Founders of Successful Tech Companies Are Mostly Middle-Aged | Hacker News Reader

Founders of Successful Tech Companies Are Mostly Middle-Aged

nytimes.com

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Those who want to read the paper

https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/jones-ben/htm/A...

The harder the tech, the older the founder.

There are no rules on this either.

I’m pretty sure the Neuralink president is like 29.

Microsoft and Apple worked on some very difficult tech.

Most 20 somethings are usually used by venture capital firms to prove an idea and then replaced with more experienced and trusted executives.

There are a few rare exceptions, like Facebook.

Do you have any citation on this?

Genuinely interested to see if this is a real phenomenon or just anecdotally what you have witnessed.

This is true, but I don't think VCs use young founders to prove an idea. A startup is a very different environment than an enterprise.. and it's very rare that a person can execute well at all stages. So eventually the startup grows to a point where more professional leadership is helpful.. and VCs will happily replace a founder if they think it'll make them more money.

There's a lot of research on this (and dating back quite a while.. not new at all). So here are just some quick links I found:

https://www.kauffman.org/-/media/kauffman_org/research-repor...

https://academic.oup.com/rfs/article-abstract/31/4/1532/4604...

https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/the-founding-ceos-dilemma-stay-or...

https://www.businessinsider.com/how-often-do-founding-ceos-g...

Also this is a nice article about this from the Founders Dilemma (which is a good book also): https://hbr.org/2008/02/the-founders-dilemma

Creating a successful startup is proving an idea. That was my point.

Thanks for all the info!

Those executives aren’t “founders” though. So I am not sure how this applies.

I update this list from time to time. It overwhelmingly supports the premise that most of the founders of successful (or otherwise well-known) tech companies are typically in their 30s or older (and not ~18-22):

Paul Graham (31, Viaweb); Jan Koum (33, WhatsApp); Brian Acton (37, WhatsApp); Ev Williams (34, Twitter); Jack Dorsey (33, Square); Elon Musk (32, Tesla | 31, SpaceX | 27, PayPal); Garrett Camp (30, Uber); Travis Kalanick (32, Uber); Brian Chesky (27, Airbnb); Adam Neumann (31, WeWork); Reed Hastings (37, Netflix); Reid Hoffman (36, LinkedIn); Jack Ma (35, Alibaba); Jeff Bezos (30, Amazon); Jerry Sanders (33, AMD); Marc Benioff (35, Salesforce); Ross Perot (32, EDS); Peter Norton (39, Norton); Larry Ellison (33, Oracle); Mitch Kapor (32, Lotus); Leonard Bosack (32, Cisco); Sandy Lerner (29, Cisco); Gordon Moore (39, Intel); Mark Cuban (37, Broadcast.com); Scott Cook (31, Intuit); Nolan Bushnell (29, Atari); Paul Galvin (33, Motorola); Irwin Jacobs (52, Qualcomm); David Duffield (46, PeopleSoft | 64, Workday); Aneel Bhusri (39, Workday); Thomas Siebel (41, Siebel Systems); John McAfee (42, McAfee); Gary Hendrix (32, Symantec); Scott McNealy (28, Sun); Pierre Omidyar (28, eBay); Rich Barton (29, Expedia | 38, Zillow); Jim Clark (38, SGI | 49, Netscape); Charles Wang (32, CA); David Packard (27, HP); Craig Newmark (43, Craigslist); John Warnock (42, Adobe); Robert Noyce (30, Fairchild | 41, Intel); Rod Canion (37, Compaq); Jen-Hsun Huang (30, nVidia); James Goodnight (33, SAS); John Sall (28, SAS); Eli Harari (41, SanDisk); Sanjay Mehrotra (28, SanDisk); Al Shugart (48, Seagate); Finis Conner (34, Seagate); Henry Samueli (37, Broadcom); Henry Nicholas (32, Broadcom); Charles Brewer (36, Mindspring); William Shockley (45, Shockley); Ron Rivest (35, RSA); Adi Shamir (30, RSA); John Walker (32, Autodesk); Halsey Minor (30, CNet); David Filo (28, Yahoo); Jeremy Stoppelman (27, Yelp); Eric Lefkofsky (39, Groupon); Andrew Mason (29, Groupon); Markus Persson (30, Mojang); David Hitz (28, NetApp); Brian Lee (28, Legalzoom); Demis Hassabis (34, DeepMind); Tim Westergren (35, Pandora); Martin Lorentzon (37, Spotify); Ashar Aziz (44, FireEye); Kevin O'Connor (36, DoubleClick); Ben Silbermann (28, Pinterest); Evan Sharp (28, Pinterest); Steve Kirsch (38, Infoseek); Stephen Kaufer (36, TripAdvisor); Michael McNeilly (28, Applied Materials); Eugene McDermott (52, Texas Instruments); Richard Egan (43, EMC); Gary Kildall (32, Digital Research); Hasso Plattner (28, SAP); Robert Glaser (32, Real Networks); Patrick Byrne (37, Overstock.com); Marc Lore (33, Diapers.com); Ed Iacobucci (36, Citrix Systems); Ray Noorda (55, Novell); Tom Leighton (42, Akamai); Daniel Lewin (28, Akamai); Diane Greene (43, VMWare); Mendel Rosenblum (36, VMWare); Michael Mauldin (35, Lycos); Tom Anderson (33, MySpace); Chris DeWolfe (37, MySpace); Mark Pincus (41, Zynga); Caterina Fake (34, Flickr); Stewart Butterfield (31, Flickr | 36, Slack); Kevin Systrom (27, Instagram); Adi Tatarko (37, Houzz); Brian Armstrong (29, Coinbase); Pradeep Sindhu (43, Juniper); Peter Thiel (31, PayPal | 37, Palantir); Jay Walker (42, Priceline.com); Bill Coleman (48, BEA Systems); Evan Goldberg (35, NetSuite); Fred Luddy (48, ServiceNow); Michael Baum (41, Splunk); Nir Zuk (33, Palo Alto Networks); David Sacks (36, Yammer); Jack Smith (28, Hotmail); Sabeer Bhatia (28, Hotmail); Chad Hurley (28, YouTube); Andy Rubin (37, Danger | 41, Android); Rodney Brooks (36, iRobot); Jeff Hawkins (35, Palm); Tom Gosner (39, DocuSign); Niklas Zennström (37, Skype); Janus Friis (27, Skype); George Kurtz (40, CrowdStrike); Trip Hawkins (28, EA); Gabe Newell (33, Valve); David Bohnett (38, Geocities); Bill Gross (40, GoTo.com/Overture); Subrah Iyar (38, WebEx); Eric Yuan (41, Zoom); Min Zhu (47, WebEx); Bob Parsons (47, GoDaddy); Wilfred Corrigan (43, LSI); Joe Parkinson (33, Micron); Aart J. de Geus (32, Synopsys); Patrick Byrne (37, Overstock); Matthew Prince (34, Cloudflare); Ben Uretsky (28, DigitalOcean); Tom Preston-Werner (28, GitHub); Louis Borders (48, Webvan); John Moores (36, BMC Software); Vivek Ranadivé (40, Tibco); Pony Ma (27, Tencent); Robin Li (32, Baidu); Liu Qiangdong (29, JD.com); Lei Jun (40, Xiaomi); Ren Zhengfei (38, Huawei); Arkady Volozh (36, Yandex); Hiroshi Mikitani (34, Rakuten); Morris Chang (56, Taiwan Semi); Cheng Wei (29, Didi Chuxing); James Liang (29, Ctrip); Zhang Yiming (29, ByteDance);

