The popular image of major achievement, the young tech founder, the prodigy, skews heavily toward youth. Two large, methodologically rigorous studies, one on entrepreneurship and one on cognitive ability across the lifespan, suggest that image is measurably off, and off in a specific, useful direction.
The clearest evidence comes from a study by Pierre Azoulay, Benjamin Jones, J. Daniel Kim, and Javier Miranda, published as an NBER working paper and later in the American Economic Review: Insights. Using U.S. Census Bureau administrative data covering essentially the full population of new American firms over roughly a decade, not a survey sample but the actual universe of founders, the researchers identified the fastest-growing one-in-a-thousand new ventures and calculated the average age of their founders. That average came out to 45 years old. The pattern held up consistently across technology sectors, major startup hubs, and successful company exits. The researchers also found that prior industry experience was a stronger predictor of a startup’s eventual success than youth, directly undercutting the common assumption that entrepreneurial success is primarily a young person’s game.
A second, very different study helps explain part of why that pattern might make sense cognitively. In a 2015 study by Joshua Hartshorne and Laura Germine, published in Psychological Science, the researchers combined a reanalysis of standardized WAIS-III and WMS-III test norming data, drawn from 2,450 participants, with large internet-based samples totaling more than 48,000 people ranging from age 10 to 90. Rather than cognitive ability peaking at one single age, the researchers found that different specific abilities peaked at very different points across the lifespan. Raw processing speed peaked early, around age 18 to 20. Working memory peaked somewhat later, in the 20s and 30s. But vocabulary and accumulated general knowledge, what researchers call crystallized intelligence, didn’t peak until roughly age 50, and even later in more recent generations of test-takers.
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Together, these two studies suggest a specific, evidence-based explanation for why major achievement often arrives later than the popular image suggests. Azoulay and colleagues’ data shows that the entrepreneurs behind the fastest-growing companies are, on average, well into their 40s, and that accumulated industry experience matters more than raw youthful energy. Hartshorne and Germine’s research offers a plausible cognitive mechanism for why that experience pays off when it does: the specific mental abilities most useful for building genuine expertise, accumulated knowledge and vocabulary, keep climbing for decades after the raw processing speed typically associated with youthful brilliance has already peaked and started to decline. The two findings fit together into a coherent picture, the kind of achievement that depends on deep accumulated knowledge is, by its nature, more available to people later in their careers, not less.
It’s worth being honest about what these two studies don’t establish. Azoulay and colleagues’ research is specific to startup founders in the United States and to a particular, narrow slice of exceptionally fast-growing companies, so it doesn’t claim that youth is a disadvantage in every kind of entrepreneurial venture, only that the specific, most successful outliers skew notably older than commonly assumed. Hartshorne and Germine’s research documents when different cognitive abilities peak on average across large populations, but individual variation is substantial, and the study can’t predict exactly when any one specific person’s abilities will peak. Neither study claims youth offers no advantages at all, only that the popular narrative overweights youth relative to what the actual data on major achievement shows.
Within those honest limits, the research supports a more accurate and, for a lot of people, more encouraging picture than the usual story about big achievement belonging mainly to the young. The startups that actually grow the fastest are disproportionately built by people in their 40s and beyond, and the specific kind of accumulated knowledge that tends to fuel exactly that kind of success keeps building for decades longer than raw mental speed does. Achieving the most later in life isn’t really an exception to how expertise works. According to this evidence, it’s closer to the expected pattern.