Similarities among entrepreneurs of both genders

(written by Lawrence Krubner, however indented passages are often quotes)

Interesting:

We learned that the average age of a successful tech-company founder isn’t 21 as is commonly believed in Silicon Valley, but 39; or, in the broader universe of high-growth companies, 40. Founders of high-growth companies are likely to be married and to have two or more kids. They typically have six to ten years of work experience and real-world ideas. They start companies because they get tired of working for others and want to build wealth before they retire. What stops most people from embarking on the path to entrepreneurship is fear of failure and of the amount of time and effort required.

The question that was posed to me by a number of women’s groups was: what is the difference between men and women founders? This is something that I hadn’t given much thought to, but that I thought was worthy of analysis because it would reveal major differences. I expected that women had very different backgrounds and motivations from those of men.

I shared our data sets with Joanne Cohoon of the National Council of Women in Technology (NCWIT), and she worked with NCWIT analysts to crunch the data. I was really surprised at what we learned: that there was almost no difference between men and women company founders. Both groups had an equally strong desire to build wealth; wanted to capitalize on business ideas; were attracted to the culture of startups; had long-standing desire to own their own company; and were tired of working for others. There were, however, slight differences between the encouragement that women received from co-founders and what men received; and women received slightly more funding than men did from business partners.

Equally importantly, we found no difference in life circumstances between men and women founders. Their average ages when founding their first companies were the same. Likewise, successful men and women entrepreneurs founded their first companies when they had similar numbers of children living at home, though men were more likely than women to be married.