Founders’ age for startups

What do people in Silicon Valley plan to do once they hit 35 and are officially over the hill?

There was a question asked on Quora about what people do when they are over the “hill”(age 35) on Silicon Valley. The question gained a lot of popularity, and thought it would be informative to compile the responses:

Mark Pincus was 41 when he started Zynga.
Reid Hoffman was 36 when he founded Linkedin.
Marc Benioff was 35 when he started Salesforce.
Robert Noyce started Intel at 41 with a 39 year old Gordon Moore.
Irwin Jacobs was 52 and Andrew Viterbi was 50 when they founded Qualcomm.
Pradeep Sindhu was 42 when he founded Juniper Networks.

Om Malik was 39 when he started GigaOM

Robin Chase was 42 when he founded Zipcar, 47 for GoLoco, 52 for Buzzcar, and 54 for Veniam.

Michael Arrington was 35 when he started TechCrunch

Tim Westergren was 35 when he started Pandora. “ I think 30s and 40s are great decades to start things. Greater maturity, life experience, and still plenty of gas in the tank…”

Srivats Sampath was 40 when he started McAfee.

Reed Hastings was 37 when he founded Netflix.

Sandra Lerner was 29 when she co-founded Cisco.

Rashmi Sinha, founded Slideshare at 37.

Mitchell Baker, founded Mozilla at 35+

Katie Rae, founded TechStars at 42.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin were both 25 when they started Google.

Mark Zuckerberg was 21 when he founded Facebook.

Larry Elison co-founded oracle when he was 33

Bill Gates started Microsoft when he was 25

Drew Houston started Dropbox when he was 26.

I’m sure the list goes on and on. The point isn’t that you have to be a certain age to start a successful company, the point is that it doesn’t matter.

I think now is a perfect time to do something. Jeff Atwood wrote an article recently on what the creators of Doom had to deal with when they started,and what is available to us now. Guido van Rossum (inventor of Python) wrote a letter to a young programmer saying, “I am a little jealous that you have access to computers at your age; when I grew up I didn’t even know what a computer was!”

Countless people talk about what an incredible opportunity we have today. I wrote this post because a friend of mine recently told me how he had to do something before he was 26 because after that you can’t. This is probably the best time to learn and build incredible things.