Wow! That's a really comprehensive list. Thanks for compiling it.

Allow me to also add: Josh Jones (19, DreamHost)!

But also: Bob Parsons (46, GoDaddy)... founded the same time and currently worth about 200x DreamHost.

And Parsons technology when he was young. Sold to Intuit for his first $64 million.

Put that in Airtable.

> It overwhelmingly supports the premise

Well yeah, that's what it is supposed to do but it is hardly a study - you don't list any counter examples. Where is Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft? Those are simply the largest companies I can think of in tech and they all happen to be counter examples.

For every Gates and Zuckerberg there are a large number of counter examples. It isn't subtle, it's a large gap; there is a dearth of founders in the 18-22 range that have started consequential tech companies. For every Michael Dell I can add to the young group, I can add several founders over ~28 that started companies like ServiceNow or Splunk or Zoom.

It's unnecessary to list Microsoft, Facebook or Apple because they're the hyper rare, very well-known stories the media pushes as clickbait. They're the reason we're buried in mythology stories about young tech company founders.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin fall in-between, although on the younger side, at 25. They're neither in the category with Gates & Zuckerberg, nor of course in the heavily populated 28-30x group.

Here's a counter list of prominent names:

Bill Gates (20, Microsoft), Paul Allen (22, Microsoft), Mark Zuckerberg (20, Facebook), Dustin Moskovitz (20, Facebook), Steve Jobs (21, Apple), Patrick Collison (22, Stripe), John Collison (20, Stripe), Michael Dell (19, Dell), Marc Ewing (23/24 Red Hat), Ted Waitt (22, Gateway), Evan Spiegel (21, Snapchat), Bobby Murphy (23, Snapchat), Marc Andreessen (23, Netscape), Aaron Levie (20, Box), David Karp (21, Tumblr), Palmer Luckey (20, Oculus), John Carmack (21, id Software), Helen Greiner (23, iRobot), Sky Dayton (23, Earthlink), Sean Parker (20, Napster), Shawn Fanning (19, Napster)

Some in the mid 20s mixed group (which includes the Google founders): Drew Houston (24, Dropbox), Tobias Lütke (24, Shopify), Doug Burgum (25, Great Plains Software), Tony Hsieh (26, Zappos), Sachin Bansal (26, Flipkart), Steve Wozniak (25, Apple), Jerry Yang (26/27, Yahoo!)

Those are not counter examples, but entrepreneurship extremes. They just succeeded at first try (right time and place) while others either worked hard for long time or simply tried and failed few times.

