Unicorn Founders: Youth vs Experience

A data visualisation showing the ages of 300+ founders, whose companies grew into billion dollar “unicorns”.

Each block in the chart below represents a company. The horizontal position represents the founder’s age when they founded (or co-founded) the company. The colour represents the company’s market value, ranging from olive green for 1 billion ($US) to bright orange for 100 billion and over.

Companies with more than one founder may be represented by multiple blocks, as the co-founders were often different ages.

Chart by author, background image by cocoparisienne

Summary and Highlights

There is an interactive version of the chart below that allows you to explore the founders represented by each individual block. But here are some highlights…

• The average age of these unicorn founders was 32.6 years.
• About 23% of the founders were aged 25 or under.
• About 11% of the founders were aged 45 or over.
• The youngest founder in the chart is Andrew Sutherland, who created Quizlet as a 15 year-old high school student. Note that it took 15 years for his company to grow from a student side project to its billion dollar valuation, after a Series C round in 2020.