CZ on ThreadGuy Live
by Tufail: Changpeng Zhao
CZ is clear that starting a successful company later in life is completely doable. He began Binance at 40, and now he’s 48, but before that he spent 17 years doing everything from coding to managing teams in a big org. He points out there’s this idea that founders are all super young, when in reality the average is 40-plus. The road isn’t smooth either, it takes a bunch of failures to get anywhere, and doing startups is genuinely hard. His advice is to try things early while keeping risk in check, so when you fail you can bounce back. He also warns against being too desperate or eager, because founders who want success too fast tend to crash.
Transcript (en)
I started Binance when I was 40. So I'm 48 right now. So so I, you know, I spent the first 20, 17 years of work in my work life doing different things. I was successful. I was a good coder. I was a good developer. I became a manager in a large organization. And but it took me so you're never too late. There's a misconception that, you know, many of the all the founders are very young. uh the average funders are quite old actually like 40 plus um and um but i would say you also take quite a number of uh failures to become successful uh doing startups and all these new things are really hard so i think you can start early you want to try things as early as possible but you want to manage your risk and make sure you don't crush really really hard you can you can fail but but you don't want to be able to bounce back. But also don't be overly desperate or eager. We have seen failures where it was because of funders mentality. They want to become really successful really, really quickly. They're smart guys, but they're too quick, right? Yeah.
