7 ms·

Founders of Successful Tech Companies Are Mostly Middle-Aged

140 points by gk1 7y ago

jppope 7y ago
Shocking!
remotecool 7y ago
Most 20 somethings are usually used by venture capital firms to prove an idea and then replaced with more experienced and trusted executives. There are a few rare exceptions, like Facebook.
- ziddoap 7y ago
  Do you have any citation on this? Genuinely interested to see if this is a real phenomenon or just anecdotally what you have witnessed.
  - rgbrenner 7y ago
    This is true, but I don't think VCs use young founders to prove an idea. A startup is a very different environment than an enterprise.. and it's very rare that a person can execute well at all stages. So eventually the startup grows to a point where more professional leadership is helpful.. and VCs will happily replace a founder if they think it'll make them more money. There's a lot of research on this (and dating back quite a while.. not new at all). So here are just some quick links I found: https://www.kauffman.org/-/media/kauffman_org/research-reports-and-covers/2015/11/ceo_evolution.pdf https://www.kauffman.org/-/media/kauffman_org/research-repor... https://academic.oup.com/rfs/article-abstract/31/4/1532/4604800?redirectedFrom=fulltext https://academic.oup.com/rfs/article-abstract/31/4/1532/4604... https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/the-founding-ceos-dilemma-stay-or-go https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/the-founding-ceos-dilemma-stay-or... https://www.businessinsider.com/how-often-do-founding-ceos-get-replaced-2011-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/how-often-do-founding-ceos-g... Also this is a nice article about this from the Founders Dilemma (which is a good book also): https://hbr.org/2008/02/the-founders-dilemma https://hbr.org/2008/02/the-founders-dilemma
    - remotecool 7y ago
      Creating a successful startup is proving an idea. That was my point.
    - ziddoap 7y ago
      Thanks for all the info!
- ulfw 7y ago
  Those executives aren’t “founders” though. So I am not sure how this applies.
devoply 7y ago
Zuck is also middle aged. :P
npalli 7y ago
Those who want to read the paper 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...
dimitar 7y ago
Working paper version of the one in the article: https://www.nber.org/papers/w24489.pdf https://www.nber.org/papers/w24489.pdf Interesting tidnit from the discussion section: V.D Venture Capitalist Behavior We also see that venture capitalists tend to bet on relatively young founders. Given that younger founders have substantially lower batting averages (see Figure 3), the founder age tendency in VC investments may be surprising. VCs may thus be seen as making bad bets, which may be consistent with empirical findings elsewhere suggesting that VCs have earned low returns (Kaplan and Lerner 2010). However, it may also be the case that young founders are more in need of early-stage external finance, thus leading to this relationship. More subtly, and noting that VCs are seeking high returns, which is not identical to high growth, it may be that younger founders tend to sell their equity at lower prices, and thus VCs are making optimal return decisions. Teasing apart why VCs bet young is an interesting area for further work. We can say now however that venture capital, a major source of early-stage financing that can help drive creative destruction and economy-wide growth, does not currently appear allocated to the firms with the highest growth potential.
paggle 7y ago
This is true for “successful tech companies” but not for “mega successful tech companies” (e.g. Top 10 of all time, like Apple Google Microsoft Facebook Amazon Netflix etc.) There you will find the median age closer to 20 than 30.
- jacques_chester 7y ago
  John D. Rockefeller was 31 when he founded Standard Oil. Andrew Carnegie was 57 when he founded Carnegie steel.
  - throwaway082729 7y ago
    One thing I'm curious when I hear about entrepreneurs that started late is what they did leading up to it. That's a key difference in 21 year olds and 35-year olds. Are the 35-year olds doing something in common leading up to it that makes them more likely to be successful?
  - P0l83q4p1Hw3Ul 7y ago
    My understanding is that JDR started his business at 20, got into oil at 24, bought out his partners, started a new partnership, and then ended that partnership at 31, naming the part of the business he got Standard Oil.
    - jacques_chester 7y ago
      He did, which kinda underscores the argument that entrepreneurs with prior experience and connections have a higher chance of success.
- hello_newman 7y ago
