The Average Age Of A Startup Founder Is Not 20-Something. It's...

The finding offers new evidence that leaders with some experience bring advantages, said Ali Tamaseb, the author and a partner at the venture capital firm DCVC.

The notion of the teenage and twenty-something technology entrepreneur looms large. In reality, the most successful companies are more commonly founded by people in their 30s or older. Among startups valued at $1 billion or more created over the last 15 years, the median age of the founders when starting their businesses was 34, according to research in a new book called Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups. The finding offers new evidence that leaders with some experience bring advantages, said Ali Tamaseb, the author and a partner at the venture capital firm DCVC. "There are, indeed, many successful billion-dollar startup founders in their early twenties," Tamaseb wrote in the book, "but most of them aren't." His takeaway: Age doesn't matter. The profile of a prosperous tech founder in many people's minds is distorted by some big outliers. Steve Jobs was 21 when he co-founded Apple. Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg were 19 when they dropped out of Harvard University to start their companies. Often overlooked is that Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, the two richest men in tech, were in their 30s when they created their most successful businesses. A widely cited study three years ago in the American Economic Review: Insights chipped away at the popular perception that Silicon Valley's greatest entrepreneurs are all fresh college dropouts. Researchers found the average age of a successful startup founder was 45. The paper's authors defined success based largely on growth rather than valuation and compiled a list of the 1,700 fastest-growing U.S. companies.