Jeff Bezos Warns: Do This Before Starting a Company in Your 20s

There are countless articles and profiles of entrepreneurs who dropped retired of college. Fortune mag precocious featured several, including Figma CEO Dylan Field and Scale laminitis Lucy Guo, the world’s youngest self-made billionaire woman, who built her ain fortune.

Innovators similar these young radical marque the quality due to the fact that they’re inspiring, intelligent and innovative. They’re besides exceptional. which tin marque them unrealistic relation models, according to Jeff Bezos, laminitis of Amazon. He advises aspiring entrepreneurs to larn from acquisition earlier striking retired connected their own.

In October 2025, 2 entrepreneurs took the signifier astatine Italian Tech Week successful Turin. One was John Elkann, the seat and enforcement manager of automaking elephantine Stellantis [3]. During his interrogation with Bezos, Elkann asked what helium thought of the perfect of the prodigy entrepreneur.

These are personalities specified arsenic Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Apple’s Steve Jobs. Each became hugely palmy aft rejecting the accepted pathway to success: a assemblage acquisition and years of climbing the ladder.

Elkann didn’t instrumentality this route, and neither did Bezos. They person large respect for those who did, but Bezos is speedy to constituent retired that it shouldn’t beryllium an expectation.

“It is imaginable to beryllium 18, 19, 20 years old, driblet retired of assemblage and beryllium a large entrepreneur,” helium said. “We person celebrated examples of that. But these radical are the exception.”

The numbers backmost him up. A Clifford-Lewis Private Wealth survey recovered that among the apical 0.1% of rapidly increasing caller businesses, the founder’s mean property was 45 astatine startup. Based connected its data, Clifford-Lewis estimates that entrepreneurs person a overmuch higher accidental of occurrence astatine 30 than astatine 20.

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Bezos started Amazon astatine property 30. He had graduated from Princeton University successful 1986 and worked astatine respective Wall Street companies, including Fitel and Bankers Trust. In 1990, helium became the youngest-ever vice president of hedge money D.E. Shaw. He opened Amazon successful July 1995 astatine property 31.

Bezos said these 10 years of moving for others improved Amazon’s chances of success. He gained hands-on acquisition starring a increasing company, and these skills helped him usher Amazon done its aboriginal days of explosive growth. In lone 2 years, helium took the institution public, with an archetypal nationalist offering terms of $18 per share.