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I’m curious about people starting company at more “advanced” ages (i.e., 40 and beyond).

The media, as mentioned, often focuses on the “young guns,” but does anyone know of anything that’s been written about those starting companies (even their first) later in life?

Interesting… Now I don’t feel like a complete loser.

Sweet, now I can just go to University of Phoenix since education has no impact on success! Insightful+++

Anon,

Though your comment is tongue-in-cheek, don’t be so quick to discount the value of higher education. From the same study:

The most interesting findings however were the difference between those who had college degrees and those who never even got a sheepskin. The average sales revenue of all startups in one of our samples was around $5.7 million, and these companies employed an average of forty-two workers. Startups established by tech founders with Ivy League degrees had average sales and employment of $6.7 million and fifty-five workers, respectively. The success of these two groups markedly contrasted with startups established by tech founders with only a high school degree. Those founders had average revenues and employees of $2.2 million and eighteen, respectively. In other words, it didn’t matter so much if you graduated from an Ivy. What made the greatest difference was having a higher degree.

I wonder if the study’s stats included the college drop-out founders of companies like Apple and Microsoft. Both of whom, interestingly, seem to be actively seeking to change conventional education, whether via film or a new product.

So only 10 schools accounted for almost 20% of the successes?

Seems to be correlated to me.

Not to be nit-picky, but correlation implies statistical analysis and I don’t see any mention of that sort of analysis in this article. As Chuck said, it almost appears more likely that there is a correlation between the top 10 and success. A better conclusion from this article would be that a top 10 school is by no means a requirement for a successful startup and that even founders with only high school degrees have shown a measure of success.

Even if this is true, look at the # of mega giants created just at Stanford alone.

- HP - Google - Yahoo - Excite - SUN - Cisco

The list goes on-and-on, and this is just Stanford.

Stanford creates tech titans

3.5% of the schools produced 20% of the founders? Maybe they teach statistics at the top 10 schools.

There wasn’t much data in the blog post, but I think that “no correlation” was too strong a claim here. I also think that “top schools” may be misleading here, since the Ivies don’t tend to have top CS departments. Large public schools (Berkeley, Illinois, Washington, UCLA , Texas, etc…) tend to have strong science and engineering schools, but none of these schools cracks the US News rankings. In any case, tracking the Ivies is probably a better way to correlate top schools with hedge fund (mis)management than software development.

That said, the general point of the article – that you absolutely don’t need to go to a “top” school or be under 35 to be a successful high tech entrepreneur – is well supported by the data here.

Well, the place where you study does play an important part in entrepreneurial success. Not in the “teaching quality”, but in the mission to create the desire on students to be enterpreneurs. It’s cultural. And it’s one of the reason US has so many more startupers then, for example, Brazil.

Interesting article. I think the takeaway is that just because you didn’t go to an elite institution doesn’t mean you can’t be successful at life in general and in entrepreneurship in particular.

Also worth noting is that graduates from “top schools” often end up going into more conservatively lucrative careers like consulting and i-banking, where the potential theoretical upside is smaller, but the likelihood of making significant money is very high.

Finally, it should not be a surprise that the off-the-chart mid-twenties successful entrepreneurs will likely be college drop outs, it almost has to be that way because someone who graduate and goes to graduate school won’t even be able to START a company with enough time. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerburg, etc. But keep in mind these our outliers, and we don’t read about the failed college dropout entrepreneurs any more than we read about the failed actors and actresses that become career waiters and waitresses.