16 ms·

Research: The Average Age of a Successful Startup Founder Is 45

576 points by BerislavLopac 8y ago

jzymbaluk 8y ago
Ben Jones (one of the authors of this article) talks about this research on an episode of NPR's Planet Money Indicator. In the episode they make the case that older startup founders are actually more successful than their younger peers for a number of reasons. It's a short listen, if you want to hear more https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/05/02/607815836/aging-up https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/05/02/607815836/agin...
dahart 8y ago
> there is a more benign possibility: VCs are not simply looking to identify the firms with the highest growth potential. Rather, they may seek investments that will yield the highest returns, and it is possible that young founders are more financially constrained than more experienced ones, leading them to cede upside to investors at a lower price. In other words, younger entrepreneurs may be a better “deal” for investors than more experienced founders. Seems plausible, but is it true? Anyone have experience to back it up? There are obvious downsides of a better deal with worse odds. I’ve certainly heard this theory before, so maybe there’s something to it. I’ve heard a few stories of more experienced founders failing to get a term sheet after negotiating well. It’s hard to ever know the reasons, and from what I’ve seen founders tend to take VC rejections personally and/or jump to negative conclusions about VCs when they don’t close, so I tend to take rejection stories with a grain of salt.
- sgustard 8y ago
  It's easier for VCs to take advantage of inexperience and ambition. Most suicide bombers are young too.
  - kumarvvr 8y ago
    I recently heard a podcast on How I built it, by Guy Ras, about Cisco. Your statement rings so true. VC, in this case Sequoia capital, tried to drive an emotional wedge between the two original founders of Cisco and exploited them. Its a fascinating podcast about the culture of VC money. Im sure there are far worse stories now.
    - dlivingston 8y ago
      Nothing new to add, just wanted to say How I Built This is a fantastic podcast. :)
- Kpourdeilami 8y ago
  If they invest at a company 100k at a cap of of $3mil and discount of 20%, then they will effectively 10X their returns if the company sells for $30mil. Now if they invest at a company founded by experienced entrepreneurs that has same traction as the previous company, they might have to put-in $1mil at a $10mil cap and they’ll need the company to have an exit of $100mil to 10x their money. I haven’t looked at the data personally but my hypothesis is inexperienced founders and $30mil exits are more likely than over $100 mil exits with experienced founders. It’s far more likely to sell for $30mil than it is to have an exit upwards of $100mil. So while a n experienced entrepreneur will be more likely to have an exit at $30 mil than an inexperienced one, it won’t produce the same returns for the investors
ttul 8y ago
I have been an entrepreneur for 17 years and am now “middle aged”. In my early years, I made many, many mistakes that could probably be pegged to youthful hubris. I also had no idea how to run a real business because I had scant experience even working for one let alone crafting anything approaching a “go to market plan”. If I were to start a new company today, I would probably lack the carefree creativity of a 23-year-old, not to mention the energy to work crazy hours. But everything about execution would be better, and as it happens, assuming you have a decent idea at the right time, execution is everything.
- adventured 8y ago
  I'm in my late 30s now, after two decades as an entrepreneur. My brain was quicker at 21, memory was slightly stronger (slightly faster, easier recall), and I had greater endurance at working productively in very long stretches. And despite that, due to learning how to work more effectively, how to be far more productive with my use of time, understanding what mistakes to avoid, I'm a dramatically better entrepreneur across the board. My patience has improved quite a bit, and my understanding of how to build for simplicity, reducing things down to only what they need to be, is leaps beyond what it was in my 20s. The single most important improvement I've seen, is building up a belligerent ruthlessness when it comes to complexity and general bloat. My 21 year old self just loved to build unnecessary, complex shit.
  - rm_-rf_slash 8y ago
    >My 21 year old self just loved to build unnecessary, complex shit When time and energy feel infinite, the perceived cost of wasting either feels low; the real cost remains the same.
    - Alex3917 8y ago
      > the real cost remains the same. The cost is actually much higher when you’re younger because of the time-value of money. It just doesn’t feel that way because the immediate consequences are lower.
ChicagoDave 8y ago
Age could be a factor, but I think it’s all about grooming and connections. You can have Google on your resume and get funded. You might have been groomed from birth for success and you’ll get funded. Success itself is whether the idea had merit and a solid team is built.
- sah2ed 8y ago
  > Success itself is whether the idea had merit and a solid team is built. Even the concept of an idea being meritable is relative -- it depends on who is making the assessment. Fred Wilson didn't think AirBnB had merit, in fact he thought the whole thing was ridiculous [0], no matter how hard pg tried to convince him otherwise [1]. [0] https://avc.com/2011/03/airbnb/ https://avc.com/2011/03/airbnb/ [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/airbnb.html http://www.paulgraham.com/airbnb.html
  - ChicagoDave 8y ago
    Find a successful startup that didn’t have naysayers. Merit is measured by the founder getting customers and proving the model. Not what “experts” say.
tucaz 8y ago
Honest and possibly ignorant question here. Wouldn’t the median be more representative of how old the common founder would be? In a very simplistic example with a data set of two people aged 20 and 70 you would get 45 as the average age when in fact that doesn’t reflect the reality. I always struggle when thinking about average vs median.
- liftbigweights 8y ago
  Yes, the median would be a better data point. Even better would be a qualification of "successful". Are they equating successful startups that are worth a million to trillion dollar companies like apple and amazon? > I always struggle when thinking about average vs median. Median takes away the bias of the extremes that averages can include. For example, if 9 people make $1 and 1 person makes $1000000, the average is about $100,000 while the media is $1. The $1 is more representative of the sample. But in this "research", there are far more data to unpack. Like the quality and quantity of "successful".
  - compcoffee 8y ago
    >Median takes away the bias of the extremes that averages can include. What sort of extremes do you expect to see in age data for starting a business? There will be no 10 years olds, and likely no 90 years olds. >But in this "research", there are far more data to unpack. Why the quotations? Do you not believe this is research? This is a 1000 word summary of their work; do you think these researchers, from some of the best schools on the planet, didn't consider the sorts of questions you pose?
  - mithr 8y ago
    > Even better would be a qualification of "successful". Did you... read the article? Fourth paragraph: "Among the top 0.1% of startups based on growth in their first five years, we find that the founders started their companies, on average, when they were 45 years old. These highest-performing firms were identified based on employment growth. The age finding is similar using firms with the fastest sales growth instead, and founder age is similarly high for those startups that successfully exit through an IPO or acquisition. In other words, when you look at most successful firms, the average founder age goes up, not down. Overall, the empirical evidence shows that successful entrepreneurs tend to be middle-aged, not young." You can _disagree_ with their definition of success, but they certainly have one.
purplezooey 8y ago
And yet, the first thing companies do when there's any hint of trouble on the horizon is layoff anyone over 40-45.
- mgkimsal 8y ago
  > the first thing companies do when there's any hint of trouble on the horizon is layoff anyone over 40-45. well, they're not the 'founders' in most cases.
