The other side of this coin is that some ignorance can be beneficial to break out of local minima.
> How do you overcome schlep blindness? Frankly, the most valuable antidote to schlep blindness is probably ignorance. Most successful founders would probably say that if they'd known when they were starting their company about the obstacles they'd have to overcome, they might never have started it. Maybe that's one reason the most successful startups of all so often have young founders.
Re: "young founders," this is simply not true, at least not anymore, if it ever was:
> More broadly, 2018 research published in the Harvard Business Review found that the average age at which a successful founder started their company is 45. That’s “among the top 0.1% of startups based on growth in their first five years,” according to the report.
Also "most successful startups". OK let's do a quality of life scale, 0 for destitute, 10 for billionaire. Millionaire would be 9.8 on the scale. Hell maybe the other way around, being a millionaire is better than being a billionaire (because of the problem of fame).
A lot of people reach that by doing mundane things like starting a tyre fitting shop, or janitorial business, or flipping houses, or very niche software businesses.
Depends what we mean by success. There is the 'make investors rich' kind of success that an investor is looking at encouraging people to do.
I think the key distinction here is "the most successful startups", not "a successful startup". If you look at the biggest successful startups in the last ~20yrs it definitely seems like the founders skew extremely young.
Older entrepreneurs are quite successful as well, the difference is they aren’t in tech so you don’t hear about them. They’re in Real Estate, construction, logistics, infrastructure and so on. They don’t found startups, they start small businesses. Usually with debt or cash and they don’t sell equity in exchange for ownership of the business. They are a big fraction of the >22 Million Americans who have a net worth greater than $1m.
> They don’t found startups, they start small businesses.
You (probably intentionally?) put the finger on something that's been annoying me about this whole "Startup!" malarkey for a while now: The pretentious terminology. "Startups" are actually just small businesses.
My “other side of the coin” is: as a designer of a system, never explain how they work, just tell people it is smart and that they should not assume otherwise since they don’t know how they work. And then go back swimming in your giant vault of money saved by skimping on security.
> How do you overcome schlep blindness? Frankly, the most valuable antidote to schlep blindness is probably ignorance. Most successful founders would probably say that if they'd known when they were starting their company about the obstacles they'd have to overcome, they might never have started it. Maybe that's one reason the most successful startups of all so often have young founders.
http://paulgraham.com/schlep.html