Jeff Bezos Warns: Do This Before Starting a Company in Your 20s
Written by
Ellie Diamond
Edited by
Brendan McGinley
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There are countless articles and profiles of entrepreneurs who dropped out of college. Fortune magazine recently featured several, including Figma CEO Dylan Field and Scale founder Lucy Guo, the world’s youngest self-made billionaire woman, who built her own fortune.
Innovators like these young people make the news because they’re inspiring, intelligent and innovative. They’re also exceptional. which can make them unrealistic role models, according to Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon. He advises aspiring entrepreneurs to learn from experience before striking out on their own.
The Exception, Not the Rule
In October 2025, two entrepreneurs took the stage at Italian Tech Week in Turin. One was John Elkann, the chair and executive director of automaking giant Stellantis. During his interview with Bezos, Elkann asked what he thought of the ideal of the prodigy entrepreneur.
These are personalities such as Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Apple’s Steve Jobs. Each became hugely successful after rejecting the conventional pathway to success: a college education and years of climbing the ladder.
Elkann didn’t take this route, and neither did Bezos. They have great respect for those who did, but Bezos is quick to point out that it shouldn’t be an expectation.
“It is possible to be 18, 19, 20 years old, drop out of college and be a great entrepreneur,” he said. “We have famous examples of that. But these people are the exception.”
The numbers back him up. A Clifford-Lewis Private Wealth study found that among the top 0.1% of rapidly growing new businesses, the founder’s average age was 45 at startup. Based on its data, Clifford-Lewis estimates that entrepreneurs have a much higher chance of success at 30 than at 20.
The Value of Professional Experience
Bezos started Amazon at age 30. He had graduated from Princeton University in 1986 and worked at several Wall Street companies, including Fitel and Bankers Trust. In 1990, he became the youngest-ever vice president of hedge fund D.E. Shaw. He opened Amazon in July 1995 at age 31.
Bezos said these 10 years of working for others improved Amazon’s chances of success. He gained hands-on experience leading a growing company, and these skills helped him guide Amazon through its early days of explosive growth. In only two years, he took the company public, with an initial public offering price of $18 per share.
Bezos now counsels young aspiring entrepreneurs to follow a similar path. As he said in Turin:
“I always advise young people, go work at a best-practices company where you can learn a lot of basic, fundamental things: how to hire really well, how to interview, etc. There’s a lot of stuff you would learn in a great company, and there’s still lots of time to start a company after you have absorbed it”.
Bezos believes that these early career lessons do what pure inspiration and talent cannot: They teach young entrepreneurs how to do things right from day one. This knowledge supports better decision-making, allowing entrepreneurs to focus on growth.
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