These are very different things with different skills required, but, as the startup founder is the new thing here, it should get a new word instead of trying to force an existing, understood term to have a new meaning and just causing a lot of confusion as a result.
Edit: Does anyone happen to know the success rate (for some definition of success) for restaurants?
Pretty low failure rate, compared to a startup.
[1] http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2007-04-16/the-restauran...
Isn't it possible that due to the way YC is structured ($18k of funding for 3 months where you have to relocate to the Bay Area), your sample is strongly biased towards younger founders, and that the median age for a successful startup founder is actually 40 or older?
Obviously my knowledge of startups isn't limited to those we've funded.
If you're really interested in the question of successful founders' ages and not just using this as an excuse to argue with me, you can learn a lot from publicly available information. Make a list of the most successful startups of recent times, and find the average ages of their founders. E.g. what was the average age of the founders of Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook?
What you seem to have identified in 'Startup = Growth' is a subset of the startup ecosystem more akin to 'wildcatting.' Both wildcatters and the ventures you seek risk capital from domain experts. These wildcatting risks and rewards are huge as you know better than most.
Maybe a more dignified word than 'wildcatting' can be found but 'startup' is taken.
I guess I'm unconvinced that using the top 5 or 10 consumer Internet startups is a good sample. But I take your point about arguing, and I'll poke around for some reliable data.
EDIT: So I looked at the actual Kauffman survey that everyone keeps referring to [1] to see how they selected the participants. The study was done in 2008, and here's how they selected the tech companies they surveyed:
To answer these questions, we surveyed 652 U.S.-born chief executive officers and heads of product development in 502 engineering and technology companies established from 1995 through 2005. These companies, identified from an existing dataset of corporate records in Dun & Bradstreet’s Million Dollar Database, have more than $1 million in sales, twenty or more employees, and company branches with fifty or more employees.
It seems then that the worst-case scenario here would be a company that's 13 years old and has $1m in sales. If you assume a starting revenue of $1000 / month that you mentioned in your recent essay, that's a weekly growth rate of 0.66%, which is pretty anemic by the standards you set out. On the other hand, if you assume that the average company in the survey is eight years old instead of 13, and that they have $5m in annual sales, the weekly growth rate climbs to 1.46%. Still a far cry from 5% weekly growth, but then 5% weekly growth for eight years isn't even remotely possible.
1. http://sites.kauffman.org/pdf/Education_Tech_Ent_042908.pdf
Also, I think that this is primarily restricted to Internet where it has become increasingly easy to start new companies, and people create a mobile app and call it a "startup". Telecom and Semiconductor companies are still founded by more experienced people, though I don't have age data.
I'm not sure if you meant it that way, but personally I found your comment a little condescending towards people in their forties, and I'm one of them having just crossed over the threshold. As people in their youth have done amazing things, so have people in their mid to late years, and its more about attitude than age in my very humble opinion.
Sorry if I am a bit dubious of the claim.
- for Web / consumer startup the majority of entrepreneurs are in 20s
- for enterprise enterprise applications startup is seems like entrepreneurs in 30s
- for enterprise infrastructure startup is seems like entrepreneurs are in 40s
As of now the most of growth is in Web / consumer startup so it seems like all entrepreneurs needs to be in 20s.