For 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

For 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!)