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 fairly quickly.
And if we look in terms of value creation, the crazy outsize wins come from founder founders. E.g. the GAFA companies were all founded by sub-30s.
This study, like most of the Kauffman Foundation studies, tend to rely on obscure methods to reach these counterintuitive results. It's not to say 45-year-olds can't build great companies, but if you made a list of the 150-200 most notable tech startups of the last few decades, you'd see an average age closer to 33 than 45, even lower if you don't include the 2nd or 3rd startups of some founders.
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 biggest company I’ve never heard of,” experiences. There are a lot of companies in finance, telecom, and infrastructure that you don’t think about because they don’t have an app that sits on your home screen.
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.
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.
I am 41, startup CEO for ~14 months, and currently having one of the worst days since the company started. (edit: actually, the worst day period).
Although you might be right on statistics, I am 100% sure 10 years ago I wouldn't have had the maturity or the experience or the grit to face this day, the way I do right now.
Also, don't forget that today's returns are huge, compared to 10-20 years ago, and that today's entrepreneurs start earlier than their equivalent of 20 years ago.
It's hard to make sense of these numbers without bias or without any risk of misinterpreting things.
>(This study, like most of the Kauffman Foundation studies, tend to rely on obscure methods to reach these counterintuitive results*
The article seems to make a fairly solid case:
"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 founded their companies is 42. But the vast majority of these new businesses are likely small businesses with no intentions to grow large (for example, dry cleaners and restaurants). To focus on businesses that are closer in spirit to the prototypical high-tech startup, we used a variety of indicators: whether the firm was granted a patent, received VC investment, or operated in an industry that employs a high fraction of STEM workers. We also focused on the location of the firm, in particular whether it was in an entrepreneurial hub such as Silicon Valley. In general, these finer-grained analyses do not modify the main conclusion: The average age of high-tech founders falls in the early forties."
What's the counter-argument? That the famous founders of the 20-so most known companies are young?
There are thousands of tech companies founded, even on SV, not just the household names (and the household names are a tiny sample anyway).
Not the 20 best known, the 150 best known. I'd wager if you went 500 deep, you'd see the age being much closer to 30 than 45.
The criteria of this study isn't bad, but I'd much rather just see a list of companies they're defining as startups. Is there a big biotech contingent? Are consulting companies included? B2B vs. B2C? Inc. Magazine published a list of the 500 fastest growing companies every year, and there's very little overlap between that list and what we'd consider the world of tech startups. This methodology feels more like Inc.
> Who is the most famous tech founder who was 45 or older when they founded their first company?
This is a straw man fallacy. I think you're conflating the definition of "successful startup" with a cohort of "famous tech" founders, which has some merit (lower age yields higher risk).
The broader definition of "successful startup" is more about "fast growing" or "economic impact". The emphasis is on founders of “growth oriented” firms that can have large economic impacts and are often associated with driving increasing standard of living.
An MIT Sloan study found the mean founder age for the 1 in 1,000 fastest growing companies is 45.0.
I've seen a lot of studies that make this assertation, but the fact that it's hard to think of many examples in the world of tech startups makes me skeptical.
> Diane Greene founded VMWare at 43. Brian Acton was 38. You start falling into the 30s fairly quickly.
Besides VMWare, some tech companies with over-40 founders are Adobe, Craigslist, Zynga, Xiaomi, Netscape, Akamai, SanDisk, McAfee, Seagate, the list goes on (you can find even more examples in a comment by user "adventured" in this same thread [1]).
I think part of this is the fact that young founders are in the game longer. A 20 year old will have 20 years of high-growth compounding on their wealth over a 40 year old just getting into the game. When you're using market cap as the measuring stick, it will usually favor those who've been in the game longer.
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 fairly quickly.
And if we look in terms of value creation, the crazy outsize wins come from founder founders. E.g. the GAFA companies were all founded by sub-30s.
This study, like most of the Kauffman Foundation studies, tend to rely on obscure methods to reach these counterintuitive results. It's not to say 45-year-olds can't build great companies, but if you made a list of the 150-200 most notable tech startups of the last few decades, you'd see an average age closer to 33 than 45, even lower if you don't include the 2nd or 3rd startups of some founders.