Entrepreneurs are those who undertake and assume the risk of a business enterprise. Everyone has his own concept of a successful entrepreneur. Silicon Valley, for example, views a successful entrepreneur as a 20-something individual with unlimited energy and clever mind.

Researchers such as Benjamin F. Jones, professor of entrepreneurship and strategy at Northwestern University’s J.L. Kellogg School of Management and J. Daniel Kim, a Ph.D. candidate in management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, co-operated with Javier Miranda, from the U.S. Census Bureau and Pierre Azoulay, from the MIT. They have made an analysis of the age of all business founders in the US in recent years. They have concluded that the average age of the most successful entrepreneur is 45.

However, Benjamin J. Jones and his colleagues found that the most new successful enterprises nowadays are led by young people and that these are more prevalent. They have discovered that young entrepreneurs are less indebted in thinking. That is, they seem to have more innovative and mixed-up ideas that can be fruitful to their business. At the same time, they still have more time and energy to work on their business. Thanks to their early age, these young entrepreneurs are more advantageous than their elder counterparts, because they are free from family concerns and responsibilities.

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook uttered that “Young people are smarter”. In fact, young founders always have a surprising story to tell. How would you imagine that a young boy quits college to embark in a business with a mob of 20-something-year-old fellows and then come out after innumerable days with a new trending app or consumer product that make them generate important wealth? That is a very astonishing way to succeed! Thanks to this surprising story of young founders, venture capitalists choose to invest in the young founders’ business and sometimes let the older founders out in the cold.

How about other theories?

Benjamin J. Jones and his colleagues pursued their search and conducted an internal project at the US Census Bureau to check all the business launched in the US between 2007 and 2014, enclosing 2.7 million founders. They made a comparison of the founder age to establish a performance measure involving employment and sales growth, as well as the exit strategy for a business, whether it is an acquisition or an IPO (Initial Public Offering). They concluded that middle-age founders can create the highest-growth firms and the 20s founders are less likely to build a top-growth firm.
Some theories have showed that entrepreneurs get better with age. Indeed, experience is needed when we talk about entrepreneurship. Older and middle-aged entrepreneurs may have much more experiences in management and are endowed with a far-reaching knowledge in entrepreneurship. Moreover, they may have large-scale financial resources and more developed networks.

Here are some of these successful young entrepreneurs

Mark Zuckerberg, who is now endowed with an estimated net worth of USD 61.7 billion. Facebook which he created at just 19 attests itself the hit of the young entrepreneur. Since its conception, Facebook became one of the most used social media all around the world.

Blake Ross, the founder of Mozilla Firefox. At only 19, this successful entrepreneur created the famous web browser. Now, it is among the prior web browser across different platforms like Windows, Linux and Android.

Catherine Cook, creator of MyYearBook.com. At the age of 15, she came up with her brother Dave with a vision of digitizing high school yearbooks and putting it online, and got investment from their elder brother, Geoff Cook. Catherine and Dave got to be the youngest millionaires around in the prime time of MyYearBooks.

Sources: Lifehack / insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu /MarketWatch