A business edge that comes with age
Two years ago, MIT economist Pierre Azoulay started a lively discussion when a working paper he co-authored, “Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship,” revealed a surprising fact about startup founders: Among firms in the top 1/10 of the top 1 percent, in terms of growth, the average founder’s age is 45. That’s contrary to the popular image of valuable startups being the sole domain of twentysomething founders, such as Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. The paper, written with Benjamin Jones of Northwestern University, J. Daniel Kim of the University of Pennsylvania, and Javier Miranda of the U.S. Bureau of the Census, has now been officially published, in the journal American Economics Review: Insights. MIT News spoke to Azoulay, the International Programs Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, about the finding and the discussion it has generated. Q: What has been the response of people to the study? A: We’re documenting...