If you're 45 and thinking about starting something

There's this assumption that if you haven't started a company by 30, you've missed your window. I kept hearing it from younger founders who'd act like turning 35 was some kind of expiration date.

Then I started tracking who was building the companies I actually wanted to invest in. The pattern surprised me.

The founders who started after 40 weren't trying to prove themselves anymore. They'd already done that. They were building companies to solve problems they'd personally lived with for years. And they had something the 25-year-olds didn't: a working bullshit detector.

When you've worked in an industry for 15 years, you know where the bodies are buried. You've seen three different "revolutionary" solutions fail for the same reason. You know which problems are real and which ones are just annoying.

I watched a founder who'd spent 20 years in healthcare logistics build a scheduling tool. She didn't start with market research or customer interviews. She started with a list of eight things that had broken repeatedly at every hospital she'd worked with. Built the first version in six weeks because she knew exactly what mattered.

Compare that to the Stanford grad who spent nine months validating a problem that didn't exist.

The late-stage founders don't need to discover the problem. They've been carrying it around for years. They just needed time to realize nobody else was going to fix it.

By your 40s, you know people. Not LinkedIn connections. Actual relationships with people who trust your judgment.

When a 47-year-old CFO decides to build financial software, she's not cold-emailing potential customers. She's texting former colleagues who've been complaining about the same broken tools for a decade. Half her pilot customers sign up before she writes a line of code.

The young founder spends 18 months trying to get meetings. The experienced founder spends 18 months trying to keep up with inbound demand from people who already know she ships.

This isn't about age. It's about accumulated trust. But accumulated trust takes time.

Here's what changes when you start a company after you've already had a career: you don't care about impressing investors, getting press coverage, or building the next unicorn.

You care about solving the problem. That's it.

I've seen this play out dozens of times. The 28-year-old founder pivots when the VCs suggest it. The 50-year-old founder says "no, you don't understand the market" and finds different investors.

One of them wastes two years chasing someone else's vision. The other one builds exactly what they set out to build.

The confidence to say no comes from having already proven yourself in other contexts. You don't need this company to validate your entire identity. It's freeing.

Late-stage founders usually have money saved. Not rich, but enough that they can go 12-18 months without salary. That changes everything about how you build.

You're not fundraising in month three because you're about to miss rent. You're fundraising when the product works and customers are asking for more. The negotiating position is completely different.

You also know how companies actually work. You've seen good management and bad management. You've watched teams scale and teams implode. When it's time to hire your first five people, you're not learning on the job.

The 23-year-old founder spends three years learning how to run a company. The 45-year-old founder already knows. They spend those three years building product.

I'm not saying late-stage entrepreneurship is easier. The risks are just different.

You probably have a mortgage. Maybe kids in college. You can't sleep on a friend's couch and eat ramen for two years. The financial floor is higher.

You also can't work 90-hour weeks anymore. Your body won't let you. So you better be efficient. You better know exactly what matters and what doesn't.

But here's the thing: those constraints make you sharper. The 25-year-old can afford to waste six months on features that don't matter. You can't. So you don't.

The best companies come from people who've spent years inside a problem and finally decided to fix it. Sometimes that happens at 24. Sometimes at 54.

Airbnb's founders were 27 and broke. Vera Wang started her fashion company at 40. Charles Flint founded IBM at 61. Reid Hoffman was 36 when he started LinkedIn, but he'd already built and sold a company.

The common thread isn't age. It's that they all deeply understood what they were building and why it needed to exist.

If you're 45 and thinking about starting something, you have advantages the 25-year-olds don't. You know the problem better. You know more people who need it solved. You know how to build teams and manage resources.

What you might lack is time. So don't waste it building something you don't care about or chasing someone else's definition of success.

Build the thing you've been thinking about for years. The one you know needs to exist because you've personally felt the pain of it not existing.

That's not age talking. That's experience. And experience compounds.