12 facts about entrepreneurs that will likely surprise you

What’s your picture of what the average entrepreneur is like?

Here’s 12 facts from a report titled The Anatomy of an Entrepreneur. It’s based on a survey done by the Kauffman Foundation for Entrepreneurship, of 549 company founders across a variety of industries.

1. The average and median age of company founders when they started their current companies was 40.
2. 95.1% of respondents themselves had earned bachelor’s degrees, and 47%had more advanced degrees.
3. Less than one percent came from extremely rich or extremely poor backgrounds.
4. 15.2% of founders had a sibling that previously started a business.
5. 69.9% of respondents indicated they were married when they launched their first business. An additional 5.2 per cent were divorced, separated, or widowed.
6. 59.7% of respondents indicated they had at least one child when they launched their first business, and 43.5 per cent had two or more children.
7. The majority of the entrepreneurs in the sample were serial entrepreneurs. The average number of businesses launched by respondents was approximately 2.3.
8. 74.8% indicated desire to build wealth as an important motivation in becoming an entrepreneur.
9. Only 4.5% said the inability to find traditional employment was an important factor in starting a business.
10. Entrepreneurs are usually better educated than their parents.
11. Entrepreneurship doesn’t always run in the family. More than half (51.9%) of respondents were the first in their families to launch a business.
12. The majority of respondents (75.4%) had worked as employees at other companies for more than six years before launching their own companies.

Which of the above surprises you the most and alters your mental model of what entrepreneurs are like? ■