  For what it's worth, Reed Hastings founded Netflix when he was 36, and Jeff Bezos founded Amazon when he was 30.
  - paggle 7y ago
fcaruana 7y ago
Thank god
gricardo99 7y ago
But how many also had extensive experience in startups in their 20s and 30s?
adventured 7y ago
I update this list from time to time. It overwhelmingly supports the premise that most of the founders of successful (or otherwise well-known) tech companies are typically in their 30s or older (and not ~18-22): Paul Graham (31, Viaweb); Jan Koum (33, WhatsApp); Brian Acton (37, WhatsApp); Ev Williams (34, Twitter); Jack Dorsey (33, Square); Elon Musk (32, Tesla | 31, SpaceX | 27, PayPal); 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); Pierre Omidyar (28, eBay); Rich Barton (29, Expedia | 38, Zillow); Jim Clark (38, SGI | 49, Netscape); Charles Wang (32, CA); David Packard (27, HP); Craig Newmark (43, Craigslist); John Warnock (42, Adobe); Robert Noyce (30, Fairchild | 41, Intel); Rod Canion (37, Compaq); Jen-Hsun Huang (30, nVidia); James Goodnight (33, SAS); John Sall (28, SAS); 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); Markus Persson (30, Mojang); 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); Diane Greene (43, VMWare); Mendel Rosenblum (36, VMWare); Michael Mauldin (35, Lycos); Tom Anderson (33, MySpace); Chris DeWolfe (37, MySpace); Mark Pincus (41, Zynga); Caterina Fake (34, Flickr); Stewart Butterfield (31, Flickr | 36, 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); Bill Coleman (48, BEA Systems); Evan Goldberg (35, NetSuite); Fred Luddy (48, ServiceNow); Michael Baum (41, Splunk); Nir Zuk (33, Palo Alto Networks); 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); Tom Gosner (39, DocuSign); Niklas Zennström (37, Skype); Janus Friis (27, Skype); George Kurtz (40, CrowdStrike); Trip Hawkins (28, EA); Gabe Newell (33, Valve); David Bohnett (38, Geocities); Bill Gross (40, GoTo.com/Overture); Subrah Iyar (38, WebEx); Eric Yuan (41, Zoom); Min Zhu (47, WebEx); Bob Parsons (47, GoDaddy); Wilfred Corrigan (43, LSI); Joe Parkinson (33, Micron); Aart J. de Geus (32, Synopsys); Patrick Byrne (37, Overstock); Matthew Prince (34, Cloudflare); Ben Uretsky (28, DigitalOcean); Tom Preston-Werner (28, GitHub); Louis Borders (48, Webvan); John Moores (36, BMC Software); Vivek Ranadivé (40, Tibco); Pony Ma (27, Tencent); Robin Li (32, Baidu); Liu Qiangdong (29, JD.com); Lei Jun (40, Xiaomi); Ren Zhengfei (38, Huawei); Arkady Volozh (36, Yandex); Hiroshi Mikitani (34, Rakuten); Morris Chang (56, Taiwan Semi); Cheng Wei (29, Didi Chuxing); James Liang (29, Ctrip); Zhang Yiming (29, ByteDance);
streetcat1 7y ago
The harder the tech, the older the founder.
- tempsy 7y ago
  There are no rules on this either. I’m pretty sure the Neuralink president is like 29.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- muzani 7y ago
  Microsoft and Apple worked on some very difficult tech.
forkLding 7y ago
From running my own apps and toy startups in college, I don't think its really the age, its rather the ability of the person to do many things from the tech side to the business side from like creating the tech/app to going out and marketing it so you can actually carry the app to success at an early stage, the experience the person actually has with developing and marketing/distributing a product so you can carry the app at a growth stage, the connections the person has to raise money and find cofounders/employees and the financial capital of the person so you can scale a product to and past product-market fit. These things can come with age but a young person with all the above can run a successful business if they have these things. On the other hand, you can be middle-aged or 50+ and not have any of these things and run a quite awful startup that turnovers like ~20% of your employees each month which my friend works at and can attest to, as they have a rather middle-aged senior management and ceo + cto at their 50-person startup with executives who have been in the tech and real estate industry at companies like Expedia for 7+ years and it is not successful despite raising huge amounts of cash and their company product has never been launched in the 2+ years or any user testing in the period their company has existed and still offer free dinners and monthly bonuses with the enormous cashpile they raised and keep raising. This is also why I think people like Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs/Steve Wozniak or Bill Gates or Spiegel/Murphy or the Collison brothers, etc. has, which is the ability and experience or at least talent of pretty much any middle-aged startup founder. There are just some people that outshine others even at a young age.

