Startups for Retirees, not just Drop-Outs
College kids drop out to join Silicon Valley. And some retirees drop in.
For my 68-year-old father, retirement didn’t mean cruise ships and grandchildren; it meant a chance to finally do something with an idea he’d had for years, all-nighter “hackathons” with a team of developers he’d hired in India, and launching an iOS app, World Cup Scout, for player evaluation just in time for FIFA World Cup soccer tournament.
In markets like San Francisco, tech IPOs and newly minted millionaires are gentrifying what was already one of the more affluent cities on the planet. There is rising antipathy toward technologists as the self-serving haves displacing the have-nots, or those without the technical prowess to capitalize on the radically reshaped economy driven by bits and bites.
Skills are made redundant at an ever more rapid pace. Most scapegoat globalization and labor force mobility, and some drop-in, harnessing retirement time to become entrepreneurs.
Craig Hartley used to train NASA astronauts and run marathons. As he got older he took to road biking, until a 21-mph wipeout landed him in the intensive care unit where he couldn’t recall basic nouns. For six months he attended therapy alongside Iraq war veterans, victims of motorcycle crashes and downhill skiing accidents. He worked to regain basic language functions. He also reflected on his life, his decade as a youth soccer coach, and his longstanding desire to be an entrepreneur and develop an iPad app.
With the World Cup approaching, he had an idea.
Having evaluated hundreds of Silicon Valley startups as a partner at a Sand Hill Road venture capital firm, I warned him against the probability of failure. As a designer, my sister was critical of every pixel. And as his wife, my mother was supportive of all-nighters, so long as he promised to keep the mess confined to the empty nester bedroom-cum-office.
Against advice, downloads of new software versions were followed by near all-nighters developing working prototypes of his idea. On vacation, an iOS app development manual became the beach read, and middle-of-the-night email exchanges with developers he had hired in India through the freelancing website Elance became standard.
He and my mother consulted a financial advisor, and made a calculated risk to use some 401k-money to pay for basic freelance iOS development costs.
In the globalizing tech economy, my retired dad had chosen to drop-in.
He envisioned a basic performance evaluation concept, and thought about how it could be adapted for mobile. He outlined his vision for an iPad app that had universal application to any kind of evaluation using multiple criteria. He started on a napkin, fleshed out his vision in Keynote, and then built a functional prototype using a program called LiveCode. He struggled with the iOS development necessary to turn it into an iPad app to be sold on the Apple app store, and decided it should be developed in Apple’s iOS development environment. He talked to developers in Denver who quoted more money than he was willing to spend, and so he went global.
He consulted the freelance platform Elance and –based on reviews– found a small software group in India that had iOS programming experience. That group took his prototype and over dozens of middle-of-the-night messages, going back and forth over the program he had initially created, turned it into a fully functional iOS app, World Cup Scout, that went live in June 2014.
With startup costs decreasing, an increasing number of developer services that allow entrepreneurs to quickly set up prototyping environments, hire freelancers to back-fill skill sets they lack, and a globally available pool of asynchronous labor, there’s never been a better time to start a company.
As a human factors engineer working in the space industry, he had built interface prototypes on Macs using HyperCard, SuperCard, and LiveCode but it wasn’t until he had “retired,” that he truly learned to deal with a mobile market environment, launch a globally available product, and became an entrepreneur.
Despite our own familial skepticism, my dad proved that one need not be a hot-shot “bro-grammer” drop-out to drop in on the startup economy. At age 68, he demonstrated that old dogs can learn new tricks, good things can come from suburbia, that grey beards need not mean you can’t pull all-nighters, and that retirement does not mean slowing down.
The app is not yet an economic success, but for Craig Hartley, a retiree who two years ago sat in the intensive care unit without the ability to recall basic words following a catastrophic road biking accident, his ability to develop and execute on an entrepreneurial vision, teach himself to program in a new mobile development environment, and manage a global team have to him been the most rewarding professional experience of his life.
Retirees and empty nesters cannot rewind the clock to relive their youth, but when they drop in, they might find some of the greatest satisfaction in being out of the work force is coming back in.
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Scott Hartley, a global venture capitalist and startup advisor, is a former Presidential Innovation Fellow at the White House, and partner at MDV.
