Start-ups

Well-known entrepreneurs like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg were in their early twenties when they launched their highly successful companies. The Harvard Business Review (HBR) explores whether these famous cases reflect a general pattern.

The HBR team analyzed the age of all business founders in the United States in recent years and found that the average age of entrepreneurs at the time they founded their companies is 42. In software startups, the average age is 40, and younger founders are common. However, young people are less common in other industries such as oil and gas or biotechnology, where the average age is closer to 47.

HBR discovered that among the top 0.1% of startups based on growth in their first five years, the founders started their companies when they were, on average, 45 years old. Evidence points to entrepreneurial performance rising sharply with age before starting to drop in the late fifties.

One night at a hotel in 2009, tech executive Shawn Seipler thought about how many bars of soap guests use for a night and then leave. He called the front desk to find out what they did with the used soap and learned that they just throw it away. In the U.S. alone, hotels throw out about 3.3 million bars of soap every day.

So, Seipler started Clean the World, a nonprofit that recycles soap, in his garage. He quickly discovered that major hotel chains, airlines, cruise companies and casinos were happy to pay him to take their waste. The business has since grown into a $750k production facility in Orlando, Florida, with branch operations around the world.

The start-up scene in Japan has historically lagged behind the Silicon Valley and China, but several investors told CNBC that things are changing.

Workers have traditionally seen starting a company as "kind of a Plan B," according to James Riney, head of 500 Startups Japan. Finding entrepreneurial talent in the country used to be difficult because of an aversion to risk among Japanese workers. Many wanted the stability of corporate or public-sector jobs.

"If you didn't get into the major companies, the brand name companies, entrepreneurship was kind of like this second option that you could consider," Riney told CNBC.

Today, many young people are joining start-ups even as corporate Japan grapples with a labor shortage.

Japanese automotive giant Toyota has made a strategic investment in South East Asia taxi-hailing service Grab.

Grab, which competes with Uber, announced on Wednesday that Toyota is investing in a $2 billion (£1.6 billion) plus funding round that was announced in July. Other investors in the round include Japanese tech firm SoftBank and its Chinese equivalent, Didi Chuxing.

Grab—which currently offers services in 87 cities across Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and Myanmar—has raised around $3.5 billion (£2.7 billion), according to Crunchbase.