Experienced Founders, Not Dropouts, Dominate the Billion-Dollar Startups

BY YULIYA CHERNOVA

Baby-faced startup founders get a lot of media attention. Yet new data show founders typically have about a dozen years of experience— or more—before they launch startups that clinch billiondollar valuations.

Founders had worked for 13.8 years, on average, before starting their companies in 2024, up from 8.2 years for companies set up in 2010, according to an analysis by venture firm SignalFire. The data only included those startups that eventually reached the $1 billion unicorn realm.

“There’s a shift to a more experienced archetype,” said Asher Bantock, head of research at SignalFire.

SignalFire’s findings contrast with the cultural perception of tech startups, he said. “Many of the most hyped startups have young founders,” he said. They do exist, Bantock said, but they aren’t representative. The firm analyzed the backgrounds of more than 2,000 founders across about 800 U.S. venture-backed unicorns.

For Gonen Stein, president and co-founder of New Yorkbased Eon, having worked for two decades before launching the cloud-storage startup in 2024 was crucial, he said. The idea for the business came while he led product lines at AWS, part of Amazon.com.

“It was easy for us to understand what needs to be built and who needs to build it,” Stein said. The founding team also had long-term relationships with many of its customers and partners. “There’s that trust and credibility,” he added.

Eon was valued at $4 billion at its most recent funding round late last year, Stein said. The company has raised $500 million total from investors including Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners,

Greenoaks, Elad Gil and BOND.

“We don’t have the baby face anymore, but we know what we are doing,” said Stein, a grizzled 44.

The rise of deep-tech startups— those offering novel solutions to hard engineering problems—as well as those that sell to business instead of consumers, helps explain why founder experience has trended up, Bantock said.

The unending possibilities of AI are also beckoning repeat founders to get back in the game, said Barak Kaufman, a partner at Vine Ventures who helped put together a community of almost 6,000 founders who exited from their startups. Some veterans of the dot-com era have glimpsed the magnitude of artificial intelligence and returned to the fray with their own startup contender, he said.

“They have experienced how a tectonic shift in technology can create immense re --ward,” Kaufman said. “They know what they’d be missing.”

Building in AI also often requires deep technological expertise, which also favors more experienced teams. That helps with recruiting, said Chad Edwards, co-founder and chief executive of CuspAI , who has a doctorate in chemistry. The Cambridge, U.K., startup that applies AI in materials discovery has raised $200 million in venture capital since it was created in 2024.

CuspAI’s co-founder and chief technology officer, Max Welling, is a professor of machine learning at Caltech and the University of Amsterdam, and has worked for 25 years in academic and corporate settings.

“Max, as a result, has been able to attract the very best machine- learning experts,” Edwards said. Lan Xuezhao, founder and managing partner at AI venture firm Basis Set Ventures, said her firm funds both very young entrepreneurs and those with more experience.

“You have to underwrite them as people, as individuals,” she said. Overall, “I think there’s zero correlation between the number of years of

experience and the success of the company,” she said.

Venture investors have historically been of two minds on the benefits and drawbacks of founder experience, said SignalFire’s Bantock.

“On the one hand, VCs like industry outsiders and people who are not bought into established paradigms,” he said. At the same time, industry and management expertise can be crucial.

Mikey Shulman, the 39year-old co-founder and chief of music AI startup Suno, said age has become less indicative of experience in today’s market. Suno’s team includes “some really young superstars,” he said. “People start coding earlier, by the time you are 21 you’ve been doing it for a long time.” AI tools also can compensate for less experience.

Another ingredient—the stamina needed to work in a witheringly competitive field— skews younger, added Shulman.

Adam Guild, co-founder and chief executive of Owner, which offers AI tools to restaurants, had just turned 18 when he incorporated his business in 2018.

“I have a baby face,” he said. He would show up to meetings with potential customers and be dismissed, he recounted. “There was instant distrust and skepticism because of how I look,” he said. He also felt insecure about having dropped out of high school, he said. “I didn’t have any credentials to my name.”

But that forced Guild to devise ways to stand out, for instance, offering useful advice via his blog and YouTube channel, to have customers seek his help. He turned to mentors and books to learn management skills.

He was also able to work for seven years in a row without a single day off, which he believes helped Owner stay competitive, Guild said. “It was environmentally helpful to be at a stage of life where I could easily do that without a superhigh opportunity cost,” he added. Now he runs a 400person company based out of San Francisco and valued at $1 billion last year. Yuliya Chernova writes for WSJ Pro Venture Capital.