Founder Age Benchmarks
What’s the optimal age to found a tech company? Do you need to be a 19-year-old college dropout like Zuckerberg? Or is it better to have decades of industry experience under your belt?
According to the data, the sweet spot is somewhat in between. We analyzed 2,602 tech sector customers using Pave’s compensation tools. Let’s take a look at some founder age benchmarks from this dataset.
What is the median age of a startup founder?
The median founder of a venture-backed tech company founded their company when they were ~31-33 years old. Note that on the lower side, the 25th percentile at time of founding is ~27-28 years old. And on the higher side, the 75th percentile is ~36-38 years old.
Founders still running their companies today range from a median of 37 years old at seed stage ($0 to 5M capital raised) to 43 years old at later stage companies who have raised at least $500M.
How Founder Age Affects Capital Raised
Interestingly, founder age at incorporation does not have a clear-cut impact on how much capital the company has raised to date. In other words, the mature tech companies in the wild today are not disproportionately dominated by founders who were older and wiser when their companies were formed.
No matter your age, it’s never too early—or too late—to start building your vision.
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Matt Schulman is CEO and founder of Pave, the complete platform for Total Rewards professionals. Prior to Pave, he was a software engineer at Facebook focusing on user-centric mobile experiences. A self-proclaimed "comp nerd," Matt is known for sharing data-driven thought leadership around all things compensation and personal finance.
