I was 47 years old when I started my most recent startup (I am now 52). I am the 3rd oldest among my co-Founders (the 2nd oldest will be celebrating his 60th birthday this summer). I am also the only one on the team who had any kind of previous startup experience. We struggled for three years and took no salaries (1st year was conceptual, 2nd year to develop product, 3rd year we started shipping). The company is five years old and has been profitable for two years. It was recently selected for the Emerging Company of the Year Award by Frost & Sullivan. I also decided to take an early retirement early this year to write my book and travel with my parents and my kids. We took no VC money and we control our own distiny. We were successful for the same reasons that all startups are successful. We were dedicated, we were tenacious, we were lucky and we focus our energy on making sure that there are as many people as possible who care about our success and not our failure. It also helps that we took no shortcut, in life or in business. We work hard to keep every friends that we have and we didn't try to make new enemies.
Sometimes the good guys do get to win, even if we were just a bunch of old farts. So there is hope for all of us.
I found this read refreshing (and reassuring). As an "older" hacker/entrepreneur, I have never figured out what's stopping me from doing what so many 20-somethings are doing. (The answer is "nothing".)
Sure, I don't know many people with whom I can talk about my work. (Probably why I'm here.) But I make up for that with lots of hands on experience. Almost every day I run into some technical or business problem that I've encountered somewhere before, making it a little easier to solve this time.
For a software startup, lots of things are important, but most important is what you can build, which is poorly correlated to age, education, or location. So no surprises here. Just nice to read about the other 90% once in a while.
"Sure, I don't know many people with whom I can talk about my work."
You're in the wrong town. Even in Austin, which is a startup hub and the second home for many of the world's biggest tech companies (Sun, IBM, Motorola, Intel, and the list goes on and on, even Google has a small office there), I felt the way you feel. In the valley...it's a different world altogether. You never feel like the odd bird out here, and if you ever get to feeling that way, search the web...there's an even happening within the next week where you'll be able to rub elbows with people even more caught up in it than you are.
I don't see what myths this is busting. Presumably their definition of a tech company included a lot more than web startups. No one doubts that founders of biotech companies or hardware companies tend to be in their 30s or 40s.
I wonder what their analysis would look like if it was only web startups.
At Startup School I found myself older than most of the people I befriended. Was that because mostly younger people are doing web startups or mostly younger people make up this community? (Or both)
No, its because you're 80 years old! Just kidding. I think that the people attracted to Startup School might be more suited to younger people partly for networking. I didn't feel the need to go as I knew that it would be online afterwards and I'm comfortable and confident in the network I have now (not saying it can't be expanded) but when you're young and just starting out its all about building knowledge. Anyway, thats my take on it.
"I'm comfortable and confident in the network I have now"
I'm not. Whenever I talk about what I'm doing, I get the "Why would you want to do that?" response or look.
But not at Startup School. Two days talking with cool people about stuff that interests me was like therapy. When you talk about substance, no one cares about the superficial.
You were only semi-cool until the last day. Your discussion of generating python source from other apps while eating a burrito and texting pushed you over the top.
I agree, it would have been more useful to have seen the data with an industry dimension added as software was only one of 8 major industry groups they included.Maybe the results of that slice didn't fit their expected conclusions?
The survey doesn't consider serial entrepreneurs. They just ask the age of the founder during the current company's incorporation. (For example, Andreessen would contribute an older data point with Ning even though he was a prototypical young guy success story.)
Also, I think the attention paid to the Ivy-League is unwarranted given other possible groupings in the data. If you look at the data in the paper, it looks like you can create a non-Ivy "Entrepreneurship" league comprised of the following schools:
MIT, Penn St, Stanford, Berkeley, Missouri, USC, Texas, and UVa. By my mental math, this 8 school league graduated just under 14% of the founders compared to the 8% for the 8 school Ivy-League. Regional effects were probably even more interesting, and you wonder what a SF area (Berkeley/Stanford) + Boston area (MIT/Harvard) grouping would look like compared to other regions.
> "The average and median age of U.S.-born founders was 39 when they started their companies. Only about 1 percent of U.S.-born founders of tech companies were teenagers."
"... most U.S.-born technology and engineering company founders are middle-aged, well-educated, and hold degrees from a wide assortment of universities."
Sometimes the good guys do get to win, even if we were just a bunch of old farts. So there is hope for all of us.
Good luck, everyone.