The Makings Of An Entrepreneur

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September 4, 2011 by Angela Shupe | 2 Comments

What’s the average age, experience level, and education of an entrepreneur? A recent study by LinkedIn took a look at some of their member profiles and compared the information.

The scientists at the professional social networking company sifted through the more than 120 million member profiles to find those who identified themselves as a founder or co-founder of a company created in the United States after 2000. They excluded small law, consulting and real estate firms, but still indexed more than 13,000 entrepreneurs.

What they found, according to chief data scientist Monica Rogati, was that the top entrepreneurial business schools were at Stanford and Harvard, followed by MIT Sloan and U.C. Berkeley’s Haas.

“If that doesn’t come as a surprise to you, take a look at the distribution of the founders’ age at their first startup,” Rogati wrote. “While young (and serial) entrepreneurs are often in the spotlight, our data shows that 65 percent of entrepreneurs are 30 and older – and only 2 percent are serial entrepreneurs.”

Still, 34 percent were between ages 20 and 29 when they founded their startups.

And she said certain companies are “breeding ground grounds for entrepreneurs,” including Adobe Systems, Apple Inc., eBay, Paypal, Electronic Arts, Google, Microsoft, SGI and Yahoo.