Research: Average Age of a Successful Founder is 45 | Hacker News Reader

Research: Average Age of a Successful Founder is 45

hbr.org

104 pointspaulsutter34 comments

Important note about these studies: Success = high employee growth from year 0-5 OR fastest sales growth OR successfully exit through an IPO or acquisition

VC isn't looking at those three factors above. They are looking at LARGEST overall return percentage. VC and the media don't care about 1-30x returns, which is likely where most of these exits are.

HBR should go back and look at the ages of founders that have $1B exits or 100X+ returns on capital if they want to know "why some VCs persist in betting on young founders."

They should likely just consult their colleagues on a different side of their website:

"The average age at founding (a unicorn) in our dataset was just over 31, and the median was 30."

https://hbr.org/2014/04/how-old-are-silicon-valleys-top-foun...

It's sad to realize those unicorn founders aged a few years since their last exit and now worthless

Of course, once you hit the lotto once, VCs will keep throwing money at you no matter how old you get.

Yes, but these other industries employ more people and less skilled people than the tech industry. It's also not very obvious to me that VCs are that good at picking the companies with the largest overall return percentage. The performance of VC as a whole is not that good and arguably the performance of the successful name-brand VCs is due to superior access to deal flow rather than actual skill.

For those interested, there appears to have been a follow up, peer reviewed study published this year, free to access:

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aeri.20180582

With 8 billion people in the world, what we hope to see is that founders come from all age brackets.

Over correction is a real thing, and when young tech founders hit it big it defied the idea of the super senior decision makers in large companies who were the paragons of leadership.

We shifted to the idolization of the young entrepreneur. This is just as bad. Been doing a little Theranos reading lately, and the adoption of the woman founder paradigm was set to take off with Elizabeth Holmes (and she was peddling the full package stereotype of the Ivy League dropout). New narratives help break strangleholds, but damn do they also have a way of unjustly defining stereotypes.

I'm not so sure it's that bad. I'm getting 40 and not planning to create a startup, as I don't have as much energy/health as before. At the same time I'm always looking for companies to invest my money into.

If you don't have energy at 40 it's not because of your age. You can win a championship in any major sport at that age.

As someone who's 40, had to go through cancer treatment and is lacking in energy, not all 40 is equal.

I'm not sure what that has to do with anything. A 12 year old could go through the same thing. Hope you feel better though

You simply can't understand what chemotherapy does to your body and mind untill you go through it. Your minimization of its effects are callous.

You are both assuming I haven't gone through it and that I don't believe chemo is literal poison that destroys your body. This conversation is about lacking energy because of age and somehow you think I'm some sort of cancer denier.

Why are you getting down voted? The same could be said about a 20 year old cancer survivor. Have we lost our senses here?

I'm really sorry for you. My girlfriend has a BRCA gene and the doctors didn't take her seriously when she was 29, because she was ,,too young to have cancer''. Now she has to take anti-estrogene after the chemotherapy that takes most of her energy away.

As for me, I have vasomotor rhinitis since I was 34 because I lived in a street full of cars and air pollution when I was young to save on rent. Now I'm full of money that I can use to decrease all the bad effects that the sickness has on me (like going to hotels far away from cities/villages), but I won't have a normal life until my methylation levels can be reversed.

Exactly. As a counterexample, I'm approaching 40 in the best physical and mental shape of my life. You simply have to take responsibility for your own health, especially if your job involves sitting on your ass for extended hours every day.

Congratulations, you won the generic lotto. Health prevention improved a lot in our lives, but there are still illnesses that you can't prevent and just come at 30-40 already.

True, but I'd still go as far as to say the majority of illnesses western people in their 40's are suffering from could have been avoided with different lifestyle choices.

If I hadn't kept fitness and eating healthy as a priority for the last 15 years, my health would've been in complete shambles by now. I was pretty lazy and self-destructive through my early adolescence, and in my early twenties I was in terrible shape physically and had a lot of severe mental problems that I no longer struggle with. I'm extremely grateful to my 22-year old self that decided to try and turn things around, it didn't happen overnight.

Article is from 2018. Previous discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18212409

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20533034

So, build your network, wait for your inheritance, and do a start up :)

I guess at that age one is fed up working for others, realizing this is not the best way to spend your life - what is left from it.

Or the more likely scenario is, at that age, you've worked on different problems, made the right connections, experienced many frustrations, and took all of those things to create efficiency in some market and build a successful product

Every 20 year old wants to be a start-up founder without understanding how the world works, without ever managing a team, without understanding basic accounting and business processes.

Put in the time first, learn how companies and industries operate, then innovate.

I co-founded a consultancy in my late 20's, it ran for 15 years until I shut it down. I'm now an IC doing work for international juggernaut megacorp but am in my domain and am able to focus on what I'm doing while also observing how the rest of the world works (or doesn't).

Working for yourself frequently means working by yourself to start, spending most of your time solving problems outside of expertise until you've built a team that can do that for you...then you realize you're working for that team. To the extent that you're successful the size of that team continues to grow and grow until it starts to include folks that really don't give a fuck about your dreams or vision or product beyond how it translates to their profit. This isn't really freedom either. You're like a queen bee...it looks like you call the shots but the reality if you don't keep laying eggs you'll have the pleasure of seeing your successor being groomed with great care until you're ejected from the hive.

I love shilling this clip from Lex Fridman's podcast with Stephen Schwarzman, it's a good listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdt4PPY09rQ

Not necessary. Starting small and staying small is still a viable path I believe.

It absolutely is (and IMHO the only way I would want to go). It's just that you want to be big enough that the major business functions are handled by skilled folks otherwise it's just keeping 10 plates spinning until you quit.

Just one decade left to stop being a loser...

I believe in you.

If only carabiner did as well.

;-;

founder and loser are distinct states, and I have seen them overlap. and you can stop being a loser any moment you want. just recognize something dope you did today and bam.

either way, 45 isn't the midpoint, it's the average. the article shows a big chunk of founders in their 50s and a small slice in their 60s. it also shows that the probability of success rises with age, "at least until the late 50s." it crashes in the mid-to-late 60s, but an early 60s founder is still more likely to succeed than a founder who is younger than about 45.

The dopest thing I did today was to cook a correct portion of pasta. I always make too much, but today I made an appropriate amount.

This does not seem like something that convinces me that I'm not a loser.

You're improving! Keep going!

Maybe that's too little to aspire too, but is being a founder really necessary to stop feeling like a loser ?

Original title: Research: The Average Age of a Successful Startup Founder Is 45

,,vast majority of these new businesses are likely small businesses with no intentions to grow large''

It seems that these businesses that the article content about are the opposite of startups.

Read more than the first 3 sentences of the article. It goes on to find better and more direct comparisons to the outliers we focus on.

"Among the top 0.1% of startups based on growth in their first five years, we find that the founders started their companies, on average, when they were 45 years old. These highest-performing firms were identified based on employment growth. The age finding is similar using firms with the fastest sales growth instead, and founder age is similarly high for those startups that successfully exit through an IPO or acquisition."

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