I am absolutely not saying you can't do this. In fact, GoCardless is an example of a company started by very young founders with little start-up experience, and is now a unicorn.

The difference is that if you have this experience when starting a company, it can help you avoid so many stumbling blocks, and you can skip forward to more mature company stages.

While you can't really compare two companies, I think it's interesting that the company I currently work at (incident.io) has only taken a year to go from me joining as the first employee to 40 people + series A + hundreds of customers now.

There's no way we'd have moved so fast if it wasn't a case of replicating what we already knew worked, tweaked for the environment we found ourselves in.

So yes, it doesn't mean you can't be successful as an inexperienced founder, but I do think it makes a difference in terms of execution.

Doesn't match the data...

https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-succes...

That says "successful". If you're just talking about all founders it may be different.

I think this may just be your bubble - I'm 39 and worked as a programmer since I was 18 in 3 different cities/countries & I know lots of both experienced people and people out of college who started companies.

Is a "startup" the same as starting a company? If I start a company without ever seeking external funding/accelerating/etc, is my company a "startup" in the same way that "founding a startup" implies?

I was under the impression that starting a company in general and 'starting a startup' are not exactly the same thing, though I surely might be wrong about this.

In his essays Paul Graham defined "startup" as a company designed to grow quickly.

I think the average US founder age is 40s. But I'm not sure since most statistics focus on successful founders. This link seems to look at all of them.

https://www.zippia.com/founder-jobs/demographics/

The average founder of a business is not founding a VC-targeted startup, or even a technology business. There are a lot more landscapers counted in all of these surveys of successful startup businesses than founders who even considered YC.

Just to contrast this: Most of the startup founders I've met, have previously worked in consulting (think McKinsey, Bain, BCG, etc.).

Which I guess makes sense, as they've been exposed to certain industries from top to bottom, as well as people with enough funds to actually invest.