The age you're most likely to start a successful company isn't what you might think
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- Many people think of young examples — like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates — when they think of successful startup founders.
- New research shows that these cases are more the anomaly than the status quo — the average age of the most successful founder is about 42 years old.
- Among the top 0.1% highest-growth startups the age increases to 45 years old.
- While founders in their 40s tend to have the highest rate of growth, researchers found that youth does have an advantage when gaining funds from venture capitalists, who are more likely to base their investments on appearance than on data.
Company founders can be as young as in their teens or as old as in their 80s. But is there an ideal age you should be when you start a company? It turns out there is, and it's older than you may think.
Those are the results of surprising new research by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). Rather than surveying a representative sample of entrepreneurs or asking experts' opinions, an NBER research team actually assembled Census Bureau data and looked at hundreds of thousands of successful startups, especially those with rapid growth.See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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