Youth Myth: Founders of Successful Tech Companies Are Mostly Middle-Aged

The researchers looked at start-ups established between 2007 and 2014 and analyzed the top 0.1 percent — defined as those with the fastest growth in employment and sales. The average age of those companies’ founders was 45.

There are, of course, famous counterexamples. Mark Zuckerberg was 19 when he co-founded Facebook. Bill Gates was 19 when he founded Microsoft with Paul Allen. Steve Jobs was 21 when he founded Apple with Steve Wozniak. The origin stories of those companies and a handful of others helped to shape a myth that tech, and American innovation overall, is fueled by wunderkinds. But fresh-faced founders are the exception, not the rule, according to the study.

That isn’t to say that youth has no advantages.

Younger people often have a risk-taking mind-set and that might help them develop game-changing ideas. In addition, raw problem-solving ability — what psychologists call fluid intelligence — seems to peak early. It may already be declining by the time we’re in our 20s.

Still, the findings on age and entrepreneurship echo earlier myth-busting by researchers about scientific breakthroughs. While Albert Einstein did pathbreaking work on special relativity and the photoelectric effect at 26, such early discoveries aren’t typical. A study of Nobel laureates in physics over the 20th century found that those scientists did their prizewinning work at an average age of 37.

In applied science, crystallized intelligence, gained through experience, appears to be even more vital: Nobel-worthy breakthroughs in medicine arrived a bit later, at age 40, on average.

In short, entrepreneurial success isn’t just a function of raw intelligence and a propensity for risk-taking. It depends on a variety of ingredients, many of which appear to improve with age.

Consider Mr. Fadell’s story.

He started working in Silicon Valley in the early 1990s, designing products at General Magic and Philips Electronics. In the 2000s he moved to Apple, where he led the engineering team that created the iPod digital music player, and played a crucial role in the development of the early iPhone. In 2010, after amassing all that experience, he founded Nest with Matt Rogers, a young Apple engineer.

In an interview, Mr. Fadell recounted how, after he left Apple, he and his family traveled the world and designed an eco-friendly home for themselves in Lake Tahoe. He said he was dissatisfied with the clunky thermostats offered by his contractor or visible during his travels.

“Thermostats were ugly, outdated, and didn’t help you save money or keep you comfortable,” Mr. Fadell said. He recalls thinking: “There’s something fundamentally wrong here and there’s no product in the market to address it.” So he created a new thermostat and a new company.

Mr. Fadell said he had tried to start successful companies in college and earlier in his career but they failed because he wasn’t ready.

“There were a lot of things I needed to learn to finally be able to nail it,” he said. He learned about product design at General Magic, he said, and about managing teams and financing at Philips Electronics. At Apple, he said, Mr. Jobs showed him how to go beyond designing a product; the key, Mr. Fadell said, was to design the customer’s whole experience, from packaging to messaging.

When he needed to recruit a team for Nest, he said, he was already a Silicon Valley veteran. “I’d been in the Valley for 20 years so I had a huge network of people I’d worked with before,” he said.

His thinking, as an older man, was different, too. In his 20s, he said, he was barely aware of thermostats. “College students know what college students need,” he said. “When you get older, you start to need and understand other things.”

A lot of innovation in business benefits from experience. Youth has its triumphs, but some roads to success are lengthy. They require age and staying power.