Let’s ignore for a moment that the average age of a successful startup founder is 45 (that’s according to research by the Harvard Business Review). 

In this post, we’re taking a look at the exemptions to the rule: young startup founders who achieved success in their 20s and are now household names — throw in billions of dollars of net worth as well for good measure. These innovators wasted no time in building some of the most successful startups in the world. 

Just how young were they when success struck? We’ll dig into that in a bit. All figures cited below are up-to-date as of writing. 

1. Mark Zuckerberg

Net worth: Approximately $190 billion (Forbes) 

Answer to the age question: Zuckerberg was 19 years old when he created Facebook.

The trillion dollar entity now known as Meta Platforms began as a social networking site for Harvard students. Within a year after “TheFacebook” was created in 2004, Zuckerberg dropped “The” and incorporated the company as Facebook.

He would then turn down a $1 billion offer from Yahoo to acquire the company. His confidence in the platform paid off when Facebook went public in 2012 with a whopping valuation of $104 billion. Through Zuckerberg’s leadership, the company has grown by leaps and bounds while acquiring other platforms like Instagram and WhatsApp in the process. 

2. Sean Parker

Net worth: Approximately $3 billion as (Forbes)

Answer to the age question: Parker was 19 years old when he founded Napster.

Parker is known best for Napster, the short-lived music-sharing service founded in 1999. 

Most of Parker’s wealth comes from his brief time as president of Facebook from 2004 to 2005. He masterminded the company’s corporate structure that gives Zuckerberg complete control of Facebook. Parker also brought in famous venture capitalist Peter Thiel as the startup’s first investor.

His second foray into the music industry was in 2010 when he invested in Spotify and sat on its Board of Directors from 2010 to 2017. Today, he considers himself a venture capitalist. One of his more recent investments is in Stability AI.

3. Steve Jobs

Net worth: Approximately $7 billion at the time of his death in 2011 (Forbes)

Answer to the age question: Jobs was 21 years old when he started Apple Inc.

Decades before Facebook was launched in a dorm room, Apple Inc. began in Jobs’s small garage — or so the famous, semi-mythical story goes. Jobs and co-founder Steve Wozniak created the computer prototypes that would lay the foundation for Apple’s over $30 trillion market valuation. 

Apple was officially incorporated in 1976. Within a year, Jobs had already made his first million dollars. 

Jobs founded NeXT and co-founded Pixar after his ouster from Apple in 1985. Upon returning in 1996, Jobs helped usher in Apple’s golden age. It was under his leadership when products like the iPhone, iMac, and Macbook Air launched, making Apple a global household name. At the time of his passing, the company was valued at $300 billion. 

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4. Elon Musk

Net worth: Approximately $260 billion (Forbes)

Answer to the age question: Musk’s was 24 when he co-founded his first company, Global Link Information Network (later renamed to Zip2) 

Known for cutting edge companies like Tesla and SpaceX, Musk officially began his entrepreneurial journey in 1995 at the age of 24. He founded Zip2, a software company, with his brother. The siblings lived inside Zip2’s rented office space, sharing a single PC. The initial venture paid off four years later when the company sold for $307 million.

A serial entrepreneur at heart, Musk’s next step was founding X, an online payment company (not to be mistaken for the rebranded social networking site). Acquired by eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion, X eventually became the digital payments giant Paypal.

This string of successes paved the way for the rest of Musk’s long list of business ventures including: 

• SpaceX (Aerospace manufacturing, launch services, satellite communications)
• Tesla, Inc. (Automotive and clean energy) 
• NeuraLink (Neurotechnology)
• The Boring Company (Transportation and infrastructure) 
• X (Social networking site formerly known as Twitter)

5. Richard Branson

Net worth: Approximately $2.7 billion (Forbes)

Answer to the age question: Branson was 16 when he started “Student,” an alternative school magazine.

