Yeah, Cause Mark Zuckerberg Is the *Only* One

This is wrong. Not in the moralistic kinda way, but there's no way this methodology is good. From the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation:

Based on a study taken of U.S. entrepreneurs, who founded their companies between 1995-2005, it found the median age of U.S. born founders was 39 years-old, with only 1 percent

launching their company as teen-agers

. And for those in their 50s, there's still hope - twice as many folks in this age group founded a tech company than those in their early 20s, according to the study.

At the very least, I'm betting if you looked at the numbers year-over-year from 1995 to 2005 the age gets younger, then older and then far younger in the early 2000s. I'd further wager that the age is younger now than in 1999, since the first dot com bubble relied so much on raising money and business development wonks.

It is just so easy to start a company now. You pretty much need about $100 and an Internet connection. And the $100 is really for pizza and beer. I constantly hear from teens and 20-somethings starting companies and I write for BusinessWeek! A publication that skews very old. I realize I live in the Silicon Valley echo-chamber, but every time I travel anywhere in the world I meet kids inspired by Evan Williams, Mark Zuckerberg and Kevin Rose doing their own thing. You know what happens when dreams meet jaw-dropping-low barriers to entry? A surge of entrepreneurs.

The Kaufman Foundation generally focuses on what I'll call "grown up" entrepreneurs, so I think their sample size probably skews older. Not that it's necessarily their fault. This is an incredibly hard thing to measure and I'm sure it was a valiant effort. Even in the business press we tend to think of entrepreneurs as Valley guys raising venture money, forgetting it's really much broader in a Web world.

Entrepreneur doesn't have to equal "Start-up" in the Valley sense of the word. Between open source, Web 2.0 and even blogs, it has become de rigeur to make money online in your teens and early 20s. In fact, most well-known Web entrepreneurs started businesses when they were teenagers or in college, they just weren't the ones that made their names and fortunes. Did you know PayPal was Max Levchin's fourth company? (Maybe third...going from memory but it's all in the book if you want the gory deets!) When he was a newly-immigrated 16-year-old Ukrainian he was making extra money cracking game codes for Chicago's organized crime syndicates. Not something you'd raise venture money for, but I'd call it entrepreneurial! 

Ok, they're not all the next Facebook. (Are the companies being started by 50-year-olds?) But somewhere among these kids are the next Marc Andreesseen or Bill Gates. It seems to me a study on them would be far more interesting and tell us a lot more about where tech entrepreneurship is going.