
How Old Are Silicon Valley’s Top Founders? Here’s the Data - arnauddri
http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/04/how-old-are-silicon-valleys-top-founders-heres-the-data/
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theflubba
Stolen from my buddy Abe. Poor journalism.

[http://abe.is/the-best-age-to-raise-money/](http://abe.is/the-best-age-to-
raise-money/)

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bjelkeman-again
It looks very much like it. A shame if they did and didn't credit him.

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malanj
Seeing that data overlaid with number of people starting companies would be
really valuable.

I suspect that the average "cost" of starting a company in your 20s is much
lower than later in life (smaller salary to give up, less chance of family
etc).

The really interesting (relevant?) question would be chance of success over
age.

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icefox
Then of course you would want to see what is the percentage of startups that
failed at any specific age. Maybe it is cheap to start a startup when you are
20, but you fail more than when you are older and know what in the world you
are doing.

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n3on
I don't think you know more when you are older. Knowledge comes with
experience and if you never found a startup in your life, you won't have much
more experience no matter what age. You become only more risk averse.

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icefox
I was part of a startup when I was 20 and I knew _nothing_. I didn't
understand business, I didn't understand money, I didn't understand value, and
I barely knew how to develop software in a competent manor. When I was 20 it
was still okay to sleep on a couch for months because I saved $80, I could
barely comprehend how insignificant $80 is to a company. I was making
something cool that I wanted and the fact that the company wanted it too was
neat and frankly lucky. Given another ten years of just living your knowledge
of how the world works will grow considerably. Maybe you do become a little
more risk averse, but you definitely become a lot less stupid. When you are 20
you have a very hard time judging how good an idea is so one is as good as
another. Given enough 20 year olds one is bound to be lucky :) When you are 30
you should be able to toss out many ideas most of which are just bad which is
why I would expect them to fail less.

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LukeWalsh
I really hate when people default to percentages to display data for
incredibly small sample sizes. I know by the very nature of the data there is
not that much individual information available but the sample size is 41
companies. Really?

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fragsworth
This data is worthless because it shows nothing about the _distribution_ of
founder success. It gives no indication of expected value.

Better data would provide the average success of funded companies by the age
of the founders. This would tell us whether or not younger or older founders
are being under-funded.

The expected value of older founders could easily be higher if they have a
lower variance but greater average success. Or it could be that younger
founders are severely under-funded because the top-heaviness of the winners
vastly outweighs the higher number of failures.

Who knows? The data in the article tells us nothing but how old people happen
to be in this community.

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sillysaurus3
It's probably not worthless. It just depends what question you're interested
in answering.

Expected value is a good one, but personally I was just interested in knowing
the ages of all the founders.

It's absolutely worthless for an investor who's trying to predict success,
though. And since founders are investors of their own time, it's worthless to
help you decide whether you should start a company.

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error54
>"...manually searching LinkedIn profiles for year graduated, we were able to
generate a list of founders for 35 of the 41 start-ups, and to determine an
approximate age for the majority of them."

I think there's a statistically significant variance in a graduation date
versus a persons actual age. Lot's of people in my CS program were above the
age of 25 but if all you're checking is the graduation year then according to
this graph, we would all be put into the 20-24 bucket.

Granted, they acknowledge that their data is heavily biased given their small
sample size and given the fact that it only charts successful startups.

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cwal37
When they complain about having to get the data by hand, I assumed they were
crawling through at least hundreds of profiles. Instead, it's just 35. If I
had to guess, that's also a contributing reason as to why the first bar chart
is in %, it masks how laughably small their sample is.

Just because those founders have companies that went on to $1billion+ doesn't
make them disproportionately significant in a statistical sense. Although it
feels like they try to imply that with "disproportionately influential
dataset".

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pdevr
This is a decent start. However, the data set is statistically insignificant.
Only 52 founders? HBR can do much better than this.

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ganeumann
Agree. I read the part where they "were limited by having to do manual
research" on LinkedIn: essentially typing in the founders' names and hitting
return. They did this 52 times. Get some grad students and put them to work.
You'll have a couple thousand in no time.

I once emailed Reid Hoffman (a friend knows him) proposing to do an analysis
of the life-cycle of an entrepreneur (age, what jobs they held before
founding, repeat founder success, etc.) I never heard back from him; I'm sure
he's got better things to do. But I wish LinkedIn would set up a data-mining
department, like OKCupid's. They could do some really interesting stuff.

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rubyrescue
LI has a very large data mining department, they just don't publish what they
are doing. Just look on LI for employees of LinkedIn that are data scientists;
it's a substantial team. Source: I'm trying to hire data scientists and I am
learning where they are...

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hglaser
Selecting companies that are valued at over $1B yet haven't IPO'd yet is a
really narrow set and a moving target. Why not include companies that were
venture-backed and have IPO'd? And/or companies that were acquired for over
$1B?

For me the most interesting part of the underlying data is the number of
Chinese companies.

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johnrob
There are probably very few founders over 50. Given that there is at least one
success in that bracket, I'll bet that founders over 50 have the best odds of
any age group.

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w1ntermute
Not least because any entrepreneurs of that age are probably successful serial
entrepreneurs. Otherwise, they wouldn't even be able to get any funding at
that age.

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krschultz
I actually know several people that have gotten funding after age 50. Just one
example, but the first startup I worked at had a CEO who was around 50 years
old, and it was the best place I've ever worked.

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arnauddri
Data show surprisingly young founders in the billion dollars clubs but I'd be
interested to see the breakdown of tech/business founders among the 20-24 yo
founders

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pyrrhotech
You mean the extremely bubbly my series A-F silicon valley VC valuation
billion dollar club. Also known as the $100 million of which I own 5% as a
founder reality club.

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pbreit
Did they make the source data available? It's only about 40 companies, right?
Should be pretty easy to show us the details.

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michaelochurch
And here are the reasons for that:
[http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/12/14/vc-
istan-6-th...](http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/12/14/vc-istan-6-the-
isms-of-venture-funded-technology/)

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