After Branson’s first foray into entrepreneurship with Student, he started a mail-order service for music records in 1970. This venture would later become the Virgin Records label, netting him his first million dollars in 1973 at the age of 23. When Branson sold the company in 1992, Virgin Records had a price tag of $1 billion.

His early success was the springboard for founding multiple companies like:

• Virgin Megastores (Retail)
• Virgin Mobile (Telecommunications)
• Virgin Galactic (Space tourism)
• Virgin Atlantic Airways, Virgin Holidays, Virgin Blue, Virgin Trains, Virgin America, Virgin Hotels, Virgin Voyages (Travel and hospitality)

6. Michael Dell

Net worth: Approximately $100 billion (Forbes)

Answer to the age question: Dell was 19 years old when he started a full-time business.

While in high school, Dell made $18,000 in one year from selling newspaper subscriptions to newlyweds. Instead of the usual cold-call sales approach, he used marriage licenses to find the addresses of couples in the area. His innovation and business savvy would pay off big time in the decades to come.

As a college freshman at the age of 19, Dell sold computers with $1,000 in startup capital. Before his 20th birthday, he had sold $80,000 worth of computers and he dropped out of school to run his business full-time. In 1992, he became the youngest CEO in the Fortune 500. 

When Dell Technologies went public for the second time in 2016, it had a $16 billion market capitalization — which has since risen to $62 billion by the first quarter of 2024. 

7. Patrick and John Collison

Net worth: Approximately $7 billion for both brothers (Forbes)

Answer to the age question: Patrick and John were 21 and 19 respectively when they founded fintech giant Stripe.

The high-powered sibling duo were still in school when they set out on their startup journey in 2007. John was in high school while Patrick was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Less than a year later, the two made their first million after selling their first software company for $5 million.

After experiencing difficulties in making online payments, the brothers then began working on their new project: Stripe. The Collisons created unmatched integration features that would make Stripe a ubiquitous payment processing platform.

Stripe has become one of the biggest payment service providers globally. It has processed $1 trillion in total payment volume and is currently valued at $70 billion.

8. Daniel Ek

Net worth: Approximately $5 billion (Forbes)

Answer to the age question: Ek was 23 years old when he started Spotify.

Ek’s story began at the age of 14 when he was developing and hosting websites for businesses in Sweden. He founded Advertigo, an online marketing company whose sale in 2006 made him a millionaire. 

Using the money from the deal, he co-founded and bootstrapped Spotify in the same year and then launched its audio streaming service in 2008. And of course, it was only apt that Napster founder, Sean Parker, became one of Spotify’s first investors.

The company’s service registered more than 230 million paying users as of the end of 2024, as well as an annual revenue of  $14.3 billion. 

9. Melanie Perkins

Net worth: Approximately $4 billion (Forbes)

Answer to the age question: Perkins was 19 when she started her first company Fusion Books, which would pave the way for Canva.

Perkins started her entrepreneurial journey at a young age by making and selling scarves to local clothing stores. At her first company, Fusion Books, she explored the concept of making graphic design processes simpler and less expensive.

At 26 years old, she brought these key ideas to a new company she co-founded: Canva. When the platform’s first enterprise suite was released in 2019, Canva already had 20 million users.

Canva’s monthly users have since reached 185 million mark. Meanwhile, Perkins was recognized by Forbes as one of the “100 Most Powerful Women” in 2023.

10. Whitney Wolfe Herd

Net worth: Approximately $400 million (Forbes)

Answer to the age question: Herd was 22 years old when she co-founded the dating app Tinder

Herd is widely credited with Tinder’s early successes, when it was very popular on various college campuses. However, two years after co-founding Tinder, Herd left the company in 2014 due to tensions with other company executives. Her next step? Founding the equally famous dating app, Bumble, at age 25.

In a field that Forbes described as having 90% of its startups fail, Herd led Bumble to a valuation of $13 billion right after its IPO in 2021. She achieved that feat by hyper focusing on one market segment: women. Bumble has nearly 3 million paying users as of the first half of 2024. 

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