  - bonestamp2 8y ago
    No, but the point is that those people have valuable experience. But they're probably laid off purely from a numbers standpoint, they likely have a higher salary than the junior people. The decision likely isn't based on the merit of the candidates when a company is in trouble; however, that seems like OP's point... that maybe it should be.
bluedino 8y ago
What's the average (at the time of founding) age of say, the top 10 highest acquired startups, or highest IPOs, etc
boulos 8y ago
The original source is here [1] at Ben Jones’s site (he’s a co-author). The HBR article is naturally a popular summary, but the underlying research seems to cover everything people are curious about in the threads so far (distribution of age, what was the criteria for high-growth, etc.). Like most NBER articles, it’s quite long, but you can skip to the end for the figures and get a lot out of it. Figure 1 is the main thing being reported, but I found Figure 4B to be the most important: founders over 30 have a higher likelihood of success. [1] https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/jones-ben/htm/Age%20and%20High%20Growth%20Entrepreneurship.pdf https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/jones-ben/htm/A...
rafiki6 8y ago
I can tie this back to my own experience as well. Humility generally comes with age, and it's important in running a successful and socially responsible business. It's easy to get caught up in the young successful founder myth because that's what gets the most press. But look at a guy like Bill Gates. I'm sure had he started Microsoft 20 years later (assuming all conditions were ripe for it), he would have done it quite differently and likely would have had less law suits on his hand. That being said, I do think there's much to be said about the ambitiousness of the ideas when you're younger than when you're older. Your view of the world changes tremendously.
- j45 8y ago
  The importance of learning humility and discipline to do what needs to be done to stay an entrepreneur overlooked far too often. Meteoric rises are difficult to keep in the air because of the lack of foundational skills. Staying a little foolish and hungry (paraphrasing Steve Jobs) seems to be very good long term advice.
- bonestamp2 8y ago
  In some ways, it's also easier to run a startup when you're younger. Most younger people have more energy and fewer family obligations. But, that also explains why 45 makes a lot of sense... if you have kids they're probably old enough that they're doing a lot of their own things so you've got the wisdom from age (experience) and you've shed some of the family responsibilities that you might have at, say, age 35.
  - rhizome 8y ago
    Younger founders almost certainly also spend more energy on things that an older one already knows not to do, or that can be done more efficiently. Many mistakes that cost time and energy can be mooted by experience.
  - kumarvvr 8y ago
    Kids who do their own things, leaves a lot of time at hand. As a father of a 3 year old, I find it very difficult to sneak in even 15 minutes of thinking time. Of course, it dosent help that im also working while planning to start a web business.
adventured 8y ago
I've compiled and added to this list over time. When you go digging for how old the founders of major tech companies have been, you'll find they're overwhelmingly closer to their mid 30s, nearly all are over ~27, with plenty in their 40s. Exceptionally few have been like Gates, Jobs and Zuckerberg. If you're 30 and you think it's too late, it's not, you may not have even hit your prime yet. Ages of founders: Paul Graham (31, Viaweb), Jan Koum (33, WhatsApp), Brian Acton (37, WhatsApp), Ev Williams (34, Twitter), Jack Dorsey (30, Twitter; 33, Square), Elon Musk (31, SpaceX; 32, Tesla), Garrett Camp (30, Uber), Travis Kalanick (32, Uber), Brian Chesky (27, Airbnb), Adam Neumann (31, WeWork), Reed Hastings (37, Netflix), Reid Hoffman (36, LinkedIn), Jack Ma (35, Alibaba), Jeff Bezos (30, Amazon), Jerry Sanders (33, AMD), Marc Benioff (35, Salesforce), Ross Perot (32, EDS), Peter Norton (39, Norton), Larry Ellison (33, Oracle), Mitch Kapor (32, Lotus), Leonard Bosack (32, Cisco), Sandy Lerner (29, Cisco), Gordon Moore (39, Intel), Mark Cuban (37, Broadcast.com), Scott Cook (31, Intuit), Nolan Bushnell (29, Atari), Paul Galvin (33, Motorola), Irwin Jacobs (52, Qualcomm), David Duffield (46, PeopleSoft; 64 Workday), Aneel Bhusri (39, Workday), Thomas Siebel (41, Siebel Systems), John McAfee (42, McAfee), Gary Hendrix (32, Symantec), Scott McNealy (28, Sun), Markus Persson (30, Mojang), Craig Newmark (43, Craigslist), James Goodnight (33, SAS), John Sall (28, SAS), Diane Greene (43, VMWare), Mendel Rosenblum (36, VMWare), Bill Coleman (48, BEA Systems), Evan Goldberg (35, NetSuite), David Sacks (36, Yammer), Jack Smith (28, Hotmail), Sabeer Bhatia (28, Hotmail), Chad Hurley (28, YouTube), Andy Rubin (37, Danger; 41, Android), Rodney Brooks (36, iRobot), Jeff Hawkins (35, Palm), Niklas Zennström (37, Skype), Janus Friis (27, Skype), David Bohnett (38, Geocities), Bill Gross (40, GoTo.com/Overture), Subrah Iyar (38, WebEx), Min Zhu (47, WebEx), Pierre Omidyar (28, eBay), Rich Barton (29 for Expedia, 38 for Zillow), Jim Clark (38 for SGI, and 49 for Netscape), Charles Wang (32, CA), David Packard (27, HP), John Warnock (42, Adobe), Robert Noyce (30 at Fairchild, 41 for Intel), Rod Canion (37, Compaq), Jen-Hsun Huang (30, nVidia), Eli Harari (41, SanDisk), Sanjay Mehrotra (28, SanDisk), Al Shugart (48, Seagate), Finis Conner (34, Seagate), Henry Samueli (37, Broadcom), Henry Nicholas (32, Broadcom), Charles Brewer (36, Mindspring), William Shockley (45, Shockley), Ron Rivest (35, RSA), Adi Shamir (30, RSA), John Walker (32, Autodesk), Halsey Minor (30, CNet), David Filo (28, Yahoo), Jeremy Stoppelman (27, Yelp), Eric Lefkofsky (39, Groupon), Andrew Mason (29, Groupon), Wilfred Corrigan (43, LSI), Joe Parkinson (33, Micron), Aart J. de Geus (32, Synopsys), John Moores (36, BMC Software), Vivek Ranadivé (40, Tibco), Michael Baum (41, Splunk), Suhas Patil (37, Cirrus Logic), T. J. Rodgers (34, Cypress Semi), Scott Scherr (37, Ultimate Software), Ray Stata (31, Analog Devices), Ross Freeman (36, Xilinx), David Hitz (28, NetApp), Brian Lee (28, Legalzoom), Demis Hassabis (34, DeepMind), Tim Westergren (35, Pandora), Martin Lorentzon (37, Spotify), Ashar Aziz (44, FireEye), Kevin O'Connor (36, DoubleClick), Ben Silbermann (28, Pinterest), Evan Sharp (28, Pinterest), Steve Kirsch (38, Infoseek), Stephen Kaufer (36, TripAdvisor), Michael McNeilly (28, Applied Materials), Eugene McDermott (52, Texas Instruments), Richard Egan (43, EMC), Gary Kildall (32, Digital Research), Hasso Plattner (28, SAP), Robert Glaser (32, Real Networks), Patrick Byrne (37, Overstock.com), Marc Lore (33, Diapers.com), Ed Iacobucci (36, Citrix Systems), Ray Noorda (55, Novell), Tom Leighton (42, Akamai), Daniel Lewin (28, Akamai), Michael Mauldin (35, Lycos), Tom Anderson (33, MySpace), Chris DeWolfe (37, MySpace), Mark Pincus (41, Zynga), Nir Zuk (30, Palo Alto Networks), Caterina Fake (34, Flickr), Stewart Butterfield (31 for Flickr; 40 for Slack), Kevin Systrom (27, Instagram), Adi Tatarko (37, Houzz), Brian Armstrong (29, Coinbase), Pradeep Sindhu (43, Juniper), Peter Thiel (31, PayPal; 37, Palantir), Jay Walker (42, priceline.com), Tom Gosner (40, DocuSign), Shay Banon (31, Elastic), Beerud Sheth (29, Elance), Arkady Volozh (36, Yandex), Hiroshi Mikitani (34, Rakuten), Morris Chang (56, Taiwan Semi) It has also largely held true in China: Pony Ma (27, Tencent), Robin Li (32, Baidu), Liu Qiangdong (29, JD.com), Lei Jun (40, Xiaomi), Ren Zhengfei (38, Huawei), Cheng Wei (29, Didi Chuxing), James Liang (29, Ctrip), Zhang Yiming (Toutiao, 29), Wang Xing (30, Meituan-Dianping), Wang Zhidong (32, Sina)
replicatorblog 8y ago
Who is the most famous tech founder who was 45 or older when they founded their first company? There were more in the 70s, 80s, or 90s (E.g. Jim Clark) because the industry was still forming, but even then the wunderkind college dropout drove most of the value creation. In the modern era, Peter Gassner, founder of Veeva was 42. Diane Greene founded VMWare at 43. Brian Acton was 38. You start falling into the 30s fairly quickly. And if we look in terms of value creation, the crazy outsize wins come from founder founders. E.g. the GAFA companies were all founded by sub-30s. This study, like most of the Kauffman Foundation studies, tend to rely on obscure methods to reach these counterintuitive results. It's not to say 45-year-olds can't build great companies, but if you made a list of the 150-200 most notable tech startups of the last few decades, you'd see an average age closer to 33 than 45, even lower if you don't include the 2nd or 3rd startups of some founders.
