Youths lag in start-up stakes

The Life: Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg often give people the impression that entrepreneurship is the preserve of the young. But in fact they belong to the smallest age bracket of people who start businesses, according to research.

Mona Ataya, a mother of three, founded the online store mumzworld, which sells mother and child-care products. Silvia Razgova / The National

In 1995, a young Stanford student was assigned to show a fellow graduate around campus.

Sergey Brin, the guide, and Larry Page disagreed about almost everything at the time, according to some accounts.

But within a year and still in their early 20s, the pair began collaborating on an internet search engine.

Few may have heard of their initial creation, which they called BackRub. But almost everyone is familiar with what that brand eventually became: Google.

High-profile youthful businessmen such as Mr Brin and Mr Page and the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, often give the impression that entrepreneurship is the preserve of the young.

But research from the United States has found that older people form the majority ofthose launching their own businesses.

Over the past decade, the highest rate of start-up activity belonged to the 55-to-64 age group, according to a study by the Kauffman Foundation, an entrepreneurship institute based in Kansas City. And the 20-to-34 age bracket, which includes the founders of Google and Facebook, had the lowest rate.

Stephen Mezias, a professor of entrepreneurship and family enterprise at Insead business school in Abu Dhabi, suggests "the wait is so that [would-be entrepreneurs] can establish and raise families with financial security and use the wealth they have accumulated later in life to pursue dreams they deferred".

One such entrepreneur is Paris de L'Etraz, a database programmer who became an investment banker and then struck out on his own to become a sports marketing agent.

Mr de L'Etraz, who is now the associate dean of blended programmes and professor of entrepreneurship at IE Business School, which is based in Madrid, took his first step towards entrepreneurship when he was a child.

"I grew up in Los Angeles, and when I was 8 years old I used to sell lemonade outside my front lawn," he says.

But Mr de L'Etraz did not make the leap into entrepreneurship until he was 42, by which time his boredom with his job had become chronic.

"An executive called me from Japan and said 'would you be able to find somebody' - they never expected me - 'who knows football and could organise a pre-season match in Japan?' I thought 'that looks like a deal to me, and I could be the person in the deal'. And I did it," Mr de L'Etraz recalls.

For Mona Ataya, the chief executive of the online shopping portal mumzworld.com, based in Dubai, the tipping point was a call from her brother in the late 1990s to help him set up an online recruitment site.

At the time, Ms Ataya was a successful marketing executive with Johnson & Johnson in Zurich. "I was working on beautiful brands," she says.

"I would walk out into my office every day and look out into the green meadows and say 'another day in paradise'," adds Ms Ataya. "I felt really privileged to be working in such a beautiful environment."

But the offer from her brother, Rabea, to help in setting up the recruitment website Bayt.com proved too good to resist.

"I think we all have in our family - and certainly I do - the entrepreneurial drive," says Ms Ataya. "So I essentially took a leap of faith."

Late last year, she made the jump once again to start her own venture, mumzworld.com. But being a seasoned entrepreneur did not make the decision any less daunting. When she and seven others were building Bayt.com, they had clearly defined skill sets and were working constantly over three months.

"For the first year, we were working non-stop, but we were all single at the time," says Ms Ataya. "Now I have three children, so it was a big debate for me personally whether I wanted to take this on and lead this."