The image is by now so familiar it feels like fact. A twenty-something in a hoodie, hunched over a laptop in a dorm room or a garage, types out the lines of code that will turn into a billion-dollar company by the time he’s thirty. Zuckerberg at Facebook. Jobs at Apple. Gates at Microsoft. The story has been told so many times, in so many magazine covers and biopics, that we barely notice we’re being told it.
Some people in their forties and fifties, understandably, believe their best chance to start something has already passed them by. They’ve absorbed the dorm-room story. They’ve watched the TED talks. And somewhere along the way, they’ve concluded that whatever spark is needed to build a real business burns out around thirty-two.
But here’s the strange thing. The data appears to tell a different story.
In 2018, four researchers — Pierre Azoulay of MIT, Benjamin Jones of Northwestern’s Kellogg School, J. Daniel Kim of Wharton, and Javier Miranda of the US Census Bureau — set out to answer a question that no one had really tackled properly before. What is the actual average age of a successful startup founder?
What they found, published in the American Economic Review: Insights, was that “The mean age at founding for the 1-in-1,000 fastest growing new ventures is 45.0.”
Not twenty-five. Forty-five.
And it gets more pointed. As noted in Kellogg insight, a fifty-year-old entrepreneur is nearly twice as likely to build a runaway success as a thirty-year-old. It seems there is no cliff at thirty-two.
If the data is so clear, why do many of us keep believing the opposite? Part of the answer could be visibility. Consumer internet companies — the social networks, the photo apps, the dating sites — happen to be the ones we hear about. They’re the ones our nieces and nephews use. They’re the ones that end up on magazine covers.
And often those companies do skew young.
But these are a small slice of what entrepreneurship actually looks like. The Azoulay team found that high-growth companies in biotech, energy, manufacturing, and B2B software almost always have older founders. As Azoulay told MIT News, “I like to say there is no such thing as a 25-year-old biotech entrepreneur. That person just doesn’t exist, because you need a PhD and three postdocs”.
We don’t see those founders on magazine covers quite as often. So we don’t include them in our mental picture of what success looks like.
In case you’re wondering whether one study, however rigorous, is enough to overturn decades of received wisdom, there’s independent research pointing in the same direction. Ali Tamaseb, a venture capitalist “spent thousands of hours manually amassing the largest dataset ever collected on startups”. He published what he found in a book called Super Founders.
The median founder of those billion-dollar companies, Tamaseb found, was thirty-four when they started the business.
Two separate datasets. Two approaches. A similar conclusion.
It’s tempting to just say “older founders win because experience helps” and leave it there. But the picture might be a bit more interesting than that.
Industry experience matters a lot. As noted by the folks at Nanyang Business School, founders with relevant prior experience in their industry were significantly more likely to launch a successful company than founders without it. It makes sense. Knowing the market, knowing the customers, knowing where the real problems are buried. These things take time to learn, and they shorten the path to finding something people will actually pay for.
But we think there’s also something subtler at play. By the time someone is in their forties or fifties, they’ve usually developed a network of people who trust them. They’ve made career mistakes and learned from them. They have a clearer sense of what they actually want to build, and a clearer sense of what they’re willing to give up to build it. The forty-eight-year-old founder is harder to talk into a bad idea than the twenty-three-year-old. That’s not a small thing. Most startups don’t fail because the founder ran out of energy. They fail because the founder picked the wrong problem.
If you’ve been quietly thinking that you’ve missed your window, you probably haven’t. The window the dorm-room story sold you was never really there.
None of this means age is a free lunch. Older founders typically have more to lose: mortgages, kids, the cost of walking away from a senior salary. Energy and risk tolerance do bend with time, and runway looks different at fifty than at twenty-five. But the numbers are what they are. A fifty-year-old is nearly twice as likely to build a runaway success as a thirty-year-old, and the average high-growth founder is forty-five. If you’re sitting on twenty years of hard-won knowledge about an industry, the honest read of the evidence is that you’re closer to the starting line than you think, not further from it.
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