- simonebrunozzi 8y ago
  I am 41, startup CEO for ~14 months, and currently having one of the worst days since the company started. (edit: actually, the worst day period). Although you might be right on statistics, I am 100% sure 10 years ago I wouldn't have had the maturity or the experience or the grit to face this day, the way I do right now. Also, don't forget that today's returns are huge, compared to 10-20 years ago, and that today's entrepreneurs start earlier than their equivalent of 20 years ago. It's hard to make sense of these numbers without bias or without any risk of misinterpreting things.
  - ekanes 8y ago
    Sorry to hear about today. Hang in there, you got this!
    - simonebrunozzi 8y ago
      Thanks!
- themagician 8y ago
  Being successful and being famous are two completely different things only tangentially related. The 30 companies that have famous founders are far outweighed by the ten thousand that you don't know of. On more than one occasion I’ve found myself working for absolutely massive companies (public in many cases) that I’d never previously even heard of. I’ve definitely had a lot of those, “Holy shit, how is this the biggest company I’ve never heard of,” experiences. There are a lot of companies in finance, telecom, and infrastructure that you don’t think about because they don’t have an app that sits on your home screen.
formalsystem 8y ago
I always find it interesting when these sorts of threads are posted. I for one look at them as am I too old to be starting my own company or should I chill out because I still have time. Fundamentally I think there's limited value in drawing lessons from these stories because you're probably your own best judge of whether you should quit your job or not. Your risk tolerance lowers as you get older but your skills will improve so it's up to you to decide what's the sweet spot. That said there is an age threshold where you'll be treated like an old man at a big company so may as well demonstrate your expertise on your own company before that happens.
- Joe-Z 8y ago
  I don‘t think people will use this research to „optimize“ their time to fund. If you have an idea and things align you will do that regardless of your age. I think it provides an interesting contrast to the idea of young-genius unicorn-startups in that it underlines that yes, these companies exist and get a lot of coverage but most innovation still comes from people experienced in their field who had time to learn the appropriate skills for leading a company.
  - Retric 8y ago
    Young founder ages are mentioned specifically because they are unusual. Unfortunately, because many people only see ‘newsworthy’ information they get a very distorted view of reality.
- wwweston 8y ago
  > am I too old to be starting my own company or should I chill out because I still have time. Seems to me youth or age are probably less relevant questions than whether you see an opportunity (and to what degree it's proven), what domain expertise is necessary to address it (and whether you have or can get access to that), and what resources you have available. And as you noted, there are risks to simply settling into corporate comfort.
- canadapups 8y ago
  I learnt to code and started my online business in my 30s because it's fun. Age shouldn't stop anyone from fun.
lazyjones 8y ago
I only skimmed over the article, but it seems to me that their data doesn‘t take into account that Angel/VC investors might be mistaken for actual founders in case they held shares since incorporation. This would of course largely invalidate their main claim. Can anyone confirm/deny?
analognoise 8y ago
I don't get all the "entrepreneur" founder worship stuff. The disconnected tech set has produced a lot of money - and burned a lot more. They've ruined our ability to connect to each other so that we could connect on Facebook. They've ruined sidewalks with scooters, lost all of our data, participated in tracking us at all times, helped ICE deport children, and made a wage slaves out of people at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder by greasing the "gig" economy wheels with algorithms. At what point do we, as technical people, wake up and go "hey, maybe all this bullshit lingo, youth fetishism, digital isolation and community destruction is bad as a whole?" I'd rather see content about a founder who actually helped people somewhere solve some problem, and it made things better for regular people - those outside the tech bubble. It seems like all everyone wants to do is blast off with like minded people.
- shadowxs76 8y ago
  But this is simply wrong, at least partly. Yes, your criticisms of many of these tech founders and youth fetishism in general are right in certain ways but these existing companies help millions of people all the time. Facebook is used for a lot of vapid social media posing, but it also serves as a platform for millions of social protest and communication movements worldwide. The same for twitter (possibly even more). I've seen both used amazingly well by people at a grassroots level where I live to communicate news that the government and organized crime try to censor in normal media with deadly violence. Amazon is considered a vast exploiter of cheap labor and a crusher of "mom&pop" businesses, but it also frees millions of people to instantly sell their offerings online, while offering honestly useful savings and product access to millions of others. And as for Google, besides all the serious and real criticisms of it, there are numerous benefits too, so many of such a scale that we almost seem to take them for granted as part of the daily tech background, until we really pause to consider what that company has done for access to information at zero cost on a global scale. Tech founders of all kinds and especially the young tech founders of the giants have already helped millions and possibly billions of people all over the world. That they became billionaires and in some cases narcissistic snoops in the process doesn't eliminate what their technologies have done to benefit the world.
- paulgrant999 8y ago
the_clarence 8y ago
What's the average starting age of a successful entrepeneurs? That would be a more relevant statistic
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quickthrower2 8y ago
When do they measure the age? I worked at a company that took 20 years from conception to IPO. So is it the conception age or success age?
- samontar 8y ago
  Paragraph 2 starts like this: > Our team analyzed the age of all business founders in the U.S. in recent years by leveraging confidential administrative data sets from the U.S. Census Bureau. We found that the average age of entrepreneurs at the time they... So they do answer your question in the article.
  - sgustard 8y ago
    Next sentence - "the average age of entrepreneurs at the time they founded their companies is 42"
tw1010 8y ago
You can't treat statistics about humans the same way you treat probabilities about trajectories in a mechanics experiment. People live in a level two chaotic system, which means that the existence of statistics can affect future outcome. Statistics say your age or race (or whatever) isn't optimal to do what you want to do (e.g. be a successful founder)? Screw that! Be the actor that wobbles future statistics, proving we're in a level two world! Force those statisticians to scratch their head when their models don't work out right! These statistics should certainly be interesting for investors, but there are so many more factors of the equation (like personality, drive, grit, access to capital through friends, etc) that are probably much more significant (even in a rigorous statistical sense) to the outcome of a company, that founders themselves are better off just ignoring it. And besides, a founder is a high agency individual, are you really going to let age (whether it be too old or too young) stop you?
- pdimitar 8y ago
  People at 18-25 are largely impatient and willing to invest crazy energy and time in very insignificant (for the revenue) directions. I think it's pretty normal to stereotype young people, especially having in mind that most of us were impatient and lacked focus / direction at our younger age as well. Exceptions do exist. My wife is 22 and has to be the most patient and level-headed person I ever met. But those exceptions are very few and far between. Again, it's a pretty safe bet to stereotype young people.
