The media loves the story of the 20-something college dropout who builds an empire from a garage. It's a good story. It just isn't the usual one.
A study of more than 2.7 million US company founders, using US Census Bureau data, found the average age of a founder was 42. For the fastest-growing 1 in 1,000 companies, it was 45. Founders with three or more years of experience in the same industry reached that top tier at twice the rate of founders with none.
The typical successful founder isn't a kid in a hoodie. It's someone with a couple of decades of work behind them.
A lot of that experience is earned inside big organisations. People who leave corporate jobs to start something tend to treat it as a careful piece of work rather than a leap of faith, and they skip much of the trial and error that sinks younger start-ups.
Corporate life as a training ground
Working inside a large organisation gives future founders three things that are hard to learn on your own.
1How a business actually runs
When someone leaves a big company, they take a working picture of how a large operation fits together. They don't just have a product idea. They understand what it takes to market it, sell it, keep it legal and support the customers.
2Seeing lots of businesses up close
Senior roles in consultancy, operations or finance put people in front of dozens of different business models, strategies and bottlenecks. That's years of other people's lessons, learned at someone else's expense.
3Systems that repeat
Corporate veterans know how to write a standard way of doing things, check compliance and keep tight control of the money. That lets a new business grow without falling into chaos.
The bottom line
Big organisations force people to plan ahead, make decisions under pressure and deal with tough competition. Put that discipline together with the speed and freedom of running your own thing, and you have a strong starting position.
None of that means you need a corporate career to start something. It means the hoodie story is the exception, and if you're older and wondering whether you've left it too late, the numbers say otherwise.
Source: Azoulay, Jones, Kim and Miranda, Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2018.