ON AGE vs. WISDOM IN ICONIC START-UPS

FUN WITH NUMBERS

Valleywag has a good post, riffing on a discussion kicked off by Fred Wilson a few days ago on what the ideal age is to be an entrepreneur. 

In particular, I liked the table below, put together by Valleywag, showing the age at founding of some of the iconic technology companies over the past three decades.  As Valleywag summarizes it:

"...quick check on the great tech companies of the last three decades shows a pretty brutal rule. The most spectacular successes are launched by founders still in their twenties.

The peak age: 26. Within a year of that age were Google's Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Apple's Steve Wozniak, Yahoo's Jerry Yang, Skype's Janus Friis, Chad Hurley from Youtube, and Tom Anderson from Myspace."

And that's after Valleywag missed a couple of important companies, as this commenter points out:

  'quilner says:

Your forgot Oracle Corporation's Larry Ellison, surely one of techdom's greatest fortunes.

Oracle Corporation was founded in 1977 by Larry Ellison, Bob Miner, and Ed Oats. Ellison was 33, Miner was 35, and Oates was 31.

On ther other hand, Michael Dell was 19 when he founded Dell Computer in 1984."

Not to mention Netscape, co-founded by a 23-year old Marc Andreessen in 1994.

What I'd like to see next though, are the ages of  the VCs and/or lead investors, that help guide these companies into what they ultimately became. 

While most of them individually did not make fortunes comparable to their founders, they did pretty well by any measure.  And if one includes their firms, along with their limited investors, the results would not by shabby.

I dare say, that most of those key figures were in their thirties, forties or older, when you consider folks like Jim Clark (Netscape), John Doerr (Kleiner Perkins), Michael Moritz (Sequoia), amongst many others.

Because as important the founder's contributions are in these ventures, also important is the guidance and hopefully some wisdom, provided by the "graybeards", as these companies become the icons we now know well.

 

Comments

[Emil Sotirov]

You are right Mike... The age differential between young tech founders and the "greybeards" covers what I would define as a distance between vision and execution. Covering this distance happens in various ways - very much depending on the complexity (and may be historical maturity) of the specific social, economic, and organizational machinery involved. By the time successful tech entrepreneurs start to retire (early 30s), young doctors are just fresh out of school spending endless hours as residents. Architects start building significant stuff typically over 50 and way up into their 90s.

[howard lindzon]

good stuff