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I started with: “How many unicorns were founded by people in their 30s? The biggest example I can think of is Larry Ellison” but it was easy to come up with so
by smugma 4y ago
I started with: “How many unicorns were founded by people in their 30s? The biggest example I can think of is Larry Ellison” but it was easy to come up with so many more examples: Benioff, Reed Hastings, Bezos, Reid Hoffman.
Of course there are many examples of billionaires who founded companies in their 20s as well (Box, Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe)… intuitively, I think there are a lot of factors (familial obligations being near the top, ahead of American “genius” bias) that tilt the scales towards younger founders.
- maxerickson 4y agoLots of smart people in their 30s and 40s with family obligations and also "it would be fun to" money.
- ElfinTrousers 4y agoI've heard that if you look at _successful_ startups, not necessarily unicorns but ones that grow into solid companies on a firm financial footing, the average age of the founders was in the middle 40s.
- colinmorelli 4y agoI would wager a guess that if you actually based success on revenue/employee, operating margins, and overall "healthy" business criteria, the number skews probably even higher. As we were clearly made aware of in the last year, many unicorns of the last 5-10 years were little more than good marketing and a Tier 1 VC footing the bill.
- ElfinTrousers 4y agoI would bet the same way.
- smugma 4y agoIf you weight by market cap, Apple, Microsoft, and Google (Meta to a lesser extent) make it really hard to beat. And if you’re a VC, weighing by market share makes sense.
- ElfinTrousers 4y ago...what do either of those have to do with anything?
- smugma 4y agoThey all had founders in their 20s (technically, Gates and Zuckerberg were 19).
- ElfinTrousers 4y agoNone of them have anything to do with the kind of companies we're talking about.