<story><title>Research: Average Age of a Successful Founder is 45</title><url>https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-successful-startup-founder-is-45</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>AndrewKemendo</author><text>Important note about these studies: Success = high employee growth from year 0-5 OR fastest sales growth OR successfully exit through an IPO or acquisition&lt;p&gt;VC isn&amp;#x27;t looking at those three factors above. They are looking at LARGEST overall return percentage. VC and the media don&amp;#x27;t care about 1-30x returns, which is likely where most of these exits are.&lt;p&gt;HBR should go back and look at the ages of founders that have $1B exits or 100X+ returns on capital if they want to know &amp;quot;why some VCs persist in betting on young founders.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;They should likely just consult their colleagues on a different side of their website:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The average age at founding (a unicorn) in our dataset was just over 31, and the median was 30.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;hbr.org&amp;#x2F;2014&amp;#x2F;04&amp;#x2F;how-old-are-silicon-valleys-top-founders-heres-the-data&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;hbr.org&amp;#x2F;2014&amp;#x2F;04&amp;#x2F;how-old-are-silicon-valleys-top-foun...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Research: Average Age of a Successful Founder is 45</title><url>https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-successful-startup-founder-is-45</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>runawaybottle</author><text>With 8 billion people in the world, what we hope to see is that founders come from all age brackets.&lt;p&gt;Over correction is a real thing, and when young tech founders hit it big it defied the idea of the super senior decision makers in large companies who were the paragons of leadership.&lt;p&gt;We shifted to the idolization of the young entrepreneur. This is just as bad. Been doing a little Theranos reading lately, and the adoption of the woman founder paradigm was set to take off with Elizabeth Holmes (and she was peddling the full package  stereotype of the Ivy League dropout). New narratives help break strangleholds, but damn do they also have a way of unjustly defining stereotypes.</text></comment>