Bill Gates was 21 when he and Paul Allen registered Microsoft.
Steve Jobs was 22 when he and Steve Wozniak launched Apple.
Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook in his Harvard dormitory.
Such stories are the exception rather than the norm.
Starting young can have some clear advantages.
But overall, the research suggests, older age is associated with higher levels of entrepreneurial success.
Mature-aged entrepreneurs run about a third of all businesses that are less than three years old.
Younger entrepreneurs do have some advantages.
As a group, they are healthier and tend to have fewer family obligations.
They may be less risk-averse, often because they have less to lose.
They may also benefit from others positive perceptions of them as youthful.
But mature-aged entrepreneurs have three key advantages: human capital, social capital, and financial capital.
Our research involved surveying more than 1,000 mature entrepreneurs and correlating the results to other studies on entrepreneurs.
They tend to have better social skills and are better able to regulate their emotions, than those younger.
Their fear of failure is thus less than their younger counterparts.
The average age at founding was 41.
For the 1 in 1,000 highest-growth ventures, the average age was 45.
Indeed, they found the batting average for creating successful firms rose dramatically with age.
A 50-year-old founder was 1.8 times more likely to achieve upper-tail growth than a 30-year-old founder.
Those in their early 20s had the lowest likelihood of success.
How government can help
Entrepreneurship may therefore be a viable alternative to mature-aged unemployment.
Such support will both enhance the success of these businesses and employment prospects for young and old.
