Young Entrepreneur Myth - It's Never Too Late Too Start!

[akula]

Interesting little tidbit from Paul Kedrosky

My colleagues at the Kauffman Foundation are on a roll. Following up fast on the heels of a paper last week on Fortune 500 companies, recessions, and startups, Dane Stangler at Kauffman is releasing a new paper today on entrepreneurs and age.

As we all, ahem, know, entrepreneurs are callow twenty-somethings. Except, as Dane shows, that isn't true. Building, in part, on some research by another Kauffman colleague, Vivek Wadhwa, he shows that entrepreneurs' average age skew considerably older than is accepted wisdom. (I made a similar point last week at a conference in New York, cheerfully lifting Vivek's and Dane's work to support my point.)

[jonathanfigaro]

Interesting read! Its very true, its never too late to start! kernel sanders became rich at 68 " i think"
Age is just a number!

[byzantium]

Interesting read! Its very true, its never too late to start! kernel sanders became rich at 68 " i think"
Age is just a number!

From what I heard, Sanders was happy with a little chicken restaurant, until his restaurant and the land under it were seized by eminent domain for a freeway! He was forced to watch his life's work to that point be bulldozed for "progress". Sanders vowed to show them, and the rest was history. He was in his mid 60s at the time. He apparently had quite a temper-he would check KFC outlets in person, and if the place wasn't up to his standards, the franchise license was yanked on the spot.

The 60s was unbelievably cruel to anybody who stood in the way of a supposed glorious future-here in Sacramento, a full 62 city blocks were grabbed and leveled for "progress", including many historical remnants of the Gold Rush. They left three blocks on the waterfront as a park. Whoopee. Chinatown and Japantown were put to the wrecking ball.

Chinatown was replaced with an old age home and some cheap restaurants, all given superficial ornamentation to "look Chinese". The rest of it was high rise hotels, skyscrapers (several of which have since been dismantled), a home for the Sacramento Union newspaper (now a dirt lot), and a shopping mall. The mall was gutted and redone in the early 90s, and it failed for a second time a few years later. Ah, progress!

(And that's not counting the city of Sunnyvale in Silicon Valley, which happily demolished the ENTIRE DOWNTOWN in the 60s for a couple malls. Oops. The malls are no longer with us, and the office parks built during the dot.com mania are now empty.)

[bananaman]

It's never too late to have a good money-making idea!