Aaron Patzer was 28 when he sold Mint.com for $170 million
Aaron Patzer graduated from Duke University in 2002. In 2007, he took home the $50,000 prize at TechCrunch 40 for his startup, Mint.com. Mint is a financial tools and management platform that helps people keep track of their spending. In September 2009, two years after its launch, Mint was acquired by Intuit for $170 million.
Max Levchin was 27 when PayPal IPO'd and 35 when he sold Slide to Google.
Max Levchin has a couple of successful startups under his belt. In 1998, he cofounded a company that would be renamed PayPal. In February 2002, PayPal went public and was later bought by eBay. Levchin, who served as CEO, had a reported 2.3% stake, which was worth about $34 million.
In 2004, Levchin founded Slide, a platform for creating and sharing content. It was acquired by Google in August 2010 for $182 million.
Catherine and David Cook were 21 and 22 when the company they cofounded, MyYearbook, was acquired for $100 million in cash and stock.
In 2005, Catherine Cook and her brother David moved to a new high school. They felt out of place, and wanted a way to meet friends quickly. The developed MyYearbook, and it quickly spread to students across the nation.
Shortly after launch, Geoff Cook, Catherine and David's older brother, joined the team. He grew the company to a $100 million acquisition in August, 2011. QuePasa, a Latino social network, bought MyYearbook for $82 million in stock and $18 million in cash -- just enough to pay off the $17 million the siblings had raised from investors.
Jared Polis was 24 when he and his parents sold Bluemountain greeting cards for $780 million
Polis launched an e-card business with his parents in 1996 called Bluemountainarts. Three years later, Polis sold Bluemountain to Excite@Home for $780 million. Polis was CEO and pocketed about $150 million. Now he is a member of the House of Representatives from Colorado's 2nd district.
Stephan Paternot set stock market history when he took TheGlobe public at age 24
Paternot created TheGlobe.com when he was a junior at Cornell University. TheGlobe was an online chat, messaging and webpage-making service. It went public in November 1998; stock closed at $63 per share, giving TheGlobe a $1 billion+ valuation. The next year, the stock crashed. In 2008, the company folded completely.
Jeff Arnold founded WebMD in his twenties. Stock soared to $100 per share...before plummeting.
Jeff Arnold created a heart monitoring system and sold it for $25 million. He took the money from the sale and founded a new company, WebMD. Within one year, the company was valued at $20 billion. WebMD merged with its competitor Healtheon in a $7 billion merger. Arnold was 30 when he left the company in October 2000. After its stock had traded higher than $100, it plunged to $3 per share in late 2001. Fortune called Arnold the "poster boy of the Internet bubble."
Marc Ewing became a paper billionaire by age 30 when he founded Red Hat.
Marc Ewing created a Linux distribution called Red Hat Linux. His company was acquired by Bob Young and the two created Red Hat Software. Ewing was CEO, and the company went public in August, 1999. At the peak of the Internet bubble, Ewing was worth more than $900 million. He took some time off with his millions in 1999 and started spending a lot of time rock climbing.
Marium Naficy and Varsha Rao founded Eve.com in their 20s, which sold to IdeaLab for $100 million in cash.
Naficy and Rao met while working in finance in New York. They both wanted to start a company, and the decided to sell makeup to women online. At first, investors told them it was a bad idea. "Women don't shop online!" they said. Of course, that was wrong. In a Mixergy 2010 interview, Naficy explains the eventual acquisition of Eve to IdeaLab. The founders were 30 when it sold.
They bought the whole company. It was a competitive situation between Idealab and LVMH, Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy, that at that time was trying to expand Sephora into the US and they only had one store in the US. And we had about double the traffic online as Sephora.com at that time. So, it was advantageous for LVMH to buy us to move us out of the way of Sephora. So they made the initial bid. Idealab outbid them, bought us for cash. Then eventually, there were a lot of things that happened. Subsequently, we actually ended up selling to LVMH after all. So, if you type in eve.com now it actually goes into Sephora after all. So, we actually sold the company twice. The first time was for about $100 million in cash to Idealab.
BONUS: Jared Hecht (24) and Steve Martocci (29) sold GroupMe for a near $100 million exit one year after its launch.
Steve Martocci and Jared Hecht cofounded group messaging service GroupMe last summer. Last month, they sold it for a rumored $85 million to Skype. Not quite a $100 million+ exit, but close enough in our book.
BONUS: Dave Morin could have sold his company for $100 million to Google, but turned it down.
Dave Morin, a former Facebook employee, created a more private social network called Path. Three months after launch, he was rumored to have turned down a $100 million acquisition offer from Google.
Why?
His confidante, Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz, says it was peer pressure.
"I can't take full credit," says Moskovitz, "but we happened to be on vacation together. It was me, him and Brian Singerman of Founders Fund. It just was really clear from Dave's body language and what he was saying that he didn't want to do the deal. He was feeling pressured to do it. People were telling him, 'Take the deal, don't risk it all.' The lesson learned is [founders should] set expectations higher [for themselves and their companies]."
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