The Young Entrepreneur Myth

By Paul Kedrosky · Thursday, June 18, 2009 ·

My colleagues at the Kauffman Foundation are on a roll. Following up fast on the heels of a paper last week on Fortune 500 companies, recessions, and startups, Dane Stangler at Kauffman is releasing a new paper today on entrepreneurs and age.

As we all, ahem, know, entrepreneurs are callow twenty-somethings. Except, as Dane shows, that isn't true. Building, in part, on some research by another Kauffman colleague, Vivek Wadhwa, he shows that entrepreneurs' average age skew considerably older than is accepted wisdom. (I made a similar point last week at a conference in New York, cheerfully lifting Vivek's and Dane's work to support my point.)

young-entrepreneurs

You can find the press release and full study here.