[sayemm]

Jim Clark was 50 when he co-founded Netscape with Marc Andreessen. And he was 37 when he first got in the game and started SGI.

Mark Pincus was 41 when he started Zynga. Mark Cuban was in his late-30s when he started what would become Broadcast.com and Mike Bloomberg was about 40 when he started Bloomberg.

Just a few names/ages off the top of my head, though we could obviously name just as many extraordinary entrepreneurs who proved themselves in their 20s/early 30s.

Age matters little for entrepreneurs, I think. What really does though is the amount of time you have and just how much of it you're willing to put in to make something happen.

[saurik]

I feel you are discounting (with your concluding sentence) the emotions that are at work while dealing with the millions of negotiations at play while starting a company, whether it be for something as simple as "getting a good price on bandwidth" to something as complex as "getting a good valuation on our stock".

Even day-to-day operations involve a lot of emotions, such as managing feedback from users. When you start dealing with tons of customers, eventually the situation will come up that you answer the phone and there is an irate user on the other end screaming at you.

Even when you have zero users, you are going to need to make really tough decisions inside the company regarding who is working on it and how much they are being compensated (whether it be for stock or for equity).

As I've gotten older (I'm 29 now), I've seen a dramatic change in my abilities in these regards, abilities that I expect (based on discussions I've had with 40-50 year old people who advise me) will hopefully continue to improve over the next decade or two (until my brain starts to turn to mush, which of course will start to happen, making me sad).

Of course, some people manage to be good at this when they are very young, and some people simply suck at this until they are very old, but I seriously doubt that this incredibly vital skill is something that anyone doesn't get much better at as they get older, whether they are actively trying to or not.

[sayemm]

I'm 25 and I've founded two startups in the past; I know exactly what you're talking about regarding the emotional roller coaster.

But I greatly disagree that age somehow naturally helps you deal with this. The only thing that does help you deal with it is experience, plain and simple. That's why it helps if you start when you're younger.

If my father (who's 51) decided to start a company tomorrow he'd feel uneasy and make way more mistakes than I would simply because he's never been through it before.

[saurik]

I do not disagree with this, but will state the following "in response": I believe there is a lot of overlap in the things you learn from running a business as running a family, giving your father a lot to teach you about running a business from his many further years of experience in those areas (and consequently I believe his first year of entrepreneurship would be smoother than yours, even if your 26th were smoother than his first).

[sayemm]

I agree, I think it's because life exp of any kind greatly helps for confidence and leadership in running a company as well.

But I still think there's no better way to learn the game than to just go out there and do it... make mistakes, learn/improve, and keep iterating. No one becomes a great entrepreneur overnight; and certainly a lot of those guys I mentioned (Mark Cuban especially) went through a lot of failure before making their first big hit.

[rottendevice]

I completely agree.

But this country loves extreme cases. The media tends to ignore the 40+ successful CEOs out there because it's not uncommon to see someone in that age group running a good business. But when Mark Zuckerberg became the world's youngest billionaire at age 23, everyone wanted to do an interview with him and sell a story around it.

Really, the reason everyone pays attention to Zuck is because he's the exception.