned. I'm retired of course, not by choice. On SS. Pretty good shape financially and the funding needed is not that much. New product, new brand. I've done manufacturing and related things my whole career so the production side is very easy. But I'm a one man show and the marketing and selling has been a no-go so far. I drank all the nectar about selling on line for two years until 2 really good experienced people told me it's almost impossible to sell a new product with a new brand via ecommerce. Not having done any marketing I didn't know that. Guess what? TV advertising coming up.
Great blog! Do you have a deck at home?
Best, George Willison
https://thedecktool.com/

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