August 16, 2007
Just Get Started! Get up to Bat!
According to the summary section of a recent post by Marc Andreessen (co-founder of Netscape and current founder of Ning) called Age and the Entrepreneur - part 1:
- Generally, productivity — output — rises rapidly from the start of a career to a peak and then declines gradually until retirement.
- This peak in productivity varies by field, from the late 20s to the early 50s, for reasons that are field-specific.
- Precocity, longevity, and output rate are linked. “Those who are precocious also tend to display longevity, and both precocity and longevity are positively associated with high output rates per age unit.” High producers produce highly, systematically, over time.
- The odds of a hit versus a miss do not increase over time. The periods of one’s career with the most hits will also have the most misses. So maximizing quantity — taking more swings at the bat — is much higher payoff than trying to improve one’s batting average.
- Intelligence, at least as measured by metrics such as IQ, is largely irrelevant.
So here’s my first challenge: to anyone who has an opinion on the role of age and entrepreneurship — see if you can fit your opinion into this model!
And here’s my second challenge: is entrepreneurship more like poetry, pure mathematics, and theoretical physics — which exhibit a peak age in one’s late 20s or early 30s — or novel writing, history, philosophy, medicine, and general scholarship — which exhibit a peak age in one’s late 40s or early 50s? And how, and why?
So if your odds of a hit are related to the number of times you are at bat then get out there and start trying to hit that ball! Marc no longer accepts comments on his blog so if you have answers to his questions above, feel free to comment on this post. Since I’m in my mid-30’s now I am taking the stance that it’s more like “novel writing, history, philosophy, medicine, and general scholarship.” 
Thanks again to the folks at Austin Business Babes for their series of podcasts on me and my thoughts on entrepreneurship. I believe they finished the series with a podcast they called “just get started.”
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Thinking too much can stop you…don’t imagine all the things that can go wrong, just go into action! This and other insights of an experienced (and young) entrepreneur, Aruni Gunasegaram.
