Gave it a glacez but it's important to realize you're probably not successful in your first rodeo.
Success might happen in 45, but I'd wager most of those 45s have a few companies under their belts.
Research: The Average Age of a Successful Startup Founder Is 45
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Re: Research: The Average Age of a Successful Startup Founder Is 45
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
“Non-technical cofounder in early 20s” sounds like a massive red flag to me. Ideas are cheap, execution is what matters
This is common sentiment but I disagree. As a tech person, I’d much rather partner with a non-tech person already selling and raising funds. Sounds like a winning combo but the parent just didn’t want to go on the path this specific person was heading down.
I don't see the disagreement with your parent. He has reservations about the age and thus the experience of the person, not if they are already actively raising money and doing sales. You can do these at 30+ as well.
Re: Research: The Average Age of a Successful Startup Founder Is 45
#73Gave it a glacez but it's important to realize you're probably not successful in your first rodeo. Success might happen in 45, but I'd wager most of those 45s have a few companies under their belts.
I'd be interested to know if they're founders of those companies or they just participated in them during the early days. My guess is a typical 45 year old founder had one or two unsuccessful companies they founded, not a few. And of the companies they participated in but didn't found, maybe some were successful. But these are just guesses, and it would be nice to see some data.
Re: Research: The Average Age of a Successful Startup Founder Is 45
#74You can't treat statistics about humans the same way you treat probabilities about trajectories in a mechanics experiment. People live in a level two chaotic system, which means that the existence of statistics can affect future outcome. Statistics say your age or race (or whatever) isn't optimal to do what you want to do (e.g. be a successful founder)? Screw that! Be the actor that wobbles future statistics, proving…
People at 18-25 are largely impatient and willing to invest crazy energy and time in very insignificant (for the revenue) directions.
I think it's pretty normal to stereotype young people, especially having in mind that most of us were impatient and lacked focus / direction at our younger age as well.
Exceptions do exist. My wife is 22 and has to be the most patient and level-headed person I ever met. But those exceptions are very few and far between.
Again, it's a pretty safe bet to stereotype young people.
Re: Research: The Average Age of a Successful Startup Founder Is 45
#75> there is a more benign possibility: VCs are not simply looking to identify the firms with the highest growth potential. Rather, they may seek investments that will yield the highest returns, and it is possible that young founders are more financially constrained than more experienced ones, leading them to cede upside to investors at a lower price. In other words, younger entrepreneurs may be a better “deal” for inv…
If they invest at a company 100k at a cap of of $3mil and discount of 20%, then they will effectively 10X their returns if the company sells for $30mil.
Now if they invest at a company founded by experienced entrepreneurs that has same traction as the previous company, they might have to put-in $1mil at a $10mil cap and they’ll need the company to have an exit of $100mil to 10x their money.
I haven’t looked at the data personally but my hypothesis is inexperienced founders and $30mil exits are more likely than over $100 mil exits with experienced founders. It’s far more likely to sell for $30mil than it is to have an exit upwards of $100mil. So while a n experienced entrepreneur will be more likely to have an exit at $30 mil than an inexperienced one, it won’t produce the same returns for the investors
Re: Research: The Average Age of a Successful Startup Founder Is 45
#76~50% of the top 10 companies in the world by market cap (Facebook, Alphabet, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon) were all started by founders aged 30 or younger. The rest are companies that are over 100 years old (or merged from ones that were) and Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway. I'm by no means saying you can't do it when you're older, but when you're a VC in the business of hitting home runs, it is just hard to ignore th…
What is a "sexy" company exactly?
Re: Research: The Average Age of a Successful Startup Founder Is 45
#77I always find it interesting when these sorts of threads are posted. I for one look at them as am I too old to be starting my own company or should I chill out because I still have time. Fundamentally I think there's limited value in drawing lessons from these stories because you're probably your own best judge of whether you should quit your job or not. Your risk tolerance lowers as you get older but your skills wil…
Speaking as someone who is 50, I would say you have 2 choices: take your risks early so you have time to recover from them before you retire, or take a very low risk approach to your early career and save a lot of money so that you can afford to take risks later in your career.
Re: Research: The Average Age of a Successful Startup Founder Is 45
#78Who is the most famous tech founder who was 45 or older when they founded their first company? There were more in the 70s, 80s, or 90s (E.g. Jim Clark) because the industry was still forming, but even then the wunderkind college dropout drove most of the value creation. In the modern era, Peter Gassner, founder of Veeva was 42. Diane Greene founded VMWare at 43. Brian Acton was 38. You start falling into the 30s fair…
Being successful and being famous are two completely different things only tangentially related. The 30 companies that have famous founders are far outweighed by the ten thousand that you don't know of. On more than one occasion I’ve found myself working for absolutely massive companies (public in many cases) that I’d never previously even heard of. I’ve definitely had a lot of those, “Holy shit, how is this the bigg…
Yep, younger founders skew heavily toward consumer apps, partly because it's what they know. And those are much more likely to be well known by the general public.
Re: Research: The Average Age of a Successful Startup Founder Is 45
#79It's probably not really feasible (problems of definition) but I'd love to see some statistics on average age of unsuccessful startup founders, preferably correlated with industry sector, as they've done here, and perhaps with some context of previous / subsequent success by the individual. As noted in TFA, it seems likely the IT industry would heavily skew the results.
I may be wrong, but I think the problem is that startups are by and large unsuccessful across the board. It's a bit like trying to find the cause of a disease by looking at what doesn't cause a disease.
I did a quick search and got a lot of different answers, but the overwhelming number I got was that "over 90%" of startups fail in the first 3 years. With that, the number of possible common variables is going to be overwhelming.
However, it does potentially answer the question of why successful founders tend to be in their 40's. If you have a 90% chance of failing in the first 3 years, if you start 10 startups, perhaps you have a good chance of succeeding ;-)
Re: Research: The Average Age of a Successful Startup Founder Is 45
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looking at the first row, I'd just point out that some of these are repeat founders at the ages listed: Elon founded Zip2 right out of undergrad, Garrett Camp founded StumbleUpon while in grad school, and Kalanick left UCLA undergrad to found Scour and then kind of expanded on that with Red Swoosh right after. Most of these are still accurate and it's really cool data, so thank you for posting; just figured it was wo…
This is important. There's a big difference between getting started at 45 and founding your third company at 45. I don't think there is something biological, or even social that makes it hard to be a late-bloomer in tech entrepreneurship. It's just hard to develop an entirely new skillset and network in later-middle age. I think we'd mostly be skeptical of a doctor who started medical school at 45, and while the stak…
> It's just hard to develop an entirely new skillset and network in later-middle age.
To leave age out of it, the study shows that those who successfully founded growth companies already had the skillset and network to draw on. (Perhaps the older ages were due to the years it takes for someone build their skillset and network?)