Valleywag
Our quick survey of iconic tech companies, yesterday, makes depressing reading for the graybeards: the median age of the most successful founders is 26. Yes, 26. Face it: you're over already. That's largely true, particularly for tech businesses, but there's one other reason that older entrepreneurs don't show on the list: they often don't need the money. That's true in two regards: if they've already made a fortune, they may be more intent on preserving it, rather than shooting for a bigger one, so their risk profile shifts. But some older entrepreneurs fall off the sample because they've graduated into tycoons, like Richard Branson, and can fund new ventures on their own terms.
The entrepreneurial prime
Our quick survey of iconic tech companies, yesterday, makes depressing reading for the graybeards: the median age of the most successful founders is 26. Yes, 26. Face it: you're over already. That's largely true, particularly for tech businesses, but there's one other reason that older entrepreneurs don't show on the list: they often don't need the money. That's true in two regards: if they've already made a fortune, they may be more intent on preserving it, rather than shooting for a bigger one, so their risk profile shifts. But some older entrepreneurs fall off the sample because they've graduated into tycoons, like Richard Branson, and can fund new ventures on their own terms.
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7:06 AM on Wed May 16 2007
By Nick Denton
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4 comments
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I just looked at 3 more seed funded tech plans this morning. 2 will probably get VC funding. Neither had anyone on their management team under 33. The discussion we had was around whether management could deliver. You just have to look outside of the Web 2.0 club. I don't know about the VCs you're talking to. But the guys I know generally consider credible entrepreneurs over 30 to be worth their weight in gold.
I'm 22, turning 23 in July. I'm running out of time guys! Anyone got a few million to spare?
All about Entrepreneur27.org.
Did you guys make any attempt to adjust for the overall volume of companies started by people in their 20s vs. 30s? Looks to me like the big thing here is that most of the big hits are started by people who jump into something early in the credit cycle. How about poking through Fucked Company or the TechCrunch Deadpool and see how the cohorts look by number of failures (come on, give us some of that ole Spiers-era service journalism)? My guess is that you're typical 30-year-old D.E. Shaw employee earning the extra '0' that comes with having to pretend to be excited about bonds all day is considerably less likely to jump on the Next Big Thing than your workaday broke-ass 25-year-old Stanford grad student. I imagine I'd be a lot more protective of my standing Nobu rez than my Palo Alto extra-long twin. So I'd bet the volume of consumer-oriented startups launched by people in their 20s _dwarfs_ that of people in their 30s. Please tell me that's the case, because I just turned 27, and I can't take any more bad news this week.
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