HACKER Q&A
📣 bwanab

Successful Startup founders. Do they have families?


It's my intuition that most successful startup founders do their startups before they have families of their own. Is this intuition correct, incorrect, or irrelevant to the success of a startup?

The obvious examples that support my contention are Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook, but it's not obvious that those are actually representative of the huge diversity of startups. The problem is that I can't come up with any counterexamples.

  👤 warrenm Accepted Answer ✓
Most [successful] business founders are around 40[0][1][2][3] (or higher) - meaning if they are going to have a family, they probably already do

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[0] https://hbr.org/2021/12/dont-let-age-get-in-the-way-of-entre...

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/theyec/2020/06/05/you-just-turn...

[2] https://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/new-research-uncovers-ideal-a...

[3] https://smallbusiness.patriotsoftware.com/average-age-start-...

👤 Irene
Jeff Bezos started Amazon with his wife MacKenzie. Anita Roddick and Gordon Roddick started The Body Shop.
👤 gizmo
You’re correct. pg refers to startups as cramming a lifetime’s worth of work in ~8 years. Pretty hard to do that if a startup is your 3rd priority in life.

There are plenty of exceptions, of course. But as a general rule startup founders are young because young people have no responsibilities and the energy to keep going day after day, week after week, month after month, for years on end until they exit. An extra advantage young people have is they don’t know how hard it will be. Older, more experienced people don’t have this tailwind of ignorance.

👤 hipshaker
Elon Musk comes to mind
👤 gumby
Yes, I had my biggest exit before having a kid, but I was married, and my wife did not have a visa that would allow her to work.

This was a bootstrap too.

👤 extragood
In terms of big exits, Marc Randolph, Netflix's founder was married well before he started the company and had kids at the time.

In terms of (much) smaller exits, I'm the child of a startup founder. I was about age 8 and it was sold when I was about 25. It was never more than 20 people, and my dad was President as the founding engineer. It was enough for a solid middle class childhood for myself and a sibling in a VHCOL area and my dad and mom are very comfortable in retirement.

It helped that my mom was stay at home, I think. My dad bootstrapped his company and had to work on it nights when I was young after his paying job before they had enough customers that they could go full-time. They never took funding. He made time for us on the weekends, but my mom did all the weekday stuff