Age no barrier to entrepreneurs
ARECENT report concluded that the average age of a successful business founder was 47 — which suits me as a 47-year-old. But the research didn’t specify which kinds of businesses these founders are in.
However, I don’t think age is the real differentiator for success. A great business can come from a 19-year-old with no experience, who has no respect for ‘the way things have always been done’ and has nothing to lose by trying a new way.
Or an elderly, experienced founder, comfortable in his or her own skin and beliefs, who has seen it all and doesn’t have to hold back any more or try to needlessly impress.
Truly groundbreaking businesses — companies that define new sectors — tend to be created by outliers who don’t think like most of us, can sense the next consumer behavioural shift, tolerate crazy risks at that stage in their life, or just have a lucky break.
I have been ‘entrepreneurially adjacent’ to some of Ireland’s most influential founders and teams as they clawed their way to success or failure, and looked at those two imposters in the eye just the same.
My company, Beachhut, has held an annual festival of failure called Flounders for failed founders annually at the Web Summit for the past eight years.
People tend to overestimate their ability and downplay the exact timing and market circumstances behind their success. But you really only learn from mistakes; that’s why most autobiographical business books are crap. Success is sui generis.
My take on this is that entrepreneurs are not like the rest of us.
Entrepreneurs have a burning desire to change something, or a tolerance for ambiguity that would scare the pants off most of us who need the security of a pay cheque or some idea of guide-rails to get through life. They are born with the risk-taking gene.
I would say that less than 10pc of the population thrive on this attitude to risk and less than 10pc of these people will succeed in any particular hair-brained scheme.
They will almost always succeed in the long term, just not always with their current escapade. This doesn’t seem to worry them, outwardly anyway.
So back to the topic of age and its correlation to success.
You know you are getting older when the Gardaí start looking younger, but you are officially old when the Taoiseach is younger than you.
But inherently, we all feel the same inside from 18-80 these days. They say personality forms at six and character starts to externalise at 16, when the hormones calm down. Mentally, you kind of stay the same after that.
So if age is an increasingly irrelevant number, what are the lessons of experience that still count?
Having talked to a number of successful founders, a few factors outside anyone’s control seem to come into play.
Let’s begin with one of the most successful young entrepreneurs, Shane Curran of Evervault. At just 19, he is helping developers to easily deploy their applications in privacy cages by hosting a network of hardware-secured data processing enclaves. You can’t misuse your data, even if you wanted to, is his maxim.
His youth threw me recently at the Web Summit in Lisbon when he didn’t recognise Eric Cantona, pointing out that he did stop playing for Manchester United four years before he was born.
Brothers Conor and James McCarthy are far from 47 and have already set up several successful enterprises. Their current joint enterprise, Flipdish, acts as a defender of the independent takeaway kitchen in Ireland in the face of behemoths such as Deliveroo.
And some of our best young entrepreneurs, like Dorothy Creaven, get hired by global unicorns such as Rent the Runway because they know that an individual who has the drive to found their own company will guarantee success for theirs.
So let’s move on to some veterans, who were once under 30, of course.
I first met Dylan Collins and Sean Blanchfield when they were in their early 20s and, multiple companies later, mostly successful, they are still going strong — keeping kids safe online and as online advertising experts.
Richard Barnwell was 29 when he founded Digit Games, responsible for the biggest mobile strategy game in Europe. He told me he would never do the crazy hours again now that he has a young family.
Bobby Healy of Manna was the tech guru behind Cartrawler and is trying something even bigger now with his drone food delivery company.
A burrito in every back garden by the end of 2020 or bust. He has the energy of a man half his age.
Alan Coleman of Sweepr is set to go again in a similar space to his last company. Sometimes you see a bigger opportunity but need to exit and start again to really capture the market in a new way.
Rory O’Connor of Scurri in Wexford is making sure packages from the biggest retailers get to you. And that’s because of his experience in shipping and logistics, from Waterford Crystal to AOL.
Mark Little and Áine Kerr, the dynamic duo, from journalism and Storyful, to tech execs at Facebook and Twitter, will go again into battle to solve the fake news war they see raging around us all.
One of the oldest clients we work with is pushing 75 with the same energy levels of a young-wan, but it was the empty nest that allowed her to go again with a new business idea.
So how important is age really for entrepreneurs?
Next week, I will be hosting the 50year anniversary of Trinity Computer Science. I will check with an even bigger cohort of company founders, like Steve Collins, Chris Horn and Brian Caulfield, to see if 47 really is the magic number.