Studying "1-in-1,000 fastest growing new ventures" is completely misunderstanding tech. Startup returns are about power-laws and <i>extraordinary outliers</i>. If we instead study the age of founders of tech companies which actually generated almost all of the ecosystem gains over the past few decades:<p>1. Apple: $2.65T<p><pre><code> - Jobs: 21
- Woz: 26
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2. Alphabet: $1.73T<p><pre><code> - Larry/Sergey: 25ish
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3. Microsoft: $2.22T<p><pre><code> - Gates: 19
- Allen: 22
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4. Amazon: $1.45T<p><pre><code> - Bezos: 29
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5. Facebook: $0.84T<p><pre><code> - Zuckerberg: 19
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Looking at just the age of founders instead of other substance is stupid. But if we're <i>just</i> looking at age and nothing else, then younger founders make for better outliers, and generating outliers is the whole point of this endeavor.<p>-----<p>EDIT: With its high market cap, Tesla belongs on this list, and actually had some older founders. Problem: the older founders left the company/were forcibly removed, didn't retain much equity, and aren't credited with much early success when they were actually in charge. Still, some interesting data points.<p>Tesla: $0.94T<p><pre><code> - Elon Musk: 32
- J.B. Straubel: 28
- Martin Eberhard: 43 (forcibly removed due to late/over budget Roadsters)
- Marc Tappening: 39 (left Tesla in 2008)</code></pre>
The mean age at founding a 1 in 1000 fastest growing organization is 45.<p>Which makes sense, because industry connections for talent and sales are incredibly valuable.
The public only knows consumer tech startups, which imo is like catching lightning in a bottle & selling it. The key idea/insight probably matters more in consumer, which can benefit from being young or around young people. You also don't get as much of a benefit from experience & professional network as you do in other verticals; B2B SAAS, Deep Tech etc. Without making the distinction between types of companies, pieces like this are silly pop-sci.
> The mean age at founding for the 1-in-1,000 fastest growing new ventures is 45.0<p>How many of us out there are whispering to themselves "There's still hope..."
Some previous threads on the Azoulay/Jones/Kim paper: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16902662" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16902662</a>
Who's to say a small number of successful-since-25 entrepreneurs just keep making successful high growth companies every 5-10 years until they're 55+?<p>Maybe they do it more frequently on average when they're older than when they're younger.<p>It would be much more interesting to look at the age when people first achieve high growth success.