Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook

This is interesting news for those facing middle age: A new study is finding that the typical startup founder most likely to secure funding is around 38.

That’s the news from the New York Times: “Most tech start-up founders who have successfully raised venture capital have much less unusual résumés, according to data analysis by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business. The average founder is 38, with a master’s degree and 16 years of work experience.”

Of course, these findings run counter to the perception that it’s the youngsters with brilliant ideas who get the big money (Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and that Snapchat fellow Evan Spiegel). And although that’s true in some cases, the Times points out that these cases are more “anomalies” than regular occurrences.

Photo via Bloomberg Beta
Photo via Bloomberg Beta

Bloomberg Beta teamed with Berkeley’s Haas School of Business to do the study. Bloomberg Beta’s chief Roy Bahat summarizes the findings in a post on Medium, saying that BB started crunching numbers last year to see if they could “predict who would start venture-backed companies.”

Bahat writes that the project identified 350 potential Future Founders (its program to find more viable companies to fund that isn’t solely based on referrals) last year, which Bloomberg Beta then reached out to. “Eight have started companies, and three are already venture-backed (including Product Hunt, and an unannounced company in which we just invested),” Bahat reports in his post. “Half have changed roles in the last year, and 40% changed companies  —  kinetic talent.”

This year, with Berkeley’s help, Bloomberg Beta reviewed “hundreds of thousands of public profiles” of people working in tech, and found that many of the same predictors for funding success have not changed:

“Future Founders have enough education, not too much. Same with years of work experience,” Bahat writes. “They are likely to have started companies in the past without being venture-funded — and unlikely to merely have been self-employed as freelancers. This year’s group was more technical  —  roughly half have technical education.”

Bloomberg also found that about 20 percent of its Future Founders class of 2015 are women.

Who knows? With approaches like this in place, perhaps the next great company won’t come from networking on the golf course, but actual data that supports a potential entrepreneur’s idea.

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