Dear SaaStr: Is it Wise for Someone at 40+ to Think of Quitting Their Job and Becoming an Entrepreneur?
Age doesn’t matter — per se. You’re not “too old” to do a start-up until you think you are and feel you are. And in B2B SaaS, the domain expertise and experience that come with more years in the field does help a ton.
The average age for founders at founding for SaaS companies that have IPO’d is 32, and that’s the average. Peter Gassner was 42 when he founded $30B+ Veeva, Eric Yuan was 41 when he founded Zoom, etc. And both really benefitted from their domain expertise. Peter had already been a CTO at Salesforce working in part on the same vertical, and Eric led engineering at WebEx. Therese Tucker founded Blackline at 40 as a solo founder (that story below in a great interview).
But your personal burn rate does matter. And these days, many of us of all ages are just too burnt out.
One thing I do know: if you are going to do a SaaS start-up for real, you have to budget 24 months just to get it off the ground. To get to Initial Traction:
- This is easier if your “personal burn rate” is close to $0.
- It’s also easier if you have angel investors already lined up to put in say the first $500k.
- It’s also easier if you have savings and are crazy enough to burn through them to fund the business for 24+ months.
So the young, those without mortgages and kids and schools and minivans and the like, generally have a personal burn rate advantage. If you can live on ramen and sleep on a futon for 24+ months, all other things being equal, that does give you an edge if there is little-to-no funding available.
But — the seasoned and experienced have other advantages. See Veeva and Zoom and Blackline and more above.
Just make sure you budget 24 months to get it Off the Ground, with a $0 or at least a tiny salary. Budget less, and at least in B2B/SaaS, it’s not enough. You almost certainly won’t get far enough to build a sustaining SaaS business.
And it’s always difficult. It’s never easy to build something real, from nothing.
