Startup culture loves the image of a college dropout writing code in a dorm room. The data tell a different story, and Alejandro Betancourt López’s own comments sit somewhere between the myth and the numbers.
Asked in a 2023 interview what had surprised him about working with young entrepreneurs, he pointed to one trait. “Their ability to innovate. It’s incredible,” he said.
What the Census Data Says
Pierre Azoulay, Benjamin Jones, J. Daniel Kim and Javier Miranda studied 2.7 million company founders using U.S. Census Bureau records. Their findings, summarized by the National Bureau of Economic Research, put the mean age of a founder at 42. Among the top 0.1% of companies by growth, the average founder age rose to 45.
Experience in a specific field mattered more than youth. Founders who had spent three or more years in the same narrow industry before starting out were about twice as likely to reach the upper tier of startup success, the researchers found.
Where Alejandro Betancourt López Finds Youth Still Counts
Alejandro Betancourt López has given both sides of that finding. Anyone working with younger founders, he said, has to “keep up understanding new ways” of building things. Younger people are “always thinking into new ways to be innovative,” he added in that conversation. “And that’s very, very valuable.” In another interview, discussing advice for a young person entering a capital-heavy field, he said that “to be an entrepreneur in any industry, you have to have experience.”
His suggested path runs in steps. A young person should take a job, build experience and then “set up with the right set of mind, with the right relationships, with the right credibility,” he said. “You start something small, you build on that, then you do partnerships.”
Hawkers shows how youth and experience can fit together. The eyewear brand Alejandro Betancourt López chairs was launched in 2013 by four founders from Elche, and TechCrunch reported in 2016 that its staff averaged 27 years of age. Experienced executives arrived later, after the founders had proved the sales model.
Optimism is a requirement in that mix, Alejandro Betancourt said, though he drew a line around it. Founders should be “optimistic,” he said, “not dream on fantasy land,” and always keep “the two feet on the ground.” “Every entrepreneur has to dream big,” he said, but the plan “has to have a route to success.” He sees his own job with young teams as a reality check, saying it falls to “people like me to make sure that it’s doable.”