INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
There is a classic stereotype of the Silicon Valley entrepreneur: often a computer science nerd, almost certainly male, ambitious and, most
Founders who have been covered extensively by the media, like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, started their companies still
glimpsing their teenage years, and that reputation has spread widely across the industry.Now, a group of economics researchers have
Daniel Kim and Javier Miranda connected a variety of administrative data sets to investigate the age of founders of new businesses, and
particularly the age of founders of high-performance startups
entire population under consideration.What they found is that the average age of a startup founder is about 41.9 years of age among all
startups that hire at least one employee, and among the top 0.1 percent of highest-growth startups, that average age moves up to 45 years
Those ages are taken from the time of the founding of the company.The researchers broke down the population of founders along a number of
lines, including geography and industry
They found little difference in their results between subcategories, and, in many cases, the subcategory definition actually increased the
For instance, industries like oil and gas can have average founder ages as high as 51.4 years old
entrepreneurs appear correlated with better startup performance
more successful, but that younger founders are less successful
researchers wrote (italics in original)
One reason, they argue, is that older founders tend to have more years of experience in their industries.With those results out of the way,
there is a critical question: If indeed the most successful ventures are run on average by founders in their 40s, why is it that VCs seem to
focus so intently on younger founders who seem to be wildly statistically unsuccessfulThe authors speculate that the reason could be that
wealth to fund their ventures
The same reason why older founders are ignored by the ecosystem is the same reason why women and other minorities struggle in the Valley:
Data like those found in this paper should force all of us to reevaluate what kind of founders with whom we should be partnering.
