Tag: entrepreneurs age

How This Entrepreneur Raised $1 Million and Is Leading an Energy Revolution Before Age 30

The path of the entrepreneur is a bold one. At every stage of the journey, you continually make bold decisions and take bold risks.

This has certainly been the case in my journey as a founder. We started a smart home company (in 2013) when everyone said we were crazy. We saw the vision and moved toward it in the face of uncertainty and risk.

When I was starting, I identified other leaders who were making bold decisions. It helped to feel like I was not alone along the path. I followed entrepreneurs accomplished their goals, and other young leaders blazing a new trail. I recently encountered an inspiring story that demonstrates just how bold we can be.​

Ugwem Eneyo is the co-founder and CEO of Shyft Power Solutions, an energy technology company that’s working to enable an energy revolution for underserved consumers in emerging markets. Eneyo, a graduate student at Stanford University, and a member of Forbes 30 under 30, has secured more than $1 million in funding from investors and participated in the 2019 Ameren Accelerator program. GreenBiz named her a 2019 VERGE Vanguard honoree to recognize her dedication to helping advance Nigeria’s energy infrastructure.

Personally, I feel inspired by Eneyo’s bold ambitions to create solutions in an emerging market with a nascent entrepreneurial system – especially in an industry as demanding as energy. I interviewed her to learn more about her role in energy, Shyft’s path to raising money and how accelerators can be a beneficial platform for entrepreneur success.

1. How did you get interested in energy technology?

Ugwem Eneyo: My family is from the Niger Delta, a region that suffered negative environmental and socioeconomic impacts as a result of the extractive industries. After directly seeing the challenges and how they affected my family and communities in the region, I became keenly interested in the nexus of energy, environment and development.

I actually spent years working as an environmental and regulatory advisor in the oil and gas sector, trying to mitigate the impacts and drive change from within the organizations. I eventually left to pursue my M.S. and Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering at Stanford, still focused on the theme. Shyft Power Solutions is a byproduct of my work at Stanford.

2. How was your experience in your industry different as a Nigerian-American?

Eneyo: There’s an increasing interest within the industry around solving energy challenges in Nigeria and, more broadly, emerging markets. The local knowledge is often an overlooked critical asset in doing so.

My previous work in the industry, and in emerging markets, shows that it’s often non-technical issues that cause projects to be delayed or fail. The intimate local knowledge allows for an understanding of people’s values, culture and thought processes, and that can better inform how we solve problems and how we deliver solutions. This has certainly been the case with Shyft Power Solutions.

3. What approach did you take when raising money for your business?

Eneyo: In the early stage, I leveraged grants and non-dilutive capital, given the longer and more capital-intensive development timeline for building industrial-grade hardware. We also raised traditional venture capital, as well as funding from strategic corporate investors.

The corporate venture capitalists played a key role in our fundraising strategy, as they often had more market knowledge and connections, which complemented the primarily U.S.-based traditional venture capital. And Shyft Power Solutions received $100,000 in seed capital through our participation in the Ameren Accelerator this year.​

4. How did your experience with the 2019 Ameren Accelerator program advance/benefit your business? What’s your relationship with Ameren and the accelerator now that the program has ended?

Eneyo: The Ameren Accelerator, alongside the Ameren employees who served on champion teams as mentors, provided important technical and business development expertise that offered valuable and unique insight into how Shyft’s platform can add value to utilities at scale. Part of our longer-term planning required Shyft to have better insight into utilities, and we were able to leverage Ameren in the process.

Although the accelerator has ended, my team and I have remained in contact with many of our technical champions, who still provide advice and references. Additionally, the accelerator program team has remained supportive, still introducing us to valuable startup resources.​

5. How do you see the energy technology industry changing? What changes would you like to make?

Eneyo: In emerging markets, there will be a leapfrog over traditional central energy infrastructures; instead, we will see digitization and decentralization of energy infrastructure that may work alongside whatever central grid is available. The flexible and intelligent use of distributed energy resources will be necessary to make this possible, and Shyft is developing the technology to do so.

