Pull to Eject

Popular business lore promotes the sparkly vision of youthful entrepreneurs full of venture capital and accelerator cohorts. Good looking young founders grace magazine covers and business talk shows.

The reality is that the ‘youthful founder’ myth may be pushing young people into undue risk while holding back the ones who should be starting new ventures.

In a study of over 2.7 million startups, the Census Bureau and 2 MIT professors found that the average age of successful founders is decades older and far more experienced than the popular mythology. Sure Zuckerberg and Brin are standouts, but it turns out they are also outliers.

In fact, a 60-year-old startup founder is 3 times as likely to found a successful startup as a 30-year-old startup founder--and is 1.7 times as likely to found a startup that winds up in the top 0.1 percent of all companies.

And what do you think are the biggest reasons?

Experience and execution - you know - the things you’ve been doing for years at your current job. Maybe its finally time…

Now go Launch something 🚀 

Modern Tools

It’s fairly straight-forward setting up an ecommerce storefront today. Shopify and Amazon are dead simple. Web site hosting sites like GoDaddy have easy add-on ecommerce tools.

But If you just want to try to sell your ideas, GumRoad may be the place to start. You can literally start by selling a blog. Or design your work into downloadable PDFs. Or Notion templates. Or Courseware. Or whatever.

• Gumroad - Don’t want to hire sales people? Need a digital storefront? Start with this free set of tools for selling your product.

  • You can sell video lessons, subscriptions, physical products, digital products, and more to anyone, anywhere, and get paid in your currency of choice.

Old School Wisdom

Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies (#ad) Jim Collins and Jerry Porras best seller is just as relevant today as it was when first printed. Exemplary corporations stand on these principles. Your startup can build a very solid foundation leveraging the same guiding wisdom.

Extra credit if you read Collins’ prequill book Good to Great (#ad). Key takeaway: great companies create their own Venn diagram of Collins big 3:

1. What product is our most profitable?

2. What are we most passionate about?

3. What can we be the best in the world at?

Free Knowledge

Free MIT class - Startup Success: How to Launch a Technology Company - and they are all technology companies today. Michael Stonebraker and Andy Palmer share 30 years of experience and the key steps that any entrepreneur can follow to get a company going.

1. Assess product ideas for rapid development and commercialization.

2. Understand the start-up team, develop partnerships, and produce a prototype.  

3. Prepare and evaluate strategies to identify and court the vital first few customers.  

4. Anticipate organizational challenges to motivating and leading the start-up team.

5. Develop key steps toward making a pitch and negotiating a deal with venture capitalists or seed investors

Visual Crapshoot

Do you know people who should read the Launch Key? You know what to do