The Entrepreneur Age Myth

The romantic comedy Sleepless in Seattle popularized a

faux

statistic about age and the single woman, saying "a single woman over the age of 40 has a greater chance of being killed by a terrorist than of getting married." Another equally invalid urban myth relates to age and the entrepreneur.

Reading Valleywag you'd think that the only entrepreneurs are Digg-style party animal 20-something year olds. Or, if you really want to feel over-the-hill, consider the 12-year-old Jason O'Neil, profiled here by Forbes.

While I have no problem with young entrepreneurs, I think the media -- in its disproportionate coverage of them -- creates the mis-impression that if you over age 30 then you have a greater chance of being killed by a terrorist than of starting a company. So I was happy to find this post on Infectious Greed that brought some data to the problem.

Excerpt:

Perhaps surprisingly, the report shows that U.S. tech entrepreneurs are, if anything, older than expected. People founding tech companies over the last ten years had an average and median age of 39-years, nowhere near the age that makes for good stories about dorm room entrepreneurs -- and older than many of us might have thought.

Tech Start-ups Aren't Just for Wunderkinds [via Zemanta]
Age and the Entrepreneur [via Zemanta]
Fred Wilson post on the Mid-Life Entrepreneur Crisis

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