$100m+ Gaming Exit Founders

This week we wanted to explore the differences and similarities of gaming founders versus traditional technology startup founders. Gaming and the wider tech ecosystem share a lot of commonalities, but they also have their distinctions. We were curious about whether these differences manifested themselves in the founders that have built significantly large businesses within gaming.

To answer this question, we gathered data on the founders of gaming companies with publicly disclosed $100m+ exits over the past ~10.5 years (2015-2025 YTD). For each of these founders we attempted to gather demographic information on the following:

• Age
• Gender
• Immigrant Founders
• Education Background

Note: Deeper Investigation Required

While our analysis here is directionally helpful, it is limited in scope as it only focuses on significantly large exits ($100m+) and does not survey founders themselves, so it is also likely riddled with errors. We also do not have data for a direct comparison - i.e. founder demographic data of the wider tech startup ecosystems $100m+ exits over the past 10.5 years. We would welcome more focused and thorough academic research into the founder demographics of gaming and other specialized industries. Regardless, and as a thought provoking exercise, here are our observations.‍

Age

Similar to education status as we will see later, it is a common misconception that successful startup founders are younger. The data suggests otherwise. A widely referenced 2019 study from MIT professors puts the average age of founders (at the age of founding) of successfully exited startups at 47. There is no robust data that directly reports average age of founders at exit, but we can make some rough assumptions with data on the average time to exit: 6.3 years from first financing for acquisitions and 6.6 years for IPOs. Assuming 6.5 years would put the average age at exit for successfully exited founders at 53.5.

Our data on $100m+ gaming exit founders estimates their average age at exit at 49.36 (we did not research average age at founding). This delta could be driven by the nature of gaming content being able to quickly rise in popularity. If so, it would also suggest that the average time to exit for gaming founders is also shorter. If so, then the average age at founding for successful $100m+ gaming exit founders might still be closer than expected to the average age of founders of successfully exited startups, 47 years.

Gender Representation

The gender gap in tech startups is well known and studied. According to a survey conducted between 2016 and November 2022 by Startup Genome, female founders account for ~15% of all tech startup founders across all regions. It is lowest in Middle East & North Africa (MENA) (10.1%) and highest in Oceania (21.6%). North America is right at the average, with 15.7% female founders. The same survey also notes that 31% of startups have at least one female founder.

Carta puts the number of female founders at just 13.2% in 2023, down from 15.1% in 2022. They also publish industry specific data and found that, in 2023, Gaming was the second-most male dominated industry with only a 8.3% female founder rate after Hardware/Electronics (7.4%).

Interestingly, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, between 1996-2020 19.4% of exited VC-backed startups were founded by women, which is higher than the overall proportion of VC-backed startups run by women (14.5%). Once women have founded companies, they outperform on an exit basis.

According to our data on $100m+ gaming exit founders, 3.53% are female (96.47% male) and 7.32% of companies have at least one female founder. Compared to the wider tech startup ecosystem, female founders are underrepresented in gaming.

Immigrant Founders

Immigrants are roughly 14-15% of the US population, but account for over 20% of new business founders (IT & Innovation Foundation). According to the National Foundation for American Policy, 55% of unicorn startups in 2018 had at least one immigrant founder. If you consider children of immigrants as well, that number grows to nearly two-thirds (64%).

The value of immigrant founders is well understood and startup ecosystems around the world have put significant effort into attracting skilled foreign founders. Several countries offer examples of founder-friendly visa programs: the UAE has had an entrepreneurial visa system in place since 2018; the Portugal Startup Visa program, also started in 2018, grants residence visas to founders starting or relocating tech-driven companies in Portugal; and foreign student visas (such as the F-1) combined with tight entrepreneurial programs within universities have been a strong onramp for immigrant founders in the United States for decades.

According to our data on $100m+ gaming exit founders, 4.85% of founders were immigrants or children of immigrants and 7.31% of companies had at least one immigrant (or child of immigrant) founder. It is important to note that our data is on gaming companies from both the US and across the rest of the world; any founder starting a company in a country other than their home country is considered an immigrant founder. Additionally, founders of companies that eventually domiciled in the US (or elsewhere) but were founded in their home country were not considered to be immigrants.

Our data suggests that immigrant representation as founders within gaming (at least of $100m+ exits) lags behind both the US national immigration population rate, and more significantly, the percentage of overall unicorn startups founded by immigrants by a factor of 13x.

While we could not find reliable data on the overall worldwide nationality rates of successfully exited founders, we thought it would be interesting to share our estimates for the top five nationalities of $100m+ gaming exit founders:

Source: Konvoy Research‍

Education

‍While Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, or Steve Jobs, and a myriad of other high profile founders were all college drop outs, they are exceptions to the rule. The vast majority of startup founders do not drop out. According to a report by Stanford Professor Ilya Strebulaev, the dropout rate of unicorn founders is 4% whereas the national average is 36% for 4-year colleges.According to PitchBook, the universities that produced the most VC-backed founders over the past 10 years are UC Berkeley (1,811), Stanford (1,547), and Harvard (1,352). Ivy League universities accounted for 3 of the top 10 and 6 of the top 20.In our data for gaming companies, 97.54% of founders attended university for a Bachelor’s Degree (or higher), 2.48% of founders dropped out, and 5.13% attended Ivy League schools (none of whom dropped out). These numbers are largely in line with the broader tech ecosystem.As for field of study, here are the top fields of study among unicorn founders (from the same Stanford research paper) and the $100m+ gaming exit founders:

On the one hand, the significantly higher percentage for Computer Science in particular is likely due to the high technical nature of developing and creating video games. But great games and consumer platforms also require an eye for what gamers want to play and use; the outsized underrepresentation of other disciplines (compared to the wider unicorn founder data) could also mean there is an opportunity for founding teams within games to bring on diversified educational backgrounds and skillsets.

‍Takeaway: We see clear lags in female founders and immigrant founders successfully exiting $100m+ gaming exit companies over the past ~10.5 years, compared to the broader tech startup ecosystem.

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The top five nationalities for these founders, purely in terms of quantity of founders and companies, are American, British, Chinese, Israeli, and Canadian. Americans alone compose 37% and the top five nationalities compose 75% of all founders with $100m+ exits in gaming.

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As for education, there are strong similarities in the disciplines of study, with Computer Science, Business, and Engineering degrees dominating across both $100m+ gaming exit founders and unicorn founders. The especially high rate of Computer Science degree holders within gaming makes sense; games tend to be highly technical initiatives to produce.