It’s widely believed that the most successful entrepreneurs are young. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg were in their early twenties when they launched what would become world-changing companies.
But do these famous cases reflect a generalizable pattern? VC and media accounts seem to suggest so.
However, when Harvard Business Review analyzed founders who have won TechCrunch awards over the last decade, the average age at the time of founding was just 31. For the people selected by Inc. magazine as the founders of the fastest-growing startups in 2015, the average age at founding was only 29.
But when considering the age of all business founders in the U.S., buy using data sets from the U.S. Census Bureau, the average age of entrepreneurs at the time they founded their companies is 42, but the vast majority of these new businesses are likely small businesses with no intentions to grow large (for example, dry cleaners and restaurants).
These averages hide a large amount of variation across industries. In software startups, the average age is 40, and younger founders aren’t uncommon.
However, young people are less common in other industries such as oil and gas or biotechnology, where the average age is closer to 47.
Among the top 0.1% of startups based on growth in their first five years, the researchers found the founders started their companies, on average, when they were 45 years old.