verelo 8y ago
Weird, literally used this in a source for a commment today.
DrNuke 8y ago
45 is the peak of life (knowledge, experience, network) if you are healthy and out of troubles, so no wonder.
Jedd 8y ago
It's probably not really feasible (problems of definition) but I'd love to see some statistics on average age of unsuccessful startup founders, preferably correlated with industry sector, as they've done here, and perhaps with some context of previous / subsequent success by the individual. As noted in TFA, it seems likely the IT industry would heavily skew the results.
- mikekchar 8y ago
  I may be wrong, but I think the problem is that startups are by and large unsuccessful across the board. It's a bit like trying to find the cause of a disease by looking at what doesn't cause a disease. I did a quick search and got a lot of different answers, but the overwhelming number I got was that "over 90%" of startups fail in the first 3 years. With that, the number of possible common variables is going to be overwhelming. However, it does potentially answer the question of why successful founders tend to be in their 40's. If you have a 90% chance of failing in the first 3 years, if you start 10 startups, perhaps you have a good chance of succeeding ;-)
glial 8y ago
The average of the American worker is probably also roughly 45. Not sure what this adds.
jm20 8y ago
~50% of the top 10 companies in the world by market cap (Facebook, Alphabet, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon) were all started by founders aged 30 or younger. The rest are companies that are over 100 years old (or merged from ones that were) and Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway. I'm by no means saying you can't do it when you're older, but when you're a VC in the business of hitting home runs, it is just hard to ignore that fact. It's also hard to ignore the fact that the 'sexiest' companies in that list are the aforementioned 5 started by young founders.
- pdimitar 8y ago
  What is a "sexy" company exactly?
- vasilipupkin 8y ago
  there are a ton of companies that reach 150 mln dollar valuation and get sold. You don't hear about those, all you hear is consumer facing giants. Those are probably more likely to be founded by younger people. A 45 year old is probably more likely to sell early, but I am guessing.
your-nanny 8y ago
I'm not in the starup biz, but this doesn't surprise me. Seems to me that any many cases having the right idea, particularly in b2b, requires deep domain knowledge.
huffmsa 8y ago
Gave it a glacez but it's important to realize you're probably not successful in your first rodeo. Success might happen in 45, but I'd wager most of those 45s have a few companies under their belts.
- benatkin 8y ago
  I'd be interested to know if they're founders of those companies or they just participated in them during the early days. My guess is a typical 45 year old founder had one or two unsuccessful companies they founded, not a few. And of the companies they participated in but didn't found, maybe some were successful. But these are just guesses, and it would be nice to see some data.
georgewsinger 8y ago
These studies often ignore the power law. The vast majority of value generated in tech is powered by a tiny number of companies. Here are the five most valuable tech companies as of 2017 vs. the age of the founders: 1. Apple: $570.7B explained - Jobs: 21 - Woz: 26 2. Alphabet: $560B - Larry/Sergey: 25ish 3. Microsoft: $434B - Gates: 19 - Allen: 22 4. Amazon: $365B - Bezos: 29 5. Facebook: $354B - Zuckerberg: 19
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- brianwawok 8y ago
  I am not sure it ignores it. For someone who is 18 and very creative, the facts you posted could be helpful to say that they have a chance to be insane lucky if they have the aprox 1 in a billion set of skills and timing required to make it to market. On the other hand, the stats in the article point out that for someone in their 30s or 40s, they have 1/(10? 50?) chance to be able to found a successful startup, for some definition of the word startup. This in general seems a much more useful message to push. A similar story is around education. Some of the richest people in the world did not attend college. However, for 99.9999% of the people - going to to college and getting a science or other hard degree is going to lead to a much nicer life then to go straight from high school to the working world. Cool to look at the 1 in a billion case, it is not always as useful for a case study.
  - Swizec 8y ago
    Lady Gaga worked hard and got rich and famous. But you’re probably not Lady Gaga. It’s funny that we understand this hit-based reality for music, tv, movie, and sports stars, but can’t seem to grasp it when it comes to startups.
    - brianwawok 8y ago
      Who is "we". I get it ;)
    - 8y ago
fipple 8y ago
That’s true but it’s also true that when you look at just the giants (Apple Facebook Google Amazon Microsoft etc) the average age of the founder is much lower than 51.
sibmike 8y ago
Young have the freedom to risk, so they do. The most fail, but some survive. Older have less freedom, so fewer risk. Not as many fail, so some survive. We observe some young and some older founders who have survived. What does it tell us? Not much.
deleted 8y ago
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juiyout 8y ago
It is interesting to see that a successful startup is defined as being the top 1% of employment growth in its first 5 years. I wonder if Theranos would've also been included in this definition. In some culture, selling your own company or having no revenue are considered failures. Yet those "failures" are common theme in the valley. In my own startup experiences, whatever founders goals may be, startups are successful (only?) when they exit their startup phase with goals achieved.
sytelus 8y ago
What's the average age of people you fund? About 29. A lot of people think it's younger because the press especially like to write about young founders. https://www.ycombinator.com/faq/ https://www.ycombinator.com/faq/
baccheion 8y ago
What's the difference between becoming a founder at this age and being young with "adult supervision"?
beat 8y ago
tl;dr VCs prefer young founders because they're easier to exploit.
bordercases 8y ago
What happens if we condition on past startups?
drallison 8y ago
Must have been a slow day at the HBR. What evidence is there that a startup's founders age is a determinate of success? What does it mean to be successful in this context? in general? What other properties of a startup founder might contribute to the startup's success? How are those properties related to her/his age.
angelosp 8y ago
At an early age, you work in order to understand the market and the customer, working close and listen to their needs! Then you find the tier 1 problem! You give a solution! Then at 45, you become a co-founder and your life becomes your job! You probably work 80-100 hours a week. You are 80 years old, you die having changed the world! Your children live in abundance, but you keep the glory and so your name lives for a long time in human history! I've met billionaires who know the "what" and the "how" but can't give me a meaningful "Why". Their "Why" always translates in the fact that they will disrupt the world. I believe that something is missing. I am absolutely positive but one's more and even living an eternal life I can not help myself find meaning and wellbeing in starting up a business and human existence in general. If we do not include social entrepreneurship, why devote so much time for a belief to change the world without knowing that the world actually needs that change and it is not wasteful. We should re-define the "Why" before starting a business. Otherwise, we ended up doing business for the sake of business. Life is certainly worth living and changing the world at young or older age is absolutely helpful for humanity. But the paradox is that we find the worth of life by finding our own true worth first. Transcending all the illusions of limitations, and realizing oneness with nature's consciousness maybe is the ultimate purpose of human life. To conclude, I'd say at a young age develop self-awareness, define you in relation to the universe and then at an older age share your inner value with others(or keep it yourself). Don't just iterate the norms. Think out of the box!

