Contrary to the “young founder” myth, new research shows that among the very fastest-growing new tech companies, the average founder was 45 at the time of founding. Furthermore, a given 50-year-old entrepreneur is nearly 2x as likely to have a runaway success as a 30-year-old.

The “young founder” myth is the idea that young people are just more likely to have more valuable ideas,” says Benjamin Jones, a professor of strategy at the Kellogg School and one of the researchers in the study. Take Mark Zuckerberg’s statement that “young people are just smarter,” or the $100,000 fellowships that PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel hands out each year to bright entrepreneurs—provided that they are under 23.

These new findings have serious implications, as venture capitalists tend to favour younger founders. According to this research, founders and investors have been either under or over-estimating the start-up odds of success based on age assumptions.

It is true that younger people in their 20s may have the advantages of not being beholden to the current paradigm, are digital natives, and are less likely to have family responsibilities to distract or to factor into the personal risk.  And yet older people have had decades to build the business, leadership, and problem-solving chops that help a startup succeed. Experience can also bring substantial insight about specific markets and specific technologies.

There is actually evidence that contradicts the idea that a technopreneur from outside of a particular industry will be more successful, as he/she is not beholden to the current paradigm. The study shows that founders with three or more years of experience in the same industry as their startup are 2x as likely to have a one-in-1,000 fastest-growing company.

By combining tax-filing data, U.S. Census information, and other federal datasets for the first time, the researchers were able to compile a list of 2.7 million company founders who hired at least one employee between 2007 and 2014. The researchers limited their dataset to only include the fastest-growing 0.1 percent of all technology companies. This is therefore not a sample-based study.

The study found that in the fastest-growing 0.1 percent of technology companies in the US, the average founder age was 45.0.  It also found that for tech companies that have successfully “exited” the market, either by getting acquired by another company or going public in an IPO, the average founder for that group was even older, at 46.7.

It is clear that the longer that you have been around, the better are your odds as a technopreneur.

Credit: How Old Are Successful Tech Entrepreneurs? Published by KelloggInsight