I went out to dinner last night at Bacar with the Young Dudes – Mike Cannon-Brookes (Atlassian) and Chris Saad (Touchstone). Also there were some not-so-young dudes like myself and Randall Leeb-du Toit from NICTA (thanks Randall!). There was some lively discussion and excellent food. As an old bloke, I’m continually stunned by how sharp and smart guys like Mike and Chris are at 26 and 24 respectively. Both have several start-ups behind them and are killing it with their current businesses. I’ve learned a lot about Atlassian’s success and history and Mike’s background over the last few days (I’m sleeping on his sofa) and he’s a seriously impressive dude. Chris and Nik from Touchstone are also seriously smart and focused. I’ve just installed the latest alpha of their product. It’s invite only and I’ve got 5 invites to give away. First in, first served, people. Email me if you want one. I’ve also just installed the latest version of another young Aussie dude’s product – Omnidrive (Nik Cubrilovic is the young dude… I think he’s like 22 or something). It’s an online storage service. I left Australia with my external 200Gb USB drive which has a lot of show production files on it and I’m sick of having to plug it in every time I edit a show, so I’m going to dump some of the key files into my Omnidrive account and pull them down from there in future (I don’t want them sitting on the laptop, it’s low on space).
Anyway… hanging around with these young dudes makes 36 seems so old. Where did those last 20 years go?
Young at heart, Cam!
Rand
36 isn’t old. Didn’t anyone tell you that 30 is the new 20?
As far as the last 20 years go well your starting point there is 16 so you probably wasted the first 5-10 years suddenly realizing that there were girls and trying to find new and ingenious ways of getting them to have sex with you (actually I have a feeling that guys never really get over that phase they just get better at multitasking).
Then there’s all that inconvenient learning about how the world and business work. They may not have been a barrel of laughs but at least you learned something.
The point is that people who go out and have their own seriously impressive startup are the exception not the rule (I won’t even finish uni until I’m 23 and that’s assuming I don’t fail anything) and the world wasn’t set up for 20 year old genius’s when you had the opportunity to fall into the category.
In case you hadn’t noticed I’ve done this kind of pep-talk before. Colin goes through “I’m all old. Where is my life going? Why don’t I have lots of money and pretty cars and a nice house?” phases ALL the time and he has 8 more years to whinge about than you
Nik Cubrilovic is 26.
Well, at 38 I value my years living OS and traveling the world, timeout doing non IT study – all that stuff what we collectively call life experience. Not that a young gun can’t get that as well – but being funneled into a high growth startup at 22 does have its downside … but also its upside 🙂
Personally I just think you’re in denial about Val Kilmer playing David Lee Roth…
interesting, but age does not matter when you can live forever with the new tech some scientist is going to create.
thanks for the pep talk guys but Rob… WTF???
oh i get it Rob! just caught up with the news!
http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/story?id=2632446
and funnily enough, not only is Val playing Dave, but he also recently wrote a song about Lou Reed!
http://www.starpulse.com/news/index.php/2006/11/06/val_kilmer_writes_song_about_lou_reed
And guess who I’m seeing tomorrow night! Lou’s playing a gig in SF!
Omg that is awesome Cam!!!
BTW thanks for indirectly introducing to the musical brilliance that is Van Halen (via your last.fm profile). I love discovering new artists that I like.
I am far too hyper at the moment. If I’m not careful I’ll start trying to write a novel or something. I’m supposed to be studying.
I met a guy in LA who said he woke up from a dream inspired to write a novel and then wrote it in three days straight. He was selling copies of in on Venice Beach. Maybe that could be you!
oh and glad you like VH!
Yeah but then the last piece of literature I wrote was during a bad hyper (or perhaps manic, I’ll see what the shrink has to say when I go after exams) phase in year 8 and involved such characters as the Gytonski and the evil tomato eating Morice Monster as well as a three-legged mongoose.
It was like a cross between Monty Python and Douglas Adams on crack. Far too frightening to subject the public to 🙂
I like a lot of music. I have pretty broad taste in music. Generally anything with a lot of good guitar is likely to appeal to me. I impressed one aging rocker at a bar once because he had put Alice Cooper ‘Poison’ on the jukebox and turned around to notice that I was enthusiastically singing along and knew all the words.
We spent the rest of the evening arguing over whether there was a “girls, girls girls” other than the Motley Crew one (silly man had never heard of Sailor – dodgy dodgy one hit wonder)
oh damn that brings back my childhood! Just went looking for Sailor on AllTunes but alas! Not there.
If I can track down my CD of dodgy 70s and 80s one hit wonders you can borrow it 🙂
I do have an mp3 of it but its a bit mushed.
Cam,
How are you still getting credit on allTunes? I’d heard mastercard no longer worked (in addition to visa).
Cam, I think its not so much as age but the fact there is two of them. Being in a start up with only one founder is tough. The down days are the worst because nobody really knows how bad what ever happened is apart from you. Whilst it can be hard to have two founders who think the same it does happen.
Angus – yeah i hear ya. But that’s what a shrink is for. The friend you pay for. 🙂
hugo – one of my sisters gave me some alltunes credit for my birthday last month. I think the mastercard for alltunes is working again now though.
That’s one savvy sister. I think my brother’s got a mastercard 😉
See I thought shrinks were for medication and nice letters explaining that the reason why your exam results sucked were that you had a nervous breakdown the day before.
Psychotherapists/psychoanalysts/psychologists and other flavors of psycho- are friends you pay for.
Although its important to never mistake a psychopath or a psychotic person as a friendly form of psycho- those are BAD psycho-‘s
Don’t worry about being 30+, you heart is young , thats what matters.
I think starting at young age or a later age is more to do with what environment you are exposed to.
At 30 i’m contemplating of a venture, and i still belive i’m a kid 🙂
Vishal