I don't feel like the study shows something spectacular. Middle-age is the peak of performance, mental and physical health. Everything one created for himself is best seen at this peak and usually people start thinking what to do for the rest of their lives. Middle-age is not usually a time when you start having wild dreams.

Here's a little regex that matches most of these. If anyone wants to improve on it, go for it. Way too lazy to do this by hand. Inconsistent use of semi-colons & "and" mean it'll probably be hard to actually make it perfect, but oh well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Thanks for compiling the list though, this is good stuff.

([A-Za-z\s+]+{2})$([0-9]+),\s+([A-Za-z0-9.\s+]+)$,

I've adjusted the list, cleaned it up. Should simplify the regex.

Each person segment is now separated by (ended by) a semicolon.

Commas are now only used to separate age from company name within parentheses.

Multiple companies by one person are separated by a vertical bar.

Thanks! I noticed you silently fixed the "64 Workday" typo ;)

Here's a repo that has some code to transform the list into a .csv file. Having some trouble matching on the multi-company founders, which I could just deal with using code and not a regular expression, but a perfect regex would be fun haha.

https://github.com/arthurcolle/founders

I just went through the first bunch, though, and in person after person you left off a bunch of earlier successful companies that really should give the founders an earlier "start age".

For example, Ev Williams founded Pyra, which was acquired by Google and became Blogger, in 1999, so he would have been 26 or 27 then.

It's odd that you list the age of Jack Dorsey when he started Square, when he was a founder of Twitter years earlier.

Similarly, Elon Musk founded Zip2 in 1995, 4 years before he founded X.com (PayPal). Musk made $22 million when Zip2 was acquired for $307 million by Compaq.

Reed Hastings founded Pure Software in 1991, which went public in 1995, 6 years before NetFlix.

There are many more like this. Lots of these folks had huge successes in their 20s.

I think the PagerDuty trio (Alex Solomon, Baskar Puvanathasan, Andrew Miklas) were 26-27 when they started it.

I'd really love to see this plotted as a histogram of the age of founders of the top N companies according to some metric, and maybe even founder's age vs. some monetary evaluation after a certain number of years.

But how many also had extensive experience in startups in their 20s and 30s?

Working paper version of the one in the article:

https://www.nber.org/papers/w24489.pdf

Interesting tidnit from the discussion section:

V.D Venture Capitalist Behavior We also see that venture capitalists tend to bet on relatively young founders. Given that younger founders have substantially lower batting averages (see Figure 3), the founder age tendency in VC investments may be surprising. VCs may thus be seen as making bad bets, which may be consistent with empirical findings elsewhere suggesting that VCs have earned low returns (Kaplan and Lerner 2010). However, it may also be the case that young founders are more in need of early-stage external finance, thus leading to this relationship. More subtly, and noting that VCs are seeking high returns, which is not identical to high growth, it may be that younger founders tend to sell their equity at lower prices, and thus VCs are making optimal return decisions. Teasing apart why VCs bet young is an interesting area for further work. We can say now however that venture capital, a major source of early-stage financing that can help drive creative destruction and economy-wide growth, does not currently appear allocated to the firms with the highest growth potential.

Thank god

Zuck is also middle aged. :P

This is true for “successful tech companies” but not for “mega successful tech companies” (e.g. Top 10 of all time, like Apple Google Microsoft Facebook Amazon Netflix etc.) There you will find the median age closer to 20 than 30.

John D. Rockefeller was 31 when he founded Standard Oil.

Andrew Carnegie was 57 when he founded Carnegie steel.

My understanding is that JDR started his business at 20, got into oil at 24, bought out his partners, started a new partnership, and then ended that partnership at 31, naming the part of the business he got Standard Oil.

He did, which kinda underscores the argument that entrepreneurs with prior experience and connections have a higher chance of success.

For what it's worth, Reed Hastings founded Netflix when he was 36, and Jeff Bezos founded Amazon when he was 30.

Sure, now average them with the other companies like Microsoft Google Facebook Apple etc

From running my own apps and toy startups in college, I don't think its really the age, its rather the ability of the person to do many things from the tech side to the business side from like creating the tech/app to going out and marketing it so you can actually carry the app to success at an early stage, the experience the person actually has with developing and marketing/distributing a product so you can carry the app at a growth stage, the connections the person has to raise money and find cofounders/employees and the financial capital of the person so you can scale a product to and past product-market fit. These things can come with age but a young person with all the above can run a successful business if they have these things.

On the other hand, you can be middle-aged or 50+ and not have any of these things and run a quite awful startup that turnovers like ~20% of your employees each month which my friend works at and can attest to, as they have a rather middle-aged senior management and ceo + cto at their 50-person startup with executives who have been in the tech and real estate industry at companies like Expedia for 7+ years and it is not successful despite raising huge amounts of cash and their company product has never been launched in the 2+ years or any user testing in the period their company has existed and still offer free dinners and monthly bonuses with the enormous cashpile they raised and keep raising.

This is also why I think people like Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs/Steve Wozniak or Bill Gates or Spiegel/Murphy or the Collison brothers, etc. has, which is the ability and experience or at least talent of pretty much any middle-aged startup founder. There are just some people that outshine others even at a young age.

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