Killing the Young Founder Myth
CEO Mike Collins and EVP Jin Kim, Alumni Ventures
The Problem With the Story We’ve Been Sold
Silicon Valley loves a certain image: the hoodie-wearing college dropout who changes the world before being allowed to rent car. There’s even a fellowship that pays kids under 23 to quit school and start companies. The message? Younger is better.
Here’s the problem: it’s just not true. Middle-aged founders crush young ones when it comes to building high-growth companies — it’s not even close.
And I’m one of them. At the age of 49, I started Alumni Ventures, recently valued as a unicorn.*
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The Data That Ends the Debate
Take the research by MIT scientists Pierre Azoulay, Benjamin Jones, Daniel Kim, and Javier Miranda (American Economic Review: Insights). They looked at 2.7 million U.S. business founders and followed who actually built the rocket ships. The results are impossible to ignore.
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Average Founder Age
41.9 years. Most founders aren’t in dorm rooms — they’re in their late 30s or 40s. - Home
Elite High-Growth Founders
Top 0.1% of startups? Average founder age: 45. - Home
Older Beats Younger
A 50-year-old founder is 1.8x more likely to achieve extreme growth or a major exit than a 30-year-old. - Home
Experience Wins
Founders with 3+ years in the same industry as their startup are about twice as likely to build a unicorn as someone with no relevant background. - Home
Even in Tech
Across 315 industries, virtually no sectors average founders under 40. Even In computer tech — the youngest sector — the average founder age is still over 38.
This pattern holds in VC-backed startups, STEM companies, and IPO winners. Everywhere, middle-aged founders are at the top.
The AEA paper, while published in 2019, remains one of the most cited studies on founder age and has been validated by multiple follow-up studies through 2025. Research from NBER (The Demographics of Innovation), the Kauffman Foundation, and the Brookings Institution all reinforce that middle-aged founders and entrepreneurs — often in their late 30s to mid-40s — consistently lead the most successful ventures across sectors, including AI.
Why the 40s and 50s Are the Sweet Spot
By midlife, founders have:
- HomeDeep industry knowledge and networks
- HomeYears of hard-won judgment
- HomeFinancial and emotional stability
- HomeLeadership skills and refined talent acumen
- HomeBroader networks and gravitas
- HomeThe scars from failures, the humility to acknowledge them, and the wisdom to avoid them
- HomeOften serial entrepreneurs with previous exits
That combination shows up in the results. Founders in their 40s and 50s don’t just start more companies — their companies succeed at a higher rate. And this holds even in the supposed playground of the 20-something: venture-backed tech.
Youth does brings its own unique strengths:
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Fresh perspectives
that challenge entrenched industry norms. - Home
High energy
and the ability to work relentlessly through long hours and steep learning curves. - Home
Fewer commitments
making it easier to take big risks.
However, while youthful energy can ignite a venture, experience more often sustains and scales it into a lasting enterprise.
The Success Curve
When you control for the act of starting a company, success odds rise steadily with age until the late 50s, with only a small dip after 60.
- HomeFounders under 25? Rarely at the helm of high-growth companies.
- HomeThe big jump starts after 35, spikes again in the mid-40s, and stays high for another 15 years.
- HomeA founder at 50 has nearly double the chance of a blockbuster outcome compared to one at 30.
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Why Investors Should Care
This isn’t just trivia; it’s an investing edge. If your mental image of a great founder is frozen at “Mark Zuckerberg, 2004,” you’re missing the highest-probability bets. The VC industry’s youth bias means capital often flows toward the least-proven age group.
Yes, there are famous young exceptions: Jobs, Gates, Musk. But even those idols of innovation were in their 40s when their companies truly took off. The pattern is that experience compounds.
Moreover, some of the biggest and most successful companies were started by entrepreneurs past their fourth decade:
- HomeElon Musk @52: xAI
- HomeMorris Chang @55: TSMC
- HomeDave Duffield @65: Workday
- HomeIrwin Jacobs @52: Qualcomm
- HomeGary Burrell @ 52: Garmin
- HomeRobert Langer @62: Moderna
The Takeaway
If you’re thinking about starting a high-growth company, your 40s may be the prime time. Years in the trenches build the skills, relationships, and judgment that turbocharge your odds of success.
For founders: it’s never “too late.” For investors: stop underestimating midlife founders. In startups, 40 is the new 20 — but with better odds.
40+-Year Founder Profiles From the Alumni Ventures’ Portfolio
Portfolio companies are shown for illustrative purposes only; not necessarily indicative of any AV fund or investor. Investments shown are not available to future investors, except potentially in the case of follow-on investments. Past performance does not guarantee future results.
Dave Girouard
- College graduation year: 1989 (B.S. from Dartmouth College)
- Current business founding year: 2012
- Business: Upstart, an AI-powered lending platform that partners with banks and credit unions to expand access to affordable credit through machine learning-based underwriting.
Entrepreneurial Juice
- He was ~45 years old when he left his role as President of Google Enterprise (where he built a billion-dollar cloud apps business) to found Upstart.
- He joined Google in early 2004 when it was the same size as Upstart is now, using lessons from scaling Google to build what he hopes will be “the most impactful FinTech in the world.”