576 points by BerislavLopac 8y ago

Ben Jones (one of the authors of this article) talks about this research on an episode of NPR's Planet Money Indicator. In the episode they make the case that older startup founders are actually more successful than their younger peers for a number of reasons. It's a short listen, if you want to hear more https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/05/02/607815836/aging-up https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/05/02/607815836/agin...

dahart 8y ago

> there is a more benign possibility: VCs are not simply looking to identify the firms with the highest growth potential. Rather, they may seek investments that will yield the highest returns, and it is possible that young founders are more financially constrained than more experienced ones, leading them to cede upside to investors at a lower price. In other words, younger entrepreneurs may be a better “deal” for investors than more experienced founders. Seems plausible, but is it true? Anyone have experience to back it up? There are obvious downsides of a better deal with worse odds. I’ve certainly heard this theory before, so maybe there’s something to it. I’ve heard a few stories of more experienced founders failing to get a term sheet after negotiating well. It’s hard to ever know the reasons, and from what I’ve seen founders tend to take VC rejections personally and/or jump to negative conclusions about VCs when they don’t close, so I tend to take rejection stories with a grain of salt.

sgustard 8y ago
It's easier for VCs to take advantage of inexperience and ambition. Most suicide bombers are young too.
- kumarvvr 8y ago
  I recently heard a podcast on How I built it, by Guy Ras, about Cisco. Your statement rings so true. VC, in this case Sequoia capital, tried to drive an emotional wedge between the two original founders of Cisco and exploited them. Its a fascinating podcast about the culture of VC money. Im sure there are far worse stories now.
  - dlivingston 8y ago
    Nothing new to add, just wanted to say How I Built This is a fantastic podcast. :)
Kpourdeilami 8y ago
If they invest at a company 100k at a cap of of $3mil and discount of 20%, then they will effectively 10X their returns if the company sells for $30mil. Now if they invest at a company founded by experienced entrepreneurs that has same traction as the previous company, they might have to put-in $1mil at a $10mil cap and they’ll need the company to have an exit of $100mil to 10x their money. I haven’t looked at the data personally but my hypothesis is inexperienced founders and $30mil exits are more likely than over $100 mil exits with experienced founders. It’s far more likely to sell for $30mil than it is to have an exit upwards of $100mil. So while a n experienced entrepreneur will be more likely to have an exit at $30 mil than an inexperienced one, it won’t produce the same returns for the investors

ttul 8y ago

I have been an entrepreneur for 17 years and am now “middle aged”. In my early years, I made many, many mistakes that could probably be pegged to youthful hubris. I also had no idea how to run a real business because I had scant experience even working for one let alone crafting anything approaching a “go to market plan”. If I were to start a new company today, I would probably lack the carefree creativity of a 23-year-old, not to mention the energy to work crazy hours. But everything about execution would be better, and as it happens, assuming you have a decent idea at the right time, execution is everything.

adventured 8y ago
I'm in my late 30s now, after two decades as an entrepreneur. My brain was quicker at 21, memory was slightly stronger (slightly faster, easier recall), and I had greater endurance at working productively in very long stretches. And despite that, due to learning how to work more effectively, how to be far more productive with my use of time, understanding what mistakes to avoid, I'm a dramatically better entrepreneur across the board. My patience has improved quite a bit, and my understanding of how to build for simplicity, reducing things down to only what they need to be, is leaps beyond what it was in my 20s. The single most important improvement I've seen, is building up a belligerent ruthlessness when it comes to complexity and general bloat. My 21 year old self just loved to build unnecessary, complex shit.
- rm_-rf_slash 8y ago
  >My 21 year old self just loved to build unnecessary, complex shit When time and energy feel infinite, the perceived cost of wasting either feels low; the real cost remains the same.
  - Alex3917 8y ago
    > the real cost remains the same. The cost is actually much higher when you’re younger because of the time-value of money. It just doesn’t feel that way because the immediate consequences are lower.

ChicagoDave 8y ago

Age could be a factor, but I think it’s all about grooming and connections. You can have Google on your resume and get funded. You might have been groomed from birth for success and you’ll get funded. Success itself is whether the idea had merit and a solid team is built.

sah2ed 8y ago
> Success itself is whether the idea had merit and a solid team is built. Even the concept of an idea being meritable is relative -- it depends on who is making the assessment. Fred Wilson didn't think AirBnB had merit, in fact he thought the whole thing was ridiculous [0], no matter how hard pg tried to convince him otherwise [1]. [0] https://avc.com/2011/03/airbnb/ https://avc.com/2011/03/airbnb/ [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/airbnb.html http://www.paulgraham.com/airbnb.html
- ChicagoDave 8y ago
  Find a successful startup that didn’t have naysayers. Merit is measured by the founder getting customers and proving the model. Not what “experts” say.

tucaz 8y ago

Honest and possibly ignorant question here. Wouldn’t the median be more representative of how old the common founder would be? In a very simplistic example with a data set of two people aged 20 and 70 you would get 45 as the average age when in fact that doesn’t reflect the reality. I always struggle when thinking about average vs median.

liftbigweights 8y ago
Yes, the median would be a better data point. Even better would be a qualification of "successful". Are they equating successful startups that are worth a million to trillion dollar companies like apple and amazon? > I always struggle when thinking about average vs median. Median takes away the bias of the extremes that averages can include. For example, if 9 people make $1 and 1 person makes $1000000, the average is about $100,000 while the media is $1. The $1 is more representative of the sample. But in this "research", there are far more data to unpack. Like the quality and quantity of "successful".
- compcoffee 8y ago
  >Median takes away the bias of the extremes that averages can include. What sort of extremes do you expect to see in age data for starting a business? There will be no 10 years olds, and likely no 90 years olds. >But in this "research", there are far more data to unpack. Why the quotations? Do you not believe this is research? This is a 1000 word summary of their work; do you think these researchers, from some of the best schools on the planet, didn't consider the sorts of questions you pose?
- mithr 8y ago
  > Even better would be a qualification of "successful". Did you... read the article? Fourth paragraph: "Among the top 0.1% of startups based on growth in their first five years, we find that the founders started their companies, on average, when they were 45 years old. These highest-performing firms were identified based on employment growth. The age finding is similar using firms with the fastest sales growth instead, and founder age is similarly high for those startups that successfully exit through an IPO or acquisition. In other words, when you look at most successful firms, the average founder age goes up, not down. Overall, the empirical evidence shows that successful entrepreneurs tend to be middle-aged, not young." You can _disagree_ with their definition of success, but they certainly have one.

purplezooey 8y ago

And yet, the first thing companies do when there's any hint of trouble on the horizon is layoff anyone over 40-45.

mgkimsal 8y ago
> the first thing companies do when there's any hint of trouble on the horizon is layoff anyone over 40-45. well, they're not the 'founders' in most cases.
- bonestamp2 8y ago
  No, but the point is that those people have valuable experience. But they're probably laid off purely from a numbers standpoint, they likely have a higher salary than the junior people. The decision likely isn't based on the merit of the candidates when a company is in trouble; however, that seems like OP's point... that maybe it should be.

