What's the average age of people you fund?
About 29. A lot of people think it's younger because
the press especially like to write about young founders.
There is a thin balance I suppose. There is a perfect age when you don't have the responsibilities of family and kids, and still have a decade's worth of industry experience to bank on.
If you are an engineer, you likely graduated at 22. By the time you hit 29, you've had 7 years of real world engineering experience.
Good enough to start your own company, in my opinion.
From https://hbr.org/2013/06/entrepreneurs-get-better-with/:
“The average age of a successful entrepreneur in high-growth industries such as computers, health care, and aerospace is 40. Twice as many successful entrepreneurs are over 50 as under 25. The vast majority — 75 percent — have more than six years of industry experience and half have more than 10 years when they create their startup,” says Duke University scholar Vivek Wadhwa, who studied 549 successful technology ventures. Meanwhile, data from the Kauffman Foundation indicates the highest rate of entrepreneurship in America has shifted to the 55-64 age group, with people over 55 almost twice as likely to found successful companies than those between 20 and 34.
The narrative of "it's hard to start a company when you have a family and a mortgage" might seem intuitive, but the data around entrepreneurship and small business ownership in this country shows that most people don't start successful businesses when they're young, single and have limited responsibilities.
> If you are an engineer, you likely graduated at 22. By the time you hit 29, you've had 7 years of real world engineering experience.
> Good enough to start your own company, in my opinion.
I don't want to discount the value of engineering experience, but this is hardly all that's required for success. One should not mistake Silicon Valley investors tripping over themselves to provide seed funding to engineers with the creation of successful businesses. A lot of the startups today aren't going anywhere, and you just don't hear a lot about the failures because employees typically aren't out of work for long when the money runs out.
The former is usually composed of highly educated execs with business experience and a technical background. They jump in after identifying a core problem in their industry and usually have the technical chops + connections to solve it.
Not necessarily. In my case I had far more financial independence at 40, no debt, and all the kids were out of the house for the first time in my life. Car fully paid off. In my 20s, I wasn't in the position to start a business because I had mouths to feed, at least not without external capital sources.
Yes, but they often have more support too. At 31, I've got a wife who can support the household, money in the bank to pay for capital expenditures, the ability to get a business line of credit, etc. If I quit my job to start a company, I wouldn't be staring down the end of a fixed runway. At 23, I would've been burning a fixed amount of cash needing to make things work before it ran out.
It's easy(ish) to find someone with entrepreneurial drive and technical skill. Far more important is the wisdom to know when to listen and when not to listen (and corollaries about hiring good people and managing). Those are critical for long term success and difficult to learn.
It's sad that there's a cult of youth in the valley because a lot of these skills develop over time.
(on mobile, someone else can reply with the math for an upvote)
Put it like this: I'd say that the average being 29 means that around 80% of founders funded by YC are below 40.
I'd find it surprising if we didn't see a skewed normal distribution (skewed because of the lower bound).
This is not a bunch of uncorrelated uranium decay random number generators.
(I'm actually pretty sure there is enough information about on how many companies YC is funded and the average team size to have a decent go at estimating the absolute numbers too, but that is less interesting for the purposes of this discussion)
Edit: (since you seem interested in the numbers) based on [1] and [2] we can guess lower bounds of (a) 550 companies funded, (b) 2 founders per company and taking my previous "(c)80% less than 40 estimate" (based on a normal distribution) that gives around 220 older than 40.
Given than we don't know (a),(b) or the standard deviation needed to accurately estimate (c) it is actually more useful to talk about the estimate (c) than to increase the inaccuracy by using the numbers (a) and (b).
Edit 2: [3] gives us more accurate numbers. 842 companies funded, max age of founder 66 (I guessed a max of 70). Using that to adjust the standard deviation, and sticking with the (b)=2 estimate above we get around 294 founders 40 or older. Call it 300 in round numbers.
To verify this, someone could run the numbers to check if this gives the average age (30.27) along with the median of 29 (although guessing the shape of the lower-side curve is probably challenging).
[2] http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-average-demographics-of-th...
I suspect that the distribution is approximately normal and that your calculations are close to the true value. From my perspective the really interesting thing to know is how close the true numbers are to expected. This will tell us something useful about the selection process.
I posted it because the notion is similar. We are surprised that Giorgio Armani was in his forties. We are surprised that the average age of people funded by Y Combinator is almost 30.
Maybe there is another reason: At a young age every year is so important. Graduated at 17 or 18, big difference. As you get older that'll change. Founded startup with 30 or 40, not a big difference.