Yup, bad news to be sure. However, (billion dollar, public non-tech company) Calloway golf clubs has been pretty successful and was founded by a 63 year old. There's hope for the over 40 crowd!

I am a three time entrepreneur (mid 30s). I think the main reason you don't see as many tech entrepreneurs over a certain age is that few people are willing to put up with the amount of bullshit that goes along with it. It's not that you lose your edge, it's just that sacrifices worth putting up with at 23 are no longer reasonable at 35.

As you get older you realize it is generally a lot more fun to build a product and let someone else deal with fundraising, the employee whose gone batshit crazy on drugs, legal, accounting, etc, etc. This is especially true once you have a life outside of work, and realize that most of what people in the valley consider important is mostly bullshit.

Jim Clark started Silicon Graphics, Netscape, and Shutterfly at ages 38, 50 and 55 respectively.

Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore were in their late twenties when they left Shockley to form Fairchild; they were way beyond 30 when they left to form Intel. Eugene Kleiner was in his mid-thirties when he helped start Fairchild.

In any case, your analysis should also include old-time Silicon Valley firms (HP, Intel, etc.), not just modern day startups. And in the interest of fairness, you should include a sampling of companies that are defunct or have been absorbed (Informix, Amdahl, ATI, Excite@Home, WebVan, for example).

@cv: Your points are all well-made. One quibble: Jim Clark was more in the role of an angel funder of Netscape, no?

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.

Its not that VCs fun kids, its really old foggies being risk-averse. I think you'd find more young entrepreneurs, and naturally you'd have more young folks getting funded.

At the end of the day, VCs should fund people who know what they are doing (and not by age). If you see signs of prefering kids, you should avoid the VC.

If you're only talking about the elite Sand Hill funded ventures then you're probably more or less right. But most funded startups aren't funded by those guys, but by the thousands of 2nd tier VCs, debt+equity funds, merchant banks, and angels, not to mention the hedge funds that have gotten into the act.

By and large I've found those guys prefer to fund entrepreneurs in their mid 30s thru late 40s, and even older. But web 2.0 companies are almost always twenty-somethings, that is true.

All young and all male.

@Nick Denton:
One quibble: Jim Clark was more in the role of an angel funder of Netscape, no?

No. Jim C. was deeply involved in the running of the company from Day One (actually before that since he came up with the idea while he was still chairman at SGI).

Jim C. personally interviewed and hired probably the first 30-40 Netscape employees; he had a cubicle just like everyone else at the first office on Castro Street. He probably also conducted code reviews and engineering meetings himself for the first year or two. I'm sure he interviewed and hired 90% of senior management up until he picked Jim Barksdale to run the daily operations. I'm sure Jim C. didn't back off until he was convinced that Bark could handle running the show.

Reed Hastings: Pure Software @ 30, Netflix @ 37
Jim Barton: Tivo @ 37

These counterexamples (plus the aforementioned Intel, SGI, etc) aren't hard to find.

I'd like to see the age distribution of the company *pitches*. I suspect there's more pitches from younger folks than from older.

Ah, it's just all in the natural sort of evolution of things - the young have always been the early adopteres in tech, they spin off ideas because they see how easy it is to make companies. The gap will close (including with it being all male) now that we're overall much more tech savvy. Future generations of tech/internet companies will be launched by older (and younger) enterpreneurs, and a lot more women.

As a friend of mine put it, only people under 30 are stupid enough to take VC money. Older entrepreneurs are more likely to self-fund or take just an angel round, and while the businesses may not be as spectacularly successful, the outcome for the founder is generally better.

@ weezle, agreed. Everybody young always thinks it's good to get VC. Older people know better :)

If you're willing to look outside of tech, then the classic counter-example is Ray Kroc, who took over and grew a little company called McDonalds starting at age 53.

Congratulations! You've just discovered survivorship bias! (You've also discovered small sample size, but hey)

That is, once you make a list like this, the first question that should pop into your head is, "How many people did exactly the same thing, and then failed anyway?"

You don't know if it's better to fund people under 30 than over unless you also know the failure/success ratio of all companies, regardless of outcome, broken down by the founders' ages.

For your homewwork, you get to read Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Fooled By Randomness and The Black Swan. For extra credit, you get to point, giggle, and laugh at the oeuvre of Jim Collins, who makes this mistake all the time.

Bootstrapping FTW!

I walked into a minefield a couple weeks ago when I posted about the age of the entrepreneurs we've been backing. That wasn't really the point of the post.

@lex99:
Jim Barton: Tivo @ 37

And Mike Ramsay was about 47 when he and Jim founded TiVo ten years ago.

This survey is so flawed it's funny. Hot non-scoop, VW.

Latest action: Evite vs. Socialzr continued — The bad blood between Jonathan Abrams, founder of Friendster and now founder of online event service Socializr, and the lawyers at Evite, is worse than we realized.

Choose a conclusion, then find the facts to back it up. That is the glory of the web, inductive reasoning at its best. Seriously, without even doing any research Marc Cuban, Jeff Hawkins and James Dyson jump immediately to mind as entrepreneurs who did reasonably well after 29.

It's the same old silly tendency of many people in the valley (incl VC) to lump everything vaguely technical under the word "technolgy," without making a distinction. Young people are great for mastering and generating code, and being in tune with the latest way to market the internet. The same can't be said for mastering something like growing single crystal optoelectronics, or understanding other physical systems. An intelligent analysis would involve differentiating companies that develop devices, e-commerce, etc.

A lot of the comments above highlight the fact that this analysis is based on a small sample size. Looking at 600+ founders of European Venture Backed companies it turns out the average age of a founder is 39 years old. There is also clear variation between peak ages in different sectors.

Graphs that highlight these statistics are available here: http://www.libraryhouse.net/blog/2007/05/08/too-old-to-sta...

Ageism? Undeniably. Unfair? Not so sure. If it is then it will lead to an inefficient allocation of capital, one than more than one return-hungry VC would be interested in filling. In short, if "mature" entrepreneurs are being unfairly rejected then someone will pick up the slack.