Who is going to be a successful entrepreneur?
Prolific early stage investor Ron Conway's firm SV Angel gathered responses from 300 founders to try to answer that question. It's not an exact science, but it seems young co-founders doing their second startup tend to produce better results than older sole founders on their first company.
Or as Michael Arrington put it today, "Old people suck at startups."
Why is it that younger people have a tendency to succeed? Conway speculated that older founders are more cautious and will take earlier, cheaper exits for security, whereas a younger founder will let their company brew for a while, gaining value.
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CHART OF THE DAY: "Old People Suck At Startups"
Now, you might think that making a product that isn’t terrible should be so obvious to every company on the planet as to almost be nonsensical. Indeed, who would ever advocate building a product that sucks? But the fact is: many products do suck. How can something so obviously important and universally recognized by so infrequently accomplished?
It’s a surprisingly complex question. But I think it all boils down to variations on a single, simple answer: it is much, much easier to build a product that sucks than one that doesn’t. Here are some reasons why that is true (and what you can do about it):