bluedino 8y ago

What's the average (at the time of founding) age of say, the top 10 highest acquired startups, or highest IPOs, etc

boulos 8y ago

The original source is here [1] at Ben Jones’s site (he’s a co-author). The HBR article is naturally a popular summary, but the underlying research seems to cover everything people are curious about in the threads so far (distribution of age, what was the criteria for high-growth, etc.). Like most NBER articles, it’s quite long, but you can skip to the end for the figures and get a lot out of it. Figure 1 is the main thing being reported, but I found Figure 4B to be the most important: founders over 30 have a higher likelihood of success. [1] https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/jones-ben/htm/Age%20and%20High%20Growth%20Entrepreneurship.pdf https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/jones-ben/htm/A...

rafiki6 8y ago

I can tie this back to my own experience as well. Humility generally comes with age, and it's important in running a successful and socially responsible business. It's easy to get caught up in the young successful founder myth because that's what gets the most press. But look at a guy like Bill Gates. I'm sure had he started Microsoft 20 years later (assuming all conditions were ripe for it), he would have done it quite differently and likely would have had less law suits on his hand. That being said, I do think there's much to be said about the ambitiousness of the ideas when you're younger than when you're older. Your view of the world changes tremendously.

j45 8y ago
The importance of learning humility and discipline to do what needs to be done to stay an entrepreneur overlooked far too often. Meteoric rises are difficult to keep in the air because of the lack of foundational skills. Staying a little foolish and hungry (paraphrasing Steve Jobs) seems to be very good long term advice.
bonestamp2 8y ago
In some ways, it's also easier to run a startup when you're younger. Most younger people have more energy and fewer family obligations. But, that also explains why 45 makes a lot of sense... if you have kids they're probably old enough that they're doing a lot of their own things so you've got the wisdom from age (experience) and you've shed some of the family responsibilities that you might have at, say, age 35.
- rhizome 8y ago
  Younger founders almost certainly also spend more energy on things that an older one already knows not to do, or that can be done more efficiently. Many mistakes that cost time and energy can be mooted by experience.
- kumarvvr 8y ago
  Kids who do their own things, leaves a lot of time at hand. As a father of a 3 year old, I find it very difficult to sneak in even 15 minutes of thinking time. Of course, it dosent help that im also working while planning to start a web business.

adventured 8y ago

I've compiled and added to this list over time. When you go digging for how old the founders of major tech companies have been, you'll find they're overwhelmingly closer to their mid 30s, nearly all are over ~27, with plenty in their 40s. Exceptionally few have been like Gates, Jobs and Zuckerberg. If you're 30 and you think it's too late, it's not, you may not have even hit your prime yet. Ages of founders: Paul Graham (31, Viaweb), Jan Koum (33, WhatsApp), Brian Acton (37, WhatsApp), Ev Williams (34, Twitter), Jack Dorsey (30, Twitter; 33, Square), Elon Musk (31, SpaceX; 32, Tesla), Garrett Camp (30, Uber), Travis Kalanick (32, Uber), Brian Chesky (27, Airbnb), Adam Neumann (31, WeWork), Reed Hastings (37, Netflix), Reid Hoffman (36, LinkedIn), Jack Ma (35, Alibaba), Jeff Bezos (30, Amazon), Jerry Sanders (33, AMD), Marc Benioff (35, Salesforce), Ross Perot (32, EDS), Peter Norton (39, Norton), Larry Ellison (33, Oracle), Mitch Kapor (32, Lotus), Leonard Bosack (32, Cisco), Sandy Lerner (29, Cisco), Gordon Moore (39, Intel), Mark Cuban (37, Broadcast.com), Scott Cook (31, Intuit), Nolan Bushnell (29, Atari), Paul Galvin (33, Motorola), Irwin Jacobs (52, Qualcomm), David Duffield (46, PeopleSoft; 64 Workday), Aneel Bhusri (39, Workday), Thomas Siebel (41, Siebel Systems), John McAfee (42, McAfee), Gary Hendrix (32, Symantec), Scott McNealy (28, Sun), Markus Persson (30, Mojang), Craig Newmark (43, Craigslist), James Goodnight (33, SAS), John Sall (28, SAS), Diane Greene (43, VMWare), Mendel Rosenblum (36, VMWare), Bill Coleman (48, BEA Systems), Evan Goldberg (35, NetSuite), David Sacks (36, Yammer), Jack Smith (28, Hotmail), Sabeer Bhatia (28, Hotmail), Chad Hurley (28, YouTube), Andy Rubin (37, Danger; 41, Android), Rodney Brooks (36, iRobot), Jeff Hawkins (35, Palm), Niklas Zennström (37, Skype), Janus Friis (27, Skype), David Bohnett (38, Geocities), Bill Gross (40, GoTo.com/Overture), Subrah Iyar (38, WebEx), Min Zhu (47, WebEx), Pierre Omidyar (28, eBay), Rich Barton (29 for Expedia, 38 for Zillow), Jim Clark (38 for SGI, and 49 for Netscape), Charles Wang (32, CA), David Packard (27, HP), John Warnock (42, Adobe), Robert Noyce (30 at Fairchild, 41 for Intel), Rod Canion (37, Compaq), Jen-Hsun Huang (30, nVidia), Eli Harari (41, SanDisk), Sanjay Mehrotra (28, SanDisk), Al Shugart (48, Seagate), Finis Conner (34, Seagate), Henry Samueli (37, Broadcom), Henry Nicholas (32, Broadcom), Charles Brewer (36, Mindspring), William Shockley (45, Shockley), Ron Rivest (35, RSA), Adi Shamir (30, RSA), John Walker (32, Autodesk), Halsey Minor (30, CNet), David Filo (28, Yahoo), Jeremy Stoppelman (27, Yelp), Eric Lefkofsky (39, Groupon), Andrew Mason (29, Groupon), Wilfred Corrigan (43, LSI), Joe Parkinson (33, Micron), Aart J. de Geus (32, Synopsys), John Moores (36, BMC Software), Vivek Ranadivé (40, Tibco), Michael Baum (41, Splunk), Suhas Patil (37, Cirrus Logic), T. J. Rodgers (34, Cypress Semi), Scott Scherr (37, Ultimate Software), Ray Stata (31, Analog Devices), Ross Freeman (36, Xilinx), David Hitz (28, NetApp), Brian Lee (28, Legalzoom), Demis Hassabis (34, DeepMind), Tim Westergren (35, Pandora), Martin Lorentzon (37, Spotify), Ashar Aziz (44, FireEye), Kevin O'Connor (36, DoubleClick), Ben Silbermann (28, Pinterest), Evan Sharp (28, Pinterest), Steve Kirsch (38, Infoseek), Stephen Kaufer (36, TripAdvisor), Michael McNeilly (28, Applied Materials), Eugene McDermott (52, Texas Instruments), Richard Egan (43, EMC), Gary Kildall (32, Digital Research), Hasso Plattner (28, SAP), Robert Glaser (32, Real Networks), Patrick Byrne (37, Overstock.com), Marc Lore (33, Diapers.com), Ed Iacobucci (36, Citrix Systems), Ray Noorda (55, Novell), Tom Leighton (42, Akamai), Daniel Lewin (28, Akamai), Michael Mauldin (35, Lycos), Tom Anderson (33, MySpace), Chris DeWolfe (37, MySpace), Mark Pincus (41, Zynga), Nir Zuk (30, Palo Alto Networks), Caterina Fake (34, Flickr), Stewart Butterfield (31 for Flickr; 40 for Slack), Kevin Systrom (27, Instagram), Adi Tatarko (37, Houzz), Brian Armstrong (29, Coinbase), Pradeep Sindhu (43, Juniper), Peter Thiel (31, PayPal; 37, Palantir), Jay Walker (42, priceline.com), Tom Gosner (40, DocuSign), Shay Banon (31, Elastic), Beerud Sheth (29, Elance), Arkady Volozh (36, Yandex), Hiroshi Mikitani (34, Rakuten), Morris Chang (56, Taiwan Semi) It has also largely held true in China: Pony Ma (27, Tencent), Robin Li (32, Baidu), Liu Qiangdong (29, JD.com), Lei Jun (40, Xiaomi), Ren Zhengfei (38, Huawei), Cheng Wei (29, Didi Chuxing), James Liang (29, Ctrip), Zhang Yiming (Toutiao, 29), Wang Xing (30, Meituan-Dianping), Wang Zhidong (32, Sina)

