Startup life here begins a bit later, and after a job

[SINGAPORE] Thanks to Facebook, and now HBO's latest startup sitcom Silicon Valley, the popular image of an entrepreneur is very much Mark Zuckerberg-inspired: a male, socially awkward geek in his early 20s, a tad unkempt, and whose "uniform" consists of a pair of jeans and a hoodie.

This stereotype is, of course, only a part of the entrepreneurship story. In Singapore, it is increasingly likely that entrepreneurs are older - 35-and-up adults who are abandoning their nine-to-five jobs to start their own companies, backed by accumulated savings and knowledge of a certain industry, said observers. The findings of a poll of 102 Singapore startups conducted by The Business Times squares with this perceived trend. The number of startups here founded by entrepreneurs who were aged at least 35 in the year of the launch of the business has generally risen since 2006.

Hugh Mason, co-founder of startup incubator JFDI, said: "It's as if they did what their parents told them to do when they were young - take a 'sensible' job. But now that their own kids are independent, they want to leverage the deep domain expertise they've built up in a certain industry, to tackle issues that just aren't getting resolved in that industry."