After studying more than 500 successful tech companies, Vivek Wadhwa, director of research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University, concluded that the common belief that young entrepreneurs can turn ideas into billion-dollar companies overnight is nothing more than a myth. The media promotes the few rare outliers, but the reality is very different: the average age of successful entrepreneurs is 40 years old. “Twice as many successful entrepreneurs are over 50 as under 25. The vast majority—75 percent—have more than six years of industry experience, and half have more than ten years when they create their start-up,” wrote Wadhwa in The Washington Post. Most entrepreneurs are between 55 and 64 years old, and they are twice as likely to build successful start-ups than those between 20 and 35.

Building something that matters is a marathon, not a sprint. Even the rare exceptions must obey the rules of nature. Google started in 1996 as a dissertation project by two students at Stanford University who wanted to explore the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web. The project ran for a year under Stanford University’s website at google.stanford.edu, until 1997 when the two students bought their web domain google.com. Yet another year later, they incorporated Google at a friend’s garage in Silicon Valley. The founders did 350 pitches to investors before they got funded. Had they stopped along the way, the world today would be totally different.