Starting a company is a possible at any age.
To prove that innovation isn’t just a young man’s game, we gathered together a group of founders from successful companies like Box, Hubspot, and Poshmark.
These entrepreneurs say that it’s time we shattered Silicon Valley’s age bias. Many venture capitalists have openly stated their preference for funding bright-eyed, youthful founders. And thanks to initiatives like venture capitalist Peter Thiel’s “20 under 20,” which offers students $100,000 to forgo college, entrepreneurs are getting younger and younger.
“People under 35 are the people who make change happen,” said venture capitalist Vinod Khosla in 2011. “People over 45 basically die in terms of new ideas.”
“It may sound bizarre to outsiders, but we — investors — are keen on paying a premium to partner with very young first-time founders that simply think differently before the rest of us,” said Niko Bonatsos, a principal at General Catalyst.
And yet, a number of reports have surfaced in recent years to reflect that more experienced entrepreneurs can think differently too. The Kauffman Foundation posted a report on how 5,000 startups launched in 2004 fared over time. They found that “firms surviving through 2008 were much more likely than firms that exited over the period to have primary owners older than age 45.” More
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