140 points by gk1 7y ago

Shocking!

Most 20 somethings are usually used by venture capital firms to prove an idea and then replaced with more experienced and trusted executives. There are a few rare exceptions, like Facebook.

ziddoap 7y ago
Do you have any citation on this? Genuinely interested to see if this is a real phenomenon or just anecdotally what you have witnessed.
- rgbrenner 7y ago
  This is true, but I don't think VCs use young founders to prove an idea. A startup is a very different environment than an enterprise.. and it's very rare that a person can execute well at all stages. So eventually the startup grows to a point where more professional leadership is helpful.. and VCs will happily replace a founder if they think it'll make them more money. There's a lot of research on this (and dating back quite a while.. not new at all). So here are just some quick links I found: https://www.kauffman.org/-/media/kauffman_org/research-reports-and-covers/2015/11/ceo_evolution.pdf https://www.kauffman.org/-/media/kauffman_org/research-repor... https://academic.oup.com/rfs/article-abstract/31/4/1532/4604800?redirectedFrom=fulltext https://academic.oup.com/rfs/article-abstract/31/4/1532/4604... https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/the-founding-ceos-dilemma-stay-or-go https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/the-founding-ceos-dilemma-stay-or... https://www.businessinsider.com/how-often-do-founding-ceos-get-replaced-2011-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/how-often-do-founding-ceos-g... Also this is a nice article about this from the Founders Dilemma (which is a good book also): https://hbr.org/2008/02/the-founders-dilemma https://hbr.org/2008/02/the-founders-dilemma
  - remotecool 7y ago
    Creating a successful startup is proving an idea. That was my point.
  - ziddoap 7y ago
    Thanks for all the info!
ulfw 7y ago
Those executives aren’t “founders” though. So I am not sure how this applies.

devoply 7y ago

Zuck is also middle aged. :P

npalli 7y ago

Those who want to read the paper 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...

dimitar 7y ago

Working paper version of the one in the article: https://www.nber.org/papers/w24489.pdf https://www.nber.org/papers/w24489.pdf Interesting tidnit from the discussion section: V.D Venture Capitalist Behavior We also see that venture capitalists tend to bet on relatively young founders. Given that younger founders have substantially lower batting averages (see Figure 3), the founder age tendency in VC investments may be surprising. VCs may thus be seen as making bad bets, which may be consistent with empirical findings elsewhere suggesting that VCs have earned low returns (Kaplan and Lerner 2010). However, it may also be the case that young founders are more in need of early-stage external finance, thus leading to this relationship. More subtly, and noting that VCs are seeking high returns, which is not identical to high growth, it may be that younger founders tend to sell their equity at lower prices, and thus VCs are making optimal return decisions. Teasing apart why VCs bet young is an interesting area for further work. We can say now however that venture capital, a major source of early-stage financing that can help drive creative destruction and economy-wide growth, does not currently appear allocated to the firms with the highest growth potential.

paggle 7y ago

This is true for “successful tech companies” but not for “mega successful tech companies” (e.g. Top 10 of all time, like Apple Google Microsoft Facebook Amazon Netflix etc.) There you will find the median age closer to 20 than 30.

jacques_chester 7y ago
John D. Rockefeller was 31 when he founded Standard Oil. Andrew Carnegie was 57 when he founded Carnegie steel.
- throwaway082729 7y ago
  One thing I'm curious when I hear about entrepreneurs that started late is what they did leading up to it. That's a key difference in 21 year olds and 35-year olds. Are the 35-year olds doing something in common leading up to it that makes them more likely to be successful?
- P0l83q4p1Hw3Ul 7y ago
  My understanding is that JDR started his business at 20, got into oil at 24, bought out his partners, started a new partnership, and then ended that partnership at 31, naming the part of the business he got Standard Oil.
  - jacques_chester 7y ago
    He did, which kinda underscores the argument that entrepreneurs with prior experience and connections have a higher chance of success.
hello_newman 7y ago
For what it's worth, Reed Hastings founded Netflix when he was 36, and Jeff Bezos founded Amazon when he was 30.
- paggle 7y ago

fcaruana 7y ago

Thank god

gricardo99 7y ago

But how many also had extensive experience in startups in their 20s and 30s?

