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THE 20-YEAR-OLD ENTREPRENEUR IS A LIE
DATA FROM THE CENSUS BUREAU AND THE IRS SHOW THE AVERAGE AGE OF
SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS FOUNDERS IS 42.
By Meredith Somers | April 20, 2018
According to a working paper from MIT Sloan professor Pierre Azoulay and PhD student Daniel Kim,
the average age of entrepreneurs who've started companies and gone on to hire at least one employee is
42 years old.
"If you knew nothing else, and you had two identical ideas, one proposed by a very young person, one
proposed by a middle-aged person, and that's the only thing you have to go on, you would be better off
- if you wanted to predict success betting on a middle-aged person," Azoulay said.
To find out the correlation between age and entrepreneurship, Kim and Azoulay went to the
government, specifically, administrative data from the Census Bureau's Longitudinal Business
Database, and Schedule K-1 business owners data from the Internal Revenue Service.
FOUNDER AGE DISTRIBUTION:
ALL STARTUPS AND HIGH-PERFORMANCE STARTUPS
PERCENT OF US STARTUPS
3
20
30
From left: Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates started Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft in
20s, but new research suggests that founders in their 40s are more successful.
40
50
70
AGE OF ENTREPRENEUR
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