Why Great Entrepreneurs Are Older Than You Think (2014)
For what it&#x27;s worth, I&#x27;m a 20-something working in the industry while my peers are off starting start-ups.<p>I agree with the article, at least as far as technical knowledge goes. Some friends of mine who I graduated with are starting an Instagram for music app called Cymbal in Brooklyn, and I talk to them somewhat frequently about what&#x27;s going on tech-wise. They&#x27;re seed-funded and have runway for the next while, and have produced a really quality app. Whether or not they&#x27;ll succeed, I don&#x27;t know, but I know the quality of their work isn&#x27;t in question.<p>My takeaway from conversations with their back-end engineer is that he&#x27;s getting a lot of experience building an infrastructure from the group up that&#x27;s taking a lot of traffic, learning what to do and what not to do by things failing. He&#x27;s developing the &quot;right way to do things&quot;. By contrast, my time at Twitter as a backend&#x2F;fullstack engineer has taught me a lot about what that infrastructure looks like when it&#x27;s mature, and I&#x27;ve learned the Twitter-approved &quot;right way to do things&quot;. We&#x27;re both learning what scalable robust infrastructure looks like, but while he gets the benefit of familiarity with every part of the stack and learning first hand what works and why, I get a huge jump in general knowledge with less details.<p>Which is arguably better? We&#x27;ll only know for certain when I start my own startup in a few years, but my gut feeling is that the skills I&#x27;m gaining here by perusing scaled-up systems that face hundred of millions of requests every day will serve me more. I&#x27;ve learned so much about good ways to build things in just my past few months that have already radically changed how I face my own personal projects, that I can&#x27;t imagine sticking with code I wrote before I had this knowledge.<p>I know the article is more about industry experience as applied to creating a network of peers and the business side of things, but I&#x27;m confident it extends to the technical side as well.<p>Thoughts?