replicatorblog 8y ago

Who is the most famous tech founder who was 45 or older when they founded their first company? There were more in the 70s, 80s, or 90s (E.g. Jim Clark) because the industry was still forming, but even then the wunderkind college dropout drove most of the value creation. In the modern era, Peter Gassner, founder of Veeva was 42. Diane Greene founded VMWare at 43. Brian Acton was 38. You start falling into the 30s fairly quickly. And if we look in terms of value creation, the crazy outsize wins come from founder founders. E.g. the GAFA companies were all founded by sub-30s. This study, like most of the Kauffman Foundation studies, tend to rely on obscure methods to reach these counterintuitive results. It's not to say 45-year-olds can't build great companies, but if you made a list of the 150-200 most notable tech startups of the last few decades, you'd see an average age closer to 33 than 45, even lower if you don't include the 2nd or 3rd startups of some founders.

simonebrunozzi 8y ago
I am 41, startup CEO for ~14 months, and currently having one of the worst days since the company started. (edit: actually, the worst day period). Although you might be right on statistics, I am 100% sure 10 years ago I wouldn't have had the maturity or the experience or the grit to face this day, the way I do right now. Also, don't forget that today's returns are huge, compared to 10-20 years ago, and that today's entrepreneurs start earlier than their equivalent of 20 years ago. It's hard to make sense of these numbers without bias or without any risk of misinterpreting things.
- ekanes 8y ago
  Sorry to hear about today. Hang in there, you got this!
  - simonebrunozzi 8y ago
    Thanks!
themagician 8y ago
Being successful and being famous are two completely different things only tangentially related. The 30 companies that have famous founders are far outweighed by the ten thousand that you don't know of. On more than one occasion I’ve found myself working for absolutely massive companies (public in many cases) that I’d never previously even heard of. I’ve definitely had a lot of those, “Holy shit, how is this the biggest company I’ve never heard of,” experiences. There are a lot of companies in finance, telecom, and infrastructure that you don’t think about because they don’t have an app that sits on your home screen.

formalsystem 8y ago

I always find it interesting when these sorts of threads are posted. I for one look at them as am I too old to be starting my own company or should I chill out because I still have time. Fundamentally I think there's limited value in drawing lessons from these stories because you're probably your own best judge of whether you should quit your job or not. Your risk tolerance lowers as you get older but your skills will improve so it's up to you to decide what's the sweet spot. That said there is an age threshold where you'll be treated like an old man at a big company so may as well demonstrate your expertise on your own company before that happens.

Joe-Z 8y ago
I don‘t think people will use this research to „optimize“ their time to fund. If you have an idea and things align you will do that regardless of your age. I think it provides an interesting contrast to the idea of young-genius unicorn-startups in that it underlines that yes, these companies exist and get a lot of coverage but most innovation still comes from people experienced in their field who had time to learn the appropriate skills for leading a company.
- Retric 8y ago
  Young founder ages are mentioned specifically because they are unusual. Unfortunately, because many people only see ‘newsworthy’ information they get a very distorted view of reality.
wwweston 8y ago
> am I too old to be starting my own company or should I chill out because I still have time. Seems to me youth or age are probably less relevant questions than whether you see an opportunity (and to what degree it's proven), what domain expertise is necessary to address it (and whether you have or can get access to that), and what resources you have available. And as you noted, there are risks to simply settling into corporate comfort.
canadapups 8y ago
I learnt to code and started my online business in my 30s because it's fun. Age shouldn't stop anyone from fun.

lazyjones 8y ago

I only skimmed over the article, but it seems to me that their data doesn‘t take into account that Angel/VC investors might be mistaken for actual founders in case they held shares since incorporation. This would of course largely invalidate their main claim. Can anyone confirm/deny?

analognoise 8y ago

I don't get all the "entrepreneur" founder worship stuff. The disconnected tech set has produced a lot of money - and burned a lot more. They've ruined our ability to connect to each other so that we could connect on Facebook. They've ruined sidewalks with scooters, lost all of our data, participated in tracking us at all times, helped ICE deport children, and made a wage slaves out of people at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder by greasing the "gig" economy wheels with algorithms. At what point do we, as technical people, wake up and go "hey, maybe all this bullshit lingo, youth fetishism, digital isolation and community destruction is bad as a whole?" I'd rather see content about a founder who actually helped people somewhere solve some problem, and it made things better for regular people - those outside the tech bubble. It seems like all everyone wants to do is blast off with like minded people.

shadowxs76 8y ago
But this is simply wrong, at least partly. Yes, your criticisms of many of these tech founders and youth fetishism in general are right in certain ways but these existing companies help millions of people all the time. Facebook is used for a lot of vapid social media posing, but it also serves as a platform for millions of social protest and communication movements worldwide. The same for twitter (possibly even more). I've seen both used amazingly well by people at a grassroots level where I live to communicate news that the government and organized crime try to censor in normal media with deadly violence. Amazon is considered a vast exploiter of cheap labor and a crusher of "mom&pop" businesses, but it also frees millions of people to instantly sell their offerings online, while offering honestly useful savings and product access to millions of others. And as for Google, besides all the serious and real criticisms of it, there are numerous benefits too, so many of such a scale that we almost seem to take them for granted as part of the daily tech background, until we really pause to consider what that company has done for access to information at zero cost on a global scale. Tech founders of all kinds and especially the young tech founders of the giants have already helped millions and possibly billions of people all over the world. That they became billionaires and in some cases narcissistic snoops in the process doesn't eliminate what their technologies have done to benefit the world.
paulgrant999 8y ago

the_clarence 8y ago

What's the average starting age of a successful entrepeneurs? That would be a more relevant statistic

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quickthrower2 8y ago

When do they measure the age? I worked at a company that took 20 years from conception to IPO. So is it the conception age or success age?

samontar 8y ago
Paragraph 2 starts like this: > Our team analyzed the age of all business founders in the U.S. in recent years by leveraging confidential administrative data sets from the U.S. Census Bureau. We found that the average age of entrepreneurs at the time they... So they do answer your question in the article.
- sgustard 8y ago
  Next sentence - "the average age of entrepreneurs at the time they founded their companies is 42"

tw1010 8y ago

You can't treat statistics about humans the same way you treat probabilities about trajectories in a mechanics experiment. People live in a level two chaotic system, which means that the existence of statistics can affect future outcome. Statistics say your age or race (or whatever) isn't optimal to do what you want to do (e.g. be a successful founder)? Screw that! Be the actor that wobbles future statistics, proving we're in a level two world! Force those statisticians to scratch their head when their models don't work out right! These statistics should certainly be interesting for investors, but there are so many more factors of the equation (like personality, drive, grit, access to capital through friends, etc) that are probably much more significant (even in a rigorous statistical sense) to the outcome of a company, that founders themselves are better off just ignoring it. And besides, a founder is a high agency individual, are you really going to let age (whether it be too old or too young) stop you?

pdimitar 8y ago
People at 18-25 are largely impatient and willing to invest crazy energy and time in very insignificant (for the revenue) directions. I think it's pretty normal to stereotype young people, especially having in mind that most of us were impatient and lacked focus / direction at our younger age as well. Exceptions do exist. My wife is 22 and has to be the most patient and level-headed person I ever met. But those exceptions are very few and far between. Again, it's a pretty safe bet to stereotype young people.

verelo 8y ago

Weird, literally used this in a source for a commment today.

