The real relationship between your age and

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Let me illustrate that. Here is Frank Wilczek, who got the Nobel 
Prize in Physics for the very first paper he ever wrote in his 
career as a graduate student.
13:34
(Laughter)
13:35
More interesting is John Fenn, who, at age 70, was forcefully 
retired by Yale University. They shut his lab down, and at that 
m o m e n t , h e m o v e d t o V i r g i n i a C o m m o n w e a l t h 
University, opened another lab, and it is there, at age 72, that 
he published a paper for which, 15 years later, he got the 
Nobel Prize for Chemistry.
13:58
And you think, OK, well, science is special, but what about 
other areas where we need to be creative? So let me take 
another typical example: entrepreneurship. Silicon Valley, the 
land of the youth, right? And indeed, when you look at it, you 
realize that the biggest awards, the TechCrunch Awards and 
other awards, are all going to people whose average age is late 
20s, very early 30s. You look at who the VCs give the money 
to, some of the biggest VC firms -- all people in their early 
30s. Which, of course, we know; there is this ethos in Silicon 
Valley that youth equals success. Not when you look at the 
data, because it's not only about forming a company --
forming a company is like productivity, trying, trying, trying --
when you look at which of these individuals actually put out a 
successful company, a successful exit. And recently, some of 
our colleagues looked at exactly that question. And it turns out 
that yes, those in the 20s and 30s put out a huge number of 
companies, form lots of companies, but most of them go 
bust. And when you look at the successful exits, what you see 
in this particular plot, the older you are, the more likely that you 
will actually hit the stock market or the sell the company 
successfully. This is so strong, actually, that if you are in the 
50s, you are twice as likely to actually have a successful 
exit than if you are in your 30s.
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15:30
(Applause)
15:35
So in the end, what is it that we see, actually? What we see is 
that creativity has no age. Productivity does, right? Which is 
telling me that at the end of the day, if you keep trying --
15:51
(Laughter)
15:53
you could still succeed and succeed over and over. So my 
conclusion is very simple: I am off the stage, back in my lab.
16:01
Thank you.
16:02
(Applause)
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