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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 ar
by 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);
- Epenthesis 7y agoI think the PagerDuty trio (Alex Solomon, Baskar Puvanathasan, Andrew Miklas) were 26-27 when they started it.
- statguy 7y agoWow! That's a really comprehensive list. Thanks for compiling it.
- zhoujianfu 7y agoAllow me to also add: Josh Jones (19, DreamHost)! But also: Bob Parsons (46, GoDaddy)... founded the same time and currently worth about 200x DreamHost.
- parsnips 7y agoAnd Parsons technology when he was young. Sold to Intuit for his first $64 million.
- omarchowdhury 7y agoPut that in Airtable.
- jeremyjh 7y ago> It overwhelmingly supports the premise Well yeah, that's what it is supposed to do but it is hardly a study - you don't list any counter examples. Where is Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft? Those are simply the largest companies I can think of in tech and they all happen to be counter examples.
- adventured 7y agoFor every Gates and Zuckerberg there are a large number of counter examples. It isn't subtle, it's a large gap; there is a dearth of founders in the 18-22 range that have started consequential tech companies. For every Michael Dell I can add to the young group, I can add several founders over ~28 that started companies like ServiceNow or Splunk or Zoom. It's unnecessary to list Microsoft, Facebook or Apple because they're the hyper rare, very well-known stories the media pushes as clickbait. They're the reason we're buried in mythology stories about young tech company founders. Larry Page and Sergey Brin fall in-between, although on the younger side, at 25. They're neither in the category with Gates & Zuckerberg, nor of course in the heavily populated 28-30x group. Here's a counter list of prominent names: Bill Gates (20, Microsoft), Paul Allen (22, Microsoft), Mark Zuckerberg (20, Facebook), Dustin Moskovitz (20, Facebook), Steve Jobs (21, Apple), Patrick Collison (22, Stripe), John Collison (20, Stripe), Michael Dell (19, Dell), Marc Ewing (23/24 Red Hat), Ted Waitt (22, Gateway), Evan Spiegel (21, Snapchat), Bobby Murphy (23, Snapchat), Marc Andreessen (23, Netscape), Aaron Levie (20, Box), David Karp (21, Tumblr), Palmer Luckey (20, Oculus), John Carmack (21, id Software), Helen Greiner (23, iRobot), Sky Dayton (23, Earthlink), Sean Parker (20, Napster), Shawn Fanning (19, Napster) Some in the mid 20s mixed group (which includes the Google founders): Drew Houston (24, Dropbox), Tobias Lütke (24, Shopify), Doug Burgum (25, Great Plains Software), Tony Hsieh (26, Zappos), Sachin Bansal (26, Flipkart), Steve Wozniak (25, Apple), Jerry Yang (26/27, Yahoo!)