Don’t Let Age Get in the Way of Entrepreneurship

By Emma Waldman | Harvard Business Review | December 02, 2021

If I ask you to imagine the typical American startup founder, who do you picture? Most people might conjure someone resembling Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs. Young, white, male, college dropouts who took leaps of faith and bet everything on their big ideas. Part of that image checks out. In 2019 it was reported that 77% of venture-backed founders in the U.S. are white and 90% of them are men.

But surprisingly — and in direct contradiction to the Zuckerberg, Gates, and Jobs personas (who were 19, 19, and 21 years old, respectively, when they founded their businesses) — the average entrepreneur is more seasoned. According to a 2018 study of data sets from the U.S. Census Bureau, 42 is the magic age of successful startup founders.

While much has been written about the biases aspiring entrepreneurs face: race, gender, sexuality, and religion (to name a few), before digging into the data, I had not considered age as a factor. In the movies and media I grew up with, the story was clear — the younger and more driven the protagonist, the more their business thrived.

This made me wonder: What role does age play in real life?

While researchers suggest that more studies need to be done to answer my question, there are some specific advantages to starting a company later on in life: greater access to financial resources, deeper social networks, and more experience — including the acquisition of hard skills (technical training and education) and soft ones (personality, confidence, likeability, ego).

Even so, there are exceptions. In the same study mentioned earlier, approximately 10% of founders defied the odds and started thriving companies before turning 29. To determine what these young people have in common, whether they faced any barriers (related to age or not) when getting started, and how they overcame them, I spoke with five successful founders in their mid-20s to early 30s.

While each of their journeys has been different, there are some consistent takeaways that anyone looking to become a founder — especially in the early stages of their career — can learn from.

First, let’s tackle the question of age. Does it matter?

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By MIT Sloan CDO
MIT Sloan CDO