wesleyh

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

Scott_E

DHinEG

L. M. Lloyd

twig

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

cv

BurritoFueled

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.

hbobrien

weezle

pillsandpez

weezle

pillsandpez

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.

lex99

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.

cv

deliriousnyc

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.

Randolf

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.

David Quiec

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.

quilner

Nick Denton

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

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.

Ivan Ivanobrockovich

oneword