3 ms·
As of June 2016 the average age was around 29. https://www.ycombinator.com/faq/ https://www.ycombinator.com/faq/
by ksikka 9y ago
As of June 2016 the average age was around 29.
https://www.ycombinator.com/faq/ https://www.ycombinator.com/faq/
- bpicolo 9y agoI would imagine the startup life skews young in general because older age tends to mean more responsibilities, and at some point if you haven't been successful with a startup you'll tend towards a more traditional position for those reasons? "Startup Veteran" is kind of an amusing phrase.
- apapli 9y agoI disagree. I'd say older people have more networks, more experience and more resources, hence will find less comparative benefit in giving away precious equity to YC (etc) than young people who need all the above. It could be said that YC and other startup incubators have done a stellar marketing job in taking ~6% equity off organisations by turning the tables on funding and making companies "apply" to give their equity away. From YC's perspective they have nothing to lose and everything to gain from this arrangement, versus the founders who are in pretty much the opposite position.
- bpicolo 9y agoThat's probably true. I was sort of envisioning bootstrapped, self-funded businesses as a different category than the YC-startup style business.
- mattmanser 9y agoYoure confusing concepts. You can skip an incubator like YC while still intending to not bootstrap. There is also no such thing as a 'YC-style' startup, YC was set up to target startups, so can't have invented them. YC used to only give a tiny amount of equity that any vaguely successful person could match ($16k?). It filled the gap between starting and series A. Bootstrapping means avoiding getting a series A. Basically, YC didn't invent startups, it invented a new, more accessible route to starting one.
- neurotech1 9y agoI know of several well connected, 'Older' founders who applied, were accepted and are doing well. There is even cases of YC alums going through again. The reason is likely quality, structured mentoring and not just marketing.
- s73ver 9y agoWhen I picture a "Startup Veteran", I picture someone who's worked with one or more companies to a large and successful exit. Someone like that is likely fairly wealthy, and so doing a startup doesn't have the same amount of risk as someone doing it for the first time has.
- ekianjo 9y agoIf we could know the median it would be way more telling than the average age.
- PeterFBell 9y agoI would expect that with a fairly even distribution such as ages, the median and mean would be similar. Medians are primarily useful for data sets with large outliers and I doubt there are many 400 year old YC alumni :)
- ekianjo 9y agoNot sure, but if there are a bunch of 40s years old, this would already start shifting the average upwards compared to the mean even if the data is rather centered in the mid 20s.