DrNuke 8y ago

45 is the peak of life (knowledge, experience, network) if you are healthy and out of troubles, so no wonder.

Jedd 8y ago

It's probably not really feasible (problems of definition) but I'd love to see some statistics on average age of unsuccessful startup founders, preferably correlated with industry sector, as they've done here, and perhaps with some context of previous / subsequent success by the individual. As noted in TFA, it seems likely the IT industry would heavily skew the results.

mikekchar 8y ago
I may be wrong, but I think the problem is that startups are by and large unsuccessful across the board. It's a bit like trying to find the cause of a disease by looking at what doesn't cause a disease. I did a quick search and got a lot of different answers, but the overwhelming number I got was that "over 90%" of startups fail in the first 3 years. With that, the number of possible common variables is going to be overwhelming. However, it does potentially answer the question of why successful founders tend to be in their 40's. If you have a 90% chance of failing in the first 3 years, if you start 10 startups, perhaps you have a good chance of succeeding ;-)

glial 8y ago

The average of the American worker is probably also roughly 45. Not sure what this adds.

jm20 8y ago

~50% of the top 10 companies in the world by market cap (Facebook, Alphabet, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon) were all started by founders aged 30 or younger. The rest are companies that are over 100 years old (or merged from ones that were) and Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway. I'm by no means saying you can't do it when you're older, but when you're a VC in the business of hitting home runs, it is just hard to ignore that fact. It's also hard to ignore the fact that the 'sexiest' companies in that list are the aforementioned 5 started by young founders.

pdimitar 8y ago
What is a "sexy" company exactly?
vasilipupkin 8y ago
there are a ton of companies that reach 150 mln dollar valuation and get sold. You don't hear about those, all you hear is consumer facing giants. Those are probably more likely to be founded by younger people. A 45 year old is probably more likely to sell early, but I am guessing.

your-nanny 8y ago

I'm not in the starup biz, but this doesn't surprise me. Seems to me that any many cases having the right idea, particularly in b2b, requires deep domain knowledge.

huffmsa 8y ago

Gave it a glacez but it's important to realize you're probably not successful in your first rodeo. Success might happen in 45, but I'd wager most of those 45s have a few companies under their belts.

benatkin 8y ago
I'd be interested to know if they're founders of those companies or they just participated in them during the early days. My guess is a typical 45 year old founder had one or two unsuccessful companies they founded, not a few. And of the companies they participated in but didn't found, maybe some were successful. But these are just guesses, and it would be nice to see some data.

georgewsinger 8y ago

These studies often ignore the power law. The vast majority of value generated in tech is powered by a tiny number of companies. Here are the five most valuable tech companies as of 2017 vs. the age of the founders: 1. Apple: $570.7B explained - Jobs: 21 - Woz: 26 2. Alphabet: $560B - Larry/Sergey: 25ish 3. Microsoft: $434B - Gates: 19 - Allen: 22 4. Amazon: $365B - Bezos: 29 5. Facebook: $354B - Zuckerberg: 19

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brianwawok 8y ago
I am not sure it ignores it. For someone who is 18 and very creative, the facts you posted could be helpful to say that they have a chance to be insane lucky if they have the aprox 1 in a billion set of skills and timing required to make it to market. On the other hand, the stats in the article point out that for someone in their 30s or 40s, they have 1/(10? 50?) chance to be able to found a successful startup, for some definition of the word startup. This in general seems a much more useful message to push. A similar story is around education. Some of the richest people in the world did not attend college. However, for 99.9999% of the people - going to to college and getting a science or other hard degree is going to lead to a much nicer life then to go straight from high school to the working world. Cool to look at the 1 in a billion case, it is not always as useful for a case study.
- Swizec 8y ago
  Lady Gaga worked hard and got rich and famous. But you’re probably not Lady Gaga. It’s funny that we understand this hit-based reality for music, tv, movie, and sports stars, but can’t seem to grasp it when it comes to startups.
  - brianwawok 8y ago
    Who is "we". I get it ;)
  - 8y ago

fipple 8y ago

That’s true but it’s also true that when you look at just the giants (Apple Facebook Google Amazon Microsoft etc) the average age of the founder is much lower than 51.

sibmike 8y ago

Young have the freedom to risk, so they do. The most fail, but some survive. Older have less freedom, so fewer risk. Not as many fail, so some survive. We observe some young and some older founders who have survived. What does it tell us? Not much.

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juiyout 8y ago

It is interesting to see that a successful startup is defined as being the top 1% of employment growth in its first 5 years. I wonder if Theranos would've also been included in this definition. In some culture, selling your own company or having no revenue are considered failures. Yet those "failures" are common theme in the valley. In my own startup experiences, whatever founders goals may be, startups are successful (only?) when they exit their startup phase with goals achieved.

sytelus 8y ago

What's the average age of people you fund? About 29. A lot of people think it's younger because the press especially like to write about young founders. https://www.ycombinator.com/faq/ https://www.ycombinator.com/faq/

baccheion 8y ago

What's the difference between becoming a founder at this age and being young with "adult supervision"?

beat 8y ago

tl;dr VCs prefer young founders because they're easier to exploit.

bordercases 8y ago

What happens if we condition on past startups?

drallison 8y ago

Must have been a slow day at the HBR. What evidence is there that a startup's founders age is a determinate of success? What does it mean to be successful in this context? in general? What other properties of a startup founder might contribute to the startup's success? How are those properties related to her/his age.

angelosp 8y ago

At an early age, you work in order to understand the market and the customer, working close and listen to their needs! Then you find the tier 1 problem! You give a solution! Then at 45, you become a co-founder and your life becomes your job! You probably work 80-100 hours a week. You are 80 years old, you die having changed the world! Your children live in abundance, but you keep the glory and so your name lives for a long time in human history! I've met billionaires who know the "what" and the "how" but can't give me a meaningful "Why". Their "Why" always translates in the fact that they will disrupt the world. I believe that something is missing. I am absolutely positive but one's more and even living an eternal life I can not help myself find meaning and wellbeing in starting up a business and human existence in general. If we do not include social entrepreneurship, why devote so much time for a belief to change the world without knowing that the world actually needs that change and it is not wasteful. We should re-define the "Why" before starting a business. Otherwise, we ended up doing business for the sake of business. Life is certainly worth living and changing the world at young or older age is absolutely helpful for humanity. But the paradox is that we find the worth of life by finding our own true worth first. Transcending all the illusions of limitations, and realizing oneness with nature's consciousness maybe is the ultimate purpose of human life. To conclude, I'd say at a young age develop self-awareness, define you in relation to the universe and then at an older age share your inner value with others(or keep it yourself). Don't just iterate the norms. Think out of the box!