Why are entrepreneurs often young? (though there is not a correlation between entrepreneurial success and youth) Because You have less to lose when you are young – you don’t have a big paycheck that you’ve come to “need” to live on. You almost certainly don’t have any dependents and therefore not much to lose. Hopefully you are not drowning in college loans. You can always go and get that job at McKinsey later if things don’t work out and we are fortunate to live in a country where failure at a risky endeavor is actually viewed for what it is – a great learning experience. You also don’t have any experience which is not a good thing; the experienced smart person is almost always better than the inexperienced one though an experienced incompetent person is just incompetent – experience adds nothing.
That being said, getting into the entrepreneurial life style is far easier when you are young and the way to become an experienced entrepreneurial person is to start early as an inexperienced one and then add 10,000 hours of hard work. You might not be successful before you are 30 but if you really love entrepreneurial endeavors, you’ll likely have had a lot of fun while building a vast base of knowledge off of which to leverage in the coming years. The early years of entrepreneurship are not necessarily going to be years during which you get rich but just like a doctor has to put in their time in med school, residencies and fellowships before they become that world class neurosurgeon, the same is true for entrepreneurs.
And no, you can’t really get this experience working in a BigCo. The challenges of business in a BigCo are very different from the challenges of an early stage startup. If you want to be a great at entrepreneurship, you want to spend as much time as possible in the weeds of building startups. That being said, if you are going to choose between working in consulting or banking vs working at a BigCo product company like Google, Microsoft, Adobe or the like, it’s not even a decision.
Elie, this has me thinking of Catrina Fake's recent post on working smart versus working hard – http://www.caterina.net/archive/001196.html – I enjoyed her blurb from a recent book about Watson and Crick
I completely agree with Catrina's comment. The biggest thing I learned while working on my previous business was that you have to choose the business you are in very very carefully. Working on the right thing is absolutely critical.