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A Study of 2.7M Startups Found the Ideal Age to Start a Business
- rogerkirkness 7y agoIt's interesting to see relatively objective data come out about startups lately and challenge the startup exceptionalism arguments. Such as: founders must be young and unattached, companies must take VC to be big, you can tell at the seed stage which bets will pan out and working all the time correlates well with output. What impact would it have on startups, if those things were in fact untrue?
- mdorazio 7y agoThe article is short and worth a read, but to save you a click: 45. However, the data is really not presented well and it's hard to cut through the clickbait aspect of this because the author conflates a few terms and it at least seems like this is about "entrepreneurs" rather than the HN-type definition of "startup". If you look at the Kellogg writeup link, the authors apparently looked at "technology" businesses and limited the set to the 0.1% "fastest-growing" (not sure how they determined that). The more interesting metric to me is in the Kellogg writeup as well: average age of tech IPO company founder is 47. The takeaway for me is a bit different than the headline - Middle-aged founders are more likely to start sustainable, long-view companies than their younger counterparts. However I'd love to slice the data myself to see speed-to-exit vs. age plotted. I think that might tell a different story and better match VC models.