Does “age” even matter anymore for SaaS founders, if it ever did?
- On the one hand, the Stripe founders became billionaires in their teens. So you can build something epic in SaaS without 20 years of domain expertise. Henry Schuck started ZoomInfo at 23, Andrew Bialecki started Klaviyo at 25.
- On the other hand, many SaaS founders are on to their 3rd or 4th success. The founders of Zscaler, OneStream, Samsara, Zoom and more are all second-timers. SaaS has just been around for a while.
The vast size of the Cloud is attracting more and more founders of all ages, backgrounds, nationalities, and more. And many CEOs and founders … just want to keep going. Frank Slootman ran Snowflake after having already been CEO of ServiceNow. Jyoti Bansal founded Harness and more … after already selling AppDynamics for $3.7B. And so on. Will many of us founders just do SaaS … forever?
The below data suggesting the best exits coming from founders around 60 years old made me want to take a look back at some SaaStr data — how old are founders of top SaaS companies at IPO (when the real job starts in some ways), and at founding?
The older you are, the more likely you are to succeed as a startup founder.
True all the way up to age 60 (!). pic.twitter.com/1Tv3GQFLzQ
— Alex Svanevik 🐧 (@ASvanevik) October 9, 2022
The answer: of the current batch of newer public SaaS companies, the average CEO is 44 at IPO and 33 at founding. And this data seems to have stayed fairly consistent over the last batch of SaaS IPOs. In fact, it’s gone up slightly since the first version of the post, when it was 43 and 32 respectively.
Just some food for thought. You be you. And it’s certainly not too late, nor for some of us too early, to start a great SaaS startup.
