Attention VCs – Old Guys Are The Best To Fund
My angle:
Being a 40 something entrepreneur myself it’s nice to see this post from Techcrunch – The Angle Excerpts below.
Being an entrepreneur you learn to innovate at many levels. Self preservation is most of the time the key driver. Nothing comes in handy then good old experience.
My Angel on this: The most successful entrepreneurs are either financing the early stage themselves and/or becoming the venture capitalists.
ANGLE Excerpts from Techcrunch:
Vivek Wadhwa, an entrepreneur turned academic and is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Executive in Residence at Duke University. He writes:
I’ve got a message for all the Silicon Valley venture capitalists who think a CEO is over the hill after age 40. Old guys rule. And they are far more likely to be the founder of a successful technology company than most of you understand. How do I know this? Research that my team conducted, based on a survey of 549 entrepreneurs in high-growth industries, showed that the average founder of a high-growth company launched his venture at age 40. We also learned that these founders are likely to be married and have two or more kids. They typically have six to ten years of work experience and real-world ideas. They simply got tired of working for others and wanted to rise above their middle-class heritage.
I have a few theories about why VC’s favor the young. First, VC’s tend to travel in herds. For the last decade, the herd has been all about the Internet. And Internet startups require a lot less sophistication and coordination than, say, a telecom gear startup, an enterprise software startup, or a biotech startup. Everything from the product development processes to sales processes are far more complex for these types of products. I also think that in its Web 2.0 infatuation, Silicon Valley has probably funded a huge number of companies that are really features and not companies. It’s very easy to build a feature and call yourself a CEO. It’s much harder to actually grow a company, something that, according to my research, old guys appear to be better at.
Secondly, and this is speculation but I have some personal experience in this area. Younger CEOs are probably easier to push around. Wet-behind the ears and inexperienced, young CEOs are probably far more likely to sign onerous term sheets out of sheer gratitude for getting funded. Old guys know better than to sign a term-sheet loaded with a nasty double-trigger option acceleration that would consign the founders to indentured servitude for years after a liquidity event.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/07/when-it-comes-to-founding-successful-startups-old-guys-rule/