I want to see clean, reliable, and affordable energy for all — urban and rural — and want to see energy demands being met by rapidly growing emerging markets. I’m excited to be leading an organization that’s at the forefront of this energy transition in markets like Nigeria.

By Andrew ThomasFounder, Skybell Video Doorbell

@andrewthomas

261 subscribers

Source: How This Entrepreneur Raised $1 Million and Is Leading an Energy Revolution Before Age 30

Most Successful Entrepreneurs Are Older Than You Think

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The romanticized image of entrepreneurs is a picture of youth: a 20-something individual with disruptive ideas, boundless energy and a still-sharp mind. Silicon Valley has bet on this image for years.

But is this right?

Far from it, according to our recent research with Javier Miranda of the U.S. Census Bureau and Pierre Azoulay of MIT.

Our team analyzed the age of all business founders in the U.S. in recent years. We found that the average age of the most successful entrepreneurs is 45 – and that founders in their 20s are the least likely to build a top firm.

The myth of the young entrepreneur

The idea that the most successful new business ventures come from the young, even the very young, is widespread.

Younger people are often thought to be less beholden to current thinking and thus more naturally innovative and disruptive. Many observers (perhaps enviously) believe the young have more time and energy, with fewer family responsibilities like nightly dinner with the kids or financial demands like mortgages. Besides, as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said, “Young people are just smarter.”

Young founders also make for a dramatic story. The college dropout or young corporate drone shakes off conventional expectations to launch a new business with a ragtag team of fellow 20-somethings. After countless late nights, they emerge with the new killer app or consumer product that takes the market by storm, landing them on the cover of Inc., creating enormous personal wealth, and reminding stuffy executive types that hungry young upstarts can and will eat their lunch.

This stereotype has meaningful consequences. In Silicon Valley, for example, venture capitalists show a clear bias toward investing in younger founders, often leaving older founders out in the cold. The perceived link between youth and success is so prevalent that some tech workers reportedly seek plastic surgery to appear younger.

Prime time for entrepreneurship is middle age

But the image of the young entrepreneur didn’t hold when we looked at the data.

Past studies of high-growth entrepreneurship and age have yielded conflicting results, based in part on small and selected data sets that researchers studied.

To examine the question more definitively, we conducted an internal project at the U.S. Census Bureau. That enabled us to examine all businesses launched in the U.S. between 2007 and 2014, encompassing 2.7 million founders. We compared founder age to firm performance measures, including employment and sales growth, as well as the “exit” by acquisition or IPO.

Successful entrepreneurs are much more likely to be middle-aged, not young. For the top 0.1 percent of fastest growing new businesses in the U.S., the average age of the founder in the business’ first year was 45.

Similarly, middle-aged founders dominate successful exits. By our estimation, a 50-year-old founder is 1.8 times more likely than a 30-year-old founder to create one of the highest growth firms. Founders in their early 20s have the lowest likelihood of building a top-growth firm.

Why would entrepreneurs get better with age? It’s not clear, but we have a few theories. More seasoned entrepreneurs may draw on greater experience in management or deeper industry-specific knowledge. They may also have greater financial resources and more relevant social networks to leverage the founder’s business idea. For example, our study showed that prior work experience in the startup’s specific industry more than doubled the chance of an upper-tail growth success.

Even some of the most famous young founders tend to peak toward middle age. For example, Steve Jobs and Apple found their blockbuster innovation with the iPhone, released when Jobs was 52.

Change the narrative

By continuing to associate entrepreneurship with youth, investors are likely betting too young. If venture capitalists and other early-stage investors take our findings to heart, they’ll consider founders from a broader age range and may thereby back higher-growth firms.

By the same token, middle-aged would-be entrepreneurs may feel more confident about their chances – and more likely to win the resources they need to bring business visions to life.

On an even broader scale, the emphasis on young entrepreneurs has likely skewed innovation and its funding toward problems that the younger segment understands best. Updating views of the entrepreneur’s life cycle – and peak performance within it – may shift innovation toward areas that older individuals know better.

The myth of the young entrepreneur is an age-old image, but perhaps one whose number is finally up.

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