“The Anatomy of an Entrepreneur”
- The average and median age of company founders when they started their current companies was 40.
- 95.1 percent of respondents themselves had earned bachelor’s degrees, and 47 percent had more advanced degrees.
- Less than 1 percent came from extremely rich or extremely poor backgrounds
- 15.2% of founders had a sibling that previously started a business.
- 69.9 percent of respondents indicated they were married when they launched their first business. An additional 5.2 percent were divorced, separated, or widowed.
- 59.7 percent of respondents indicated they had at least one child when they launched their first business, and 43.5 percent had two or more children.
- The majority of the entrepreneurs in the sample were serial entrepreneurs. The average number of businesses launched by respondents was approximately 2.3.
- 74.8 percent indicated desire to build wealth as an important motivation in becoming an entrepreneur.
- Only 4.5 percent said the inability to find traditional employment was an important factor in starting a business.
- Entrepreneurs are usually better educated than their parents.
- Entrepreneurship doesn’t always run in the family. More than half (51.9 percent) of respondents were the first in their families to launch a business.
- The majority of respondents (75.4 percent) had worked as employees at other companies before launching their own companies. July 2009 by the Kauffman Foundation