The youngest CEO I ever met who didn't give me WTF vibes was 29 years old. I know because I asked directly. He was raised by a successful CEO dad and I think absorbed a lot of wisdom.
I agree the idealistic 20-somethings are important. I don't think they should be handed tens of millions of dollars and trotted out like show ponies.
Having done startups at 19, 39, and 45, I can say that the sh$t I pulled at 19 is a no go at 45 with kids, but I'm also a lot wiser now. That week of near death panic due to having had my backups fail as. 19 year old will never happen to me again (knock on wood, backblaze don't fail me now). Etc. You trade some hours for some efficiency.
(There's also the financial risk, which for me is easier to absorb now. At 19 I didn't care, at 30 something I did, and now I'm lucky enough to not have to care much).
If you worry about backblaze, the solution isn't to have yet another backup, it's to test your backup recovery process regularly
The risk from not being able to recover your data because of something wrong with your process (like, you are not backing up all the data you need) dwarfs the risk from backblaze to lose your data
That's another type of risk, but if all your backups are in backblaze, you're exposed to "single provider" risk which can become very real very quickly (and not only by backblaze going bankrupt overnight).
Of course, that risk may be entirely acceptable; it's all about risk mitigation and trade-offs, not perfect security.
>If you worry about backblaze, the solution isn't to have yet another backup, it's to test your backup recovery process regularly
The solution is to do both, or all three (or n), where #3 is another backup process. And to test the backups of all processes by trying to read or restore them (onto empty disks) regularly.
I.e., somewhere on a continuum between zero or minimal and the above, depending on how critical your business is.
Because Murphy's Law.
Edited to add:
And how critical your job is (to you).
Of course there is much more to the whole issue, like funds, PHBs, etc.
Your comment made me wonder if there's anyone out there with regularly-taken long-persistence (tape, optical media, etc.) backups in their personal basement.
It seems a very specific Venn intersection to utilize technology to a high degree, but also to imagine and prepare for its worst case failure.
I keep an LTO tape robot around for just exactly that reason. I trust backblaze, but I don't trust them to the point of not writing off a weekly/monthly/yearly tape set.
A company I previously worked at (self-hosted) all production servers were RAID 5, plus continual cloud backups, with nightly backups that rotated weekly and monthly backups that were shipped out of state and stored in a disaster recovery facility in the event of a total catastrophe (earthquake, hurricane, etc).
The off-site backup storage was required by several of our largest customers due to the critical nature of our software.
There are dozens of us! I make regular yearlies that go "basement" and never get overwritten. Has come in useful very rarely, maybe it was worth the cost?
I'm not really. We have onsite backups + off-site to backblaze. I'm comfortable with that for where we are. (We run on-prem for most things that involve a lot of data or GPUs.)
I think of the VC-unicorn sales pitch to young people as: "look, here are all these nobodys who made it hyper rich by going doing some crazy thing, you go spend your youth on 20hour days of inventing shit and if you are one of the 1000 that has an interesting idea, we fund it and take most of the profits".
I have a child and is going to have another one this year. I have this crazy idea that is big if true but 99.9% it would fail. I would totally do it if I was without a family. This idea is VC type idea.
Now I am working on some idea that is 99% going to feed my family but it is boring as hell and no VC would look at it.
I want to solve the problem that it's difficult for people to predict the future with skin in the game.
My idea is to create a prediction market where people bet on REAL world events under REAL name with FAKE money. All predictions are public and we can rank every user's prediction ability in each category by his ROI.
I have created a MVP where people bet on cryptos: https://rankvestor.com/. I wanted to start with finantial market.
Now I have to stop this project because I am moving my family to Japan because I don't believe in the future of China. I have to work for a Japan company to keep my visa. In my spare time, I work on a Japanese study app that gives me some money every month.
BTW, if anyone likes this idea, feel free to take it and implement it :)
As someone that helped build and sell a startup (for hundreds of MM) in my 20s+30s pre-family, and now having a family… I cannot possibly conceive of putting in the time and energy to another venture. Maybe after the kids leave?
Back then I would climb for a couple hours in the morning for fun and then work until 8pm or later. Get beers, go to bed, do it again. Every day, most weekends, most holidays. It didn’t feel hard because it’s what I was meant to be doing. So much fun.
Now I can’t string together 2 focused hours. I’d rather take the kids to the park, or have to take someone to the doctor, or a sport, or whatever. Even if I had to work a “regular” job, the idea that I would work any harder than absolutely necessary, at the expense of time with my family? Not a chance.
I’m not saying you must be 20s or 30s or whatever. You just must care more about the venture than other things.
That's the point, you are not supposed to start anything on "hope" - you have to actually believe and perceive a value in the market.
In some cases people are wrong or even crazy, but fundamentally I don't meet many 20 somethings with both the conviction that they are right, the organization skills to do the logistics, and the wisdom to not jump at pointless things.
I certainly didn't do it right when I tried to start a company at 19.
I think people taking shots at VC are misperceiving what all parties bring to the table.
VC provides capital and connections.
Young founders provide ideas and work.
VC can't / doesn't want to have ideas or do the work, but young founders can't access capital and connections.
To speak to up thread, most people who have been working in industry for 20+ years limit their aspirations to what they believe is possible, which is far shy of what's actually possible. Thus, it takes a young/dumb/crazy enough founder to even take the shot.
Furthermore, by scaling and making multiple bets, VC packages risk into more palatable ranges for investors.
We can point at and decry excesses and metastisized business models on both VC and founder sides (e.g. SoftBank Vision Fund and Theranos), but the underlying bargain is fair and effective.
Not everyone in their 30s has kids. Many that do have plenty of money to start businesses. And lots of 20 somethings have kids.
Just because you’re not in a place to start a business doesn’t mean other people your age aren’t. So don’t make universal and ageist comments about how 20-somethings are better at starting companies than 30-somethings.
> because you’re not in a place to start a business doesn’t mean other people your age aren’t
There are more twentysomethings without families, able to burn the candle at both ends, and not take a salary while a vision comes together than thirtysomethings. That isn’t an ageist proposition because it doesn’t imply many people in their fifties don’t do it.
None of the above are necessary for a founder. But they’re selected for, explicitly and implicitly, which means a random pool of start-up founders will tend to bias young.
If you’re in your thirties and don’t have a child, you should probably have a child instead of founding a startup. The startup can wait, your likelihood of having a child (and a fulfilling relationship with one) won’t.
That's not at all how I have understood the parent comment. I think they meant that they would start a business in their 30s with a child, but not a hot air type of business with the hope to somehow make some money down the road.
