How Old Are Silicon Valley’s Top Founders? Here’s the Data

Stolen from my buddy Abe. Poor journalism.<p><a href="http://abe.is/the-best-age-to-raise-money/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;abe.is&#x2F;the-best-age-to-raise-money&#x2F;</a>

Seeing that data overlaid with number of people starting companies would be really valuable.<p>I suspect that the average &quot;cost&quot; of starting a company in your 20s is much lower than later in life (smaller salary to give up, less chance of family etc).<p>The really interesting (relevant?) question would be chance of success over age.

I really hate when people default to percentages to display data for incredibly small sample sizes. I know by the very nature of the data there is not that much individual information available but the sample size is 41 companies. Really?

This data is worthless because it shows nothing about the <i>distribution</i> of founder success. It gives no indication of expected value.<p>Better data would provide the average success of funded companies by the age of the founders. This would tell us whether or not younger or older founders are being under-funded.<p>The expected value of older founders could easily be higher if they have a lower variance but greater average success. Or it could be that younger founders are severely under-funded because the top-heaviness of the winners vastly outweighs the higher number of failures.<p>Who knows? The data in the article tells us nothing but how old people happen to be in this community.

&gt;&quot;...manually searching LinkedIn profiles for year graduated, we were able to generate a list of founders for 35 of the 41 start-ups, and to determine an approximate age for the majority of them.&quot;<p>I think there&#x27;s a statistically significant variance in a graduation date versus a persons actual age. Lot&#x27;s of people in my CS program were above the age of 25 but if all you&#x27;re checking is the graduation year then according to this graph, we would all be put into the 20-24 bucket.<p>Granted, they acknowledge that their data is heavily biased given their small sample size and given the fact that it only charts successful startups.

When they complain about having to get the data by hand, I assumed they were crawling through at least hundreds of profiles. Instead, it&#x27;s just 35. If I had to guess, that&#x27;s also a contributing reason as to why the first bar chart is in %, it masks how laughably small their sample is.<p>Just because those founders have companies that went on to $1billion+ doesn&#x27;t make them disproportionately significant in a statistical sense. Although it feels like they try to imply that with &quot;disproportionately influential dataset&quot;.

This is a decent start. However, the data set is statistically insignificant. Only 52 founders? HBR can do much better than this.

Selecting companies that are valued at over $1B yet haven&#x27;t IPO&#x27;d yet is a really narrow set and a moving target. Why not include companies that were venture-backed and have IPO&#x27;d? And&#x2F;or companies that were acquired for over $1B?<p>For me the most interesting part of the underlying data is the number of Chinese companies.

There are probably very few founders over 50. Given that there is at least one success in that bracket, I&#x27;ll bet that founders over 50 have the best odds of any age group.

Data show surprisingly young founders in the billion dollars clubs but I&#x27;d be interested to see the breakdown of tech&#x2F;business founders among the 20-24 yo founders

Did they make the source data available? It&#x27;s only about 40 companies, right? Should be pretty easy to show us the details.

And here are the reasons for that: <a href="http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/12/14/vc-istan-6-the-isms-of-venture-funded-technology/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;michaelochurch.wordpress.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;12&#x2F;14&#x2F;vc-istan-6-th...</a><p>Text search for &#x27;chickenhawking&#x27; to get to the meat of it.