I recently finished Malcolm Gladwell’s new book Outliers, in my opinion his best book yet. I was especially interested by what he said about birth year being a strong determinant of success. He used the birth dates of successful computer and Gilded Age entrepreneurs to support his conclusions. The evidence is compelling. Intuitively it makes sense as well. You have to be born at a certain time to be able to take advantage of a wide open field or a “blue ocean” as they say in the business world.
I was curious to see if this is true for Internet entrepreneurs as well. I did some quick research and came up with the following data:
There’s a few interesting trends I noticed. First, you can tell the strong divide between original internet companies like Yahoo! and Google and Web 2.0 companies like Twitter and YouTube. One difference between these two groups is not only the date founded but how they were educated. Web 2.0 entrepreneurs were much more self-educated while original internet entrepreneurs studied computer science at Stanford. The internet probably enabled self-education and made a degree from Stanford less important.
Also, these entrepreneurs were very similar in age when they started their respective companies. On average, these entrepreneurs were 29 years old, with a coefficient of variation of .136 implying very little variance from the mean.
The most interesting trend from this data, however, is the similarity in ages of partners. The success of these companies was very dependent on teamwork. Though ages of the entrepreneurs in general vary, the partnerships were always very close in age. Not a single sample of partnerships has a coefficient of variation more than .08. This also makes intuitive sense since people are more likely to become close friends and start a company together if they are the same age.
