I'd be careful drawing conclusions about tech entrepreneurship from this study. If you look at the actual paper (I somehow couldnt find a link to the paper in

I'd be careful drawing conclusions about tech entrepreneurship from this study. If you look at the actual paper (I somehow couldnt find a link to the paper in the summary article... its here [0]), the authors used growth in jobs as their metric for success. Employment growth is a very imperfect surrogate for startup success. The paper says they also looked at sales growth and IPO / M&A exits, but they dont show this data. Not sure how theyd get sales growth data for all these companies in the first place. I wonder why they didnt publish the analysis of age and sales growth, IPO and M&A exits? Maybe i missed it? Using employment growth as the success metric is biased towards high growth labor-intensive companies (like specialty manufacturing firms), and against high growth labor efficient companies (like tech and biotech). The summary article linked here is pretty intellectually dishonest imo, the tagline being "a definitive new study dispels the myth of the silicon valley wunderkind". If they published data on age and sales growth, exit, or returns, maybe they could say this is "definitive". I dont see how a study measuring startup success based on job growth can be definitive. There are other studies showing young founders do better, though they have their limitations as well. The truth is probably that you can succeed as a founder at any age I started looking at this study bc I was trying to find data on age bias in biotech, which is the opposite of in tech. In biotech startups, the conventional wisdom is that only experienced founders can succeed. But the data does not support that. More $10B+ biotech companies have been started by under 40 CEOs than over 40 CEOs, but most CEOs who get funded today are over 40 (or even 50). This doesnt mean young foudners are better in biotech, just that a bias towards "experience" is not supported by data [1] [0] https://www.ipr.northwestern.edu/publications/docs/workingpapers/2018/wp-18-11.pdf https://www.ipr.northwestern.edu/publications/docs/workingpa... [1] https://www.baybridgebio.com/blog/young_founders_1.html https://www.baybridgebio.com/blog/young_founders_1.html