- After eight years of being under the radar in Silicon Valley, Upstart went public on Nasdaq in December 2020, achieving profitability in its first nine months.
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Sallie Krawcheck
- College graduation year: 1987 (B.A. from UNC Chapel Hill)
- Current business founding year: 2014
- Business: Ellevest, a digital-first, mission-driven investment platform and wealth management company built by women for women to close the gender investing gap.
Entrepreneurial Juice
- She was 49-50 years old when she founded Ellevest after being one of the most powerful women on Wall Street, having served as CEO of Merrill Lynch, Smith Barney, and CFO of Citigroup.
- Fortune Magazine called her “The Last Honest Analyst,” and she was once ranked as the 7th most powerful woman in the world by Forbes.
- Two-thirds of Ellevest’s Series B investors are women (practically unheard of in venture capital), and the company has grown one of the largest social communities in US financial services.
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Amr Awadallah
- College graduation year: 1992 (B.S. from Cairo University)
- Current business founding year: 2021
- Business: Vectara, a semantic search platform that revolutionizes how we find meaning across all languages using Deep Neural Networks, Large Language Models, and AI to reduce hallucinations and improve search accuracy.
Entrepreneurial Juice
- He was 51 years old when he founded Vectara after previously co-founding Cloudera at age 40, which later went public and was acquired for $5.3 billion.
- He coined the famous concept of “schema-on-read vs schema-on-write” during his time as Cloudera’s CTO, revolutionizing how enterprises think about big data.
- His first startup, Aptivia (a search engine for online product information), was acquired by Yahoo in 2000, where he then spent eight years as VP of Product Intelligence Engineering.
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Amy Errett
- College graduation year: 1979 (B.A. from University of Connecticut)
- Current business founding year: 2013
- Business: Madison Reed, an omnichannel beauty brand that is redefining hair color with safer ingredients and both at-home products and physical Color Bar locations.
Entrepreneurial Juice
- She was ~53 years old when she founded Madison Reed (her fourth company), naming it after her daughter who inspired her mission to create safer hair color products.
- Before founding Madison Reed, she was a General Partner at Maveron, the VC firm co-founded by former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz.
A former UConn basketball player, she remains such a passionate fan that Madison Reed recently secured court naming rights at UConn with NIL deals for players like Paige Bueckers.
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Resources
1. “Age and the Quality of Entrepreneurship”
- Authors: J. Daniel Kim & Pierre Azoulay
- Published: Strategic Management Journal, 2021
- Summary: Expands the original study by looking at the quality of ventures across different age groups. Finds that older founders produce higher-quality firms, measured by job creation, growth, and survival.
- Link: https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.3270
2. “Super Founders”
- Author: Ali Tamaseb
- Published: PublicAffairs, 2022
- Summary: Ali Tamaseb uses data from hundreds of billion-dollar startups to show that successful founders often have significant experience, are typically in their mid-30s or older, and thrive across varied backgrounds and markets.
- Link: https://www.publicaffairsbooks.com/titles/ali-tamaseb/super-founders/9781541768413/
* Unicorn value produced in accordance with Alumni Ventures’ valuation procedures, which involve some subjectivity and estimation.
This communication is from Alumni Ventures, a for-profit venture capital company that is not affiliated with or endorsed by any school. It is not personalized advice, and AV only provides advice to its client funds. This communication is neither an offer to sell, nor a solicitation of an offer to purchase, any security. Such offers are made only pursuant to the formal offering documents for the fund(s) concerned, and describe significant risks and other material information that should be carefully considered before investing. For additional information, please see here. Example portfolio companies are provided for illustrative purposes only and are not necessarily indicative of any AV fund or the outcomes experienced by any investor. Example portfolio companies shown are not available to future investors, except potentially in the case of follow-on investments. Venture capital investing involves substantial risk, including risk of loss of all capital invested. This communication includes forward-looking statements, generally consisting of any statement pertaining to any issue other than historical fact, including without limitation predictions, financial projections, the anticipated results of the execution of any plan or strategy, the expectation or belief of the speaker, or other events or circumstances to exist in the future. Forward-looking statements are not representations of actual fact, depend on certain assumptions that may not be realized, and are not guaranteed to occur. Any forward-looking statements included in this communication speak only as of the date of the communication. AV and its affiliates disclaim any obligation to update, amend, or alter such forward-looking statements, whether due to subsequent events, new information, or otherwise.
Featured Authors:
Michael Collins
CEO, Alumni VenturesMike has been involved in almost every facet of venturing, from angel investing to venture capital, new business and product launches, and innovation consulting. He is the CEO of Alumni Ventures and launched AV’s first alumni fund, Green D Ventures, where he oversaw the portfolio as Managing Partner and is now Managing Partner Emeritus. Mike is a serial entrepreneur who has started multiple companies, including Kid Galaxy, Big Idea Group (partially owned by WPP), and RDM. He began his career at VC firm TA Associates. He holds an undergraduate degree in Engineering Science from Dartmouth and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Jin Kim
EVP of Office of InvestmentJin has worked at the intersection of innovation, investing, and business building for over 20 years. He was an executive at Raytheon Technologies, a private equity investor with Coller Capital, and started his career with the Boston Consulting Group. He holds an undergraduate degree in physics from the University of Cologne, and a PhD in quantum physics from the University of Oxford.
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