Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Geezers and High-Tech Startups

We blogged previously about the observation that Gen Y entrepreneurship appears to be on the rise. This seems to be consistent with a common myth about entrepreneurship that it's a young person's game (I should probably say young man's game because one relatively incontrovertible fact is that men engage in entrepreneurship at a much higher rate than women). If you look at the data, however, they don't seem to support the myth of the dominance of youthful entrepreneurship.

A recent study conducted by Vivek Wadhwa, Richard Freeman, and Ben Rissing on behalf of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation indicates that this myth is false even for high-tech startups. The researchers surveyed 652 US-born technology entrepreneurs who started tech companies from 1995 to 2005. They found that the average age was 39 and that twice as many U.S.-born tech entrepreneurs start ventures in their 50s as do those in their early 20s.

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