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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

#51

Post by tw1010 »

You 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 we're in a level two world! Force those statisticians to scratch their head when their models don't work out right!

These statistics should certainly be interesting for investors, but there are so many more factors of the equation (like personality, drive, grit, access to capital through friends, etc) that are probably much more significant (even in a rigorous statistical sense) to the outcome of a company, that founders themselves are better off just ignoring it. And besides, a founder is a high agency individual, are you really going to let age (whether it be too old or too young) stop you?

Re: Research: The Average Age of a Successful Startup Founder Is 45

#52

Post by samontar »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #49

When do they measure the age? I worked at a company that took 20 years from conception to IPO. So is it the conception age or success age?

Paragraph 2 starts like this:

> Our team analyzed the age of all business founders in the U.S. in recent years by leveraging confidential administrative data sets from the U.S. Census Bureau. We found that the average age of entrepreneurs at the time they...

So they do answer your question in the article.

Re: Research: The Average Age of a Successful Startup Founder Is 45

#54

Post by cronix »

formalsystem wrote: post #29

I 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…

> 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.

It's an "average" not a law.

Re: Research: The Average Age of a Successful Startup Founder Is 45

#55

Post by chrisweekly »

liftbigweights wrote: post #8
tucaz wrote: post #6

Honest and possibly ignorant question here. Wouldn’t the median be more representative of how old the common founder would be? In a very simplistic example with a data set of two people aged 20 and 70 you would get 45 as the average age when in fact that doesn’t reflect the reality. I always struggle when thinking about average vs median.

Yes, the median would be a better data point. Even better would be a qualification of "successful". Are they equating successful startups that are worth a million to trillion dollar companies like apple and amazon? > I always struggle when thinking about average vs median. Median takes away the bias of the extremes that averages can include. For example, if 9 people make $1 and 1 person makes $1000000, the average is…

... and the mode is 1.

Measures of central tendency worth keeping in mind when talking "averages":

mean - what people usually mean by "average"

median - central point on a number line (ie, the same number of items are greater, and lower, than the median)

mode - the number which is most common in the set

Re: Research: The Average Age of a Successful Startup Founder Is 45

#56

Post by rhizome »

themagician wrote: post #27
replicatorblog wrote: post #20

Who 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…

As an example, I'm pretty sure there's no such thing as a third-party solution developer for Salesforce who is famous like this, but you can bet a lot of them are making good money. They probably skew older, too.

Re: Research: The Average Age of a Successful Startup Founder Is 45

#57

Post by adventured »

akarma wrote: post #23
adventured wrote: post #17

I've compiled and added to this list over time. When you go digging for how old the founders of major tech companies have been, you'll find they're overwhelmingly closer to their mid 30s, nearly all are over ~27, with plenty in their 40s. Exceptionally few have been like Gates, Jobs and Zuckerberg. If you're 30 and you think it's too late, it's not, you may not have even hit your prime yet. Ages of founders: Paul Gra…

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…

The idea is that the life experience you accumulate - and everything that goes with that - is often extremely valuable, critical to success. Zip2 got Musk started, it no doubt helped him accumulate experience and connections to start and run later ventures - training wheels for what came later.

Musk could build Zip2 at 24. I would say there's zero chance he could have successfully built Tesla or SpaceX at 24 (ignoring the capital requirements). I think that far more often than not, to start and build great companies, requires a small lifetime of accumulated experience and mistakes.

The media myth of the tech industry and its important companies being founded by 19 year old Zuckerbergs, is just that, a myth. The media loves that story because it sells, it's just not real.

Re: Research: The Average Age of a Successful Startup Founder Is 45

#58

Post by rhizome »

bonestamp2 wrote: post #21
rafiki6 wrote: post #16

I can tie this back to my own experience as well. Humility generally comes with age, and it's important in running a successful and socially responsible business. It's easy to get caught up in the young successful founder myth because that's what gets the most press. But look at a guy like Bill Gates. I'm sure had he started Microsoft 20 years later (assuming all conditions were ripe for it), he would have done it qu…

In some ways, it's also easier to run a startup when you're younger. Most younger people have more energy and fewer family obligations. But, that also explains why 45 makes a lot of sense... if you have kids they're probably old enough that they're doing a lot of their own things so you've got the wisdom from age (experience) and you've shed some of the family responsibilities that you might have at, say, age 35.

Younger founders almost certainly also spend more energy on things that an older one already knows not to do, or that can be done more efficiently. Many mistakes that cost time and energy can be mooted by experience.

Re: Research: The Average Age of a Successful Startup Founder Is 45

#60

Post by billyggruff »

opportune wrote: post #46
bonestamp2 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I met with a non-technical cofounder a few months ago who is in his early 20s. He had a great idea for a product and was looking for a technical co-founder (he also had an investor who already put up some money and he was already deeply involved in the sales channel and had two customers already sold). I have no doubt this product would very successful. Probably not a unicorn, but could make a few people quite wealth…

“Non-technical cofounder in early 20s” sounds like a massive red flag to me. Ideas are cheap, execution is what matters

He already had investor monies and two customers.
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