adventured 7y ago

I update this list from time to time. It overwhelmingly supports the premise that most of the founders of successful (or otherwise well-known) tech companies are typically in their 30s or older (and not ~18-22): Paul Graham (31, Viaweb); Jan Koum (33, WhatsApp); Brian Acton (37, WhatsApp); Ev Williams (34, Twitter); Jack Dorsey (33, Square); Elon Musk (32, Tesla | 31, SpaceX | 27, PayPal); 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); Pierre Omidyar (28, eBay); Rich Barton (29, Expedia | 38, Zillow); Jim Clark (38, SGI | 49, Netscape); Charles Wang (32, CA); David Packard (27, HP); Craig Newmark (43, Craigslist); John Warnock (42, Adobe); Robert Noyce (30, Fairchild | 41, Intel); Rod Canion (37, Compaq); Jen-Hsun Huang (30, nVidia); James Goodnight (33, SAS); John Sall (28, SAS); 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); Markus Persson (30, Mojang); 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); Diane Greene (43, VMWare); Mendel Rosenblum (36, VMWare); Michael Mauldin (35, Lycos); Tom Anderson (33, MySpace); Chris DeWolfe (37, MySpace); Mark Pincus (41, Zynga); Caterina Fake (34, Flickr); Stewart Butterfield (31, Flickr | 36, 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); Bill Coleman (48, BEA Systems); Evan Goldberg (35, NetSuite); Fred Luddy (48, ServiceNow); Michael Baum (41, Splunk); Nir Zuk (33, Palo Alto Networks); 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); Tom Gosner (39, DocuSign); Niklas Zennström (37, Skype); Janus Friis (27, Skype); George Kurtz (40, CrowdStrike); Trip Hawkins (28, EA); Gabe Newell (33, Valve); David Bohnett (38, Geocities); Bill Gross (40, GoTo.com/Overture); Subrah Iyar (38, WebEx); Eric Yuan (41, Zoom); Min Zhu (47, WebEx); Bob Parsons (47, GoDaddy); Wilfred Corrigan (43, LSI); Joe Parkinson (33, Micron); Aart J. de Geus (32, Synopsys); Patrick Byrne (37, Overstock); Matthew Prince (34, Cloudflare); Ben Uretsky (28, DigitalOcean); Tom Preston-Werner (28, GitHub); Louis Borders (48, Webvan); John Moores (36, BMC Software); Vivek Ranadivé (40, Tibco); Pony Ma (27, Tencent); Robin Li (32, Baidu); Liu Qiangdong (29, JD.com); Lei Jun (40, Xiaomi); Ren Zhengfei (38, Huawei); Arkady Volozh (36, Yandex); Hiroshi Mikitani (34, Rakuten); Morris Chang (56, Taiwan Semi); Cheng Wei (29, Didi Chuxing); James Liang (29, Ctrip); Zhang Yiming (29, ByteDance);

streetcat1 7y ago

The harder the tech, the older the founder.

tempsy 7y ago
There are no rules on this either. I’m pretty sure the Neuralink president is like 29.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
muzani 7y ago
Microsoft and Apple worked on some very difficult tech.

forkLding 7y ago

From running my own apps and toy startups in college, I don't think its really the age, its rather the ability of the person to do many things from the tech side to the business side from like creating the tech/app to going out and marketing it so you can actually carry the app to success at an early stage, the experience the person actually has with developing and marketing/distributing a product so you can carry the app at a growth stage, the connections the person has to raise money and find cofounders/employees and the financial capital of the person so you can scale a product to and past product-market fit. These things can come with age but a young person with all the above can run a successful business if they have these things. On the other hand, you can be middle-aged or 50+ and not have any of these things and run a quite awful startup that turnovers like ~20% of your employees each month which my friend works at and can attest to, as they have a rather middle-aged senior management and ceo + cto at their 50-person startup with executives who have been in the tech and real estate industry at companies like Expedia for 7+ years and it is not successful despite raising huge amounts of cash and their company product has never been launched in the 2+ years or any user testing in the period their company has existed and still offer free dinners and monthly bonuses with the enormous cashpile they raised and keep raising. This is also why I think people like Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs/Steve Wozniak or Bill Gates or Spiegel/Murphy or the Collison brothers, etc. has, which is the ability and experience or at least talent of pretty much any middle-aged startup founder. There are just some people that outshine others even at a young age.