In the world of tech, age usually seems like just a number.

Mark Zuckerberg co-founded Facebook in his early 20s. Matthew Mullenweg co-founded the open-source blogging platform WordPress at the age of 19.

Today, we will delve into the ages of the founders of four publicly traded developer tools companies and see if the perception matches the reality.

Grab a cup of coffee, and let's dive in! ☕

Olivier Pomel and Alexis Lê-Quôc founded Datadog ($DDOG) after both worked for Wireless Generation (now Amplify).

Olivier Pomel (46) born at 1977, and was 33 years old when founding Datadog. He worked as a VP of Technology at Wireless Generation prior to becoming Datadog CEO.

Alexis Lê-Quôc (48) was born in 1975 and was 35 at Datadog's inception.

He was the Director of Operations at Wireless Generation.

Snowflake ($SNOW), the cloud-based data warehousing company, was founded by Benoit Dageville, Thierry Cruanes, and Marcin Zukowski.

Dageville and Cruanes worked at Oracle as data architects and Marcin Zukowski co-founded Vectorwise.

Dageville (57) and Cruanes (56) were born in 1966 and 1967, respectively.

They founded Snowflake in 2012 while being in their late 40s.

MongoDB was founded by Dwight Merriman, Kevin P. Ryan, and Eliot Horowitz.

Dwight Merriman and Kevin P. Ryan previously co-founded DoubleClick, a tech company that Google acquired. Dwight served as CTO, Kevin as CEO, and Eliot Horowitz worked as a Software Engineer.

Merriman (54), born in 1969, was 38; he founded MongoDB. Ryan born (59), born in 1963, was 44.

Eliot Horowitz (42) is the younger one on the team, born in 1981, and was 26 when he founded MongoDB.

Twilio, the cloud communications platform that allows software developers to programmatically make and receive phone calls, send and receive text messages, and perform other communication functions using its web service APIs, was founded by Jeff Lawson, Evan Cooke, and John Wolthuis.

Before Twilio, Jeff Lawson (46) was a Founding CTO of StubHub, a Technical Product Manager at Amazon, and the CTO of Nine Star.

He was born in 1977 and was 31 at Twilio's inception.

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While the tech world is often associated with young entrepreneurs, the reality is quite different.

A closer look at the founders of publicly traded developer tools companies reveals that, on average, founders are in their 40s when they create companies that eventually go public.

This dispels the common assumption that successful tech entrepreneurs are typically in their 20s.

In fact, innovation is not bound by age, as proven by the diverse ages of successful founders.

Whether you’re just starting out or are a seasoned professional, there’s always room for growth and innovation in technology.

Stay inspired and keep building!

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