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It's a myth that only young guns can set up and lead successful start-ups. Successful entrepreneurship knows no age limits.
When Warren Buffett, chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, announced on 3 August this year the sale of almost half of the holding company's shares in Apple for 76 billion USD, stock market experts frantically speculated about his reasons for doing so. They didn't have to wait long: two days later the Nikkei index fell by 12% due to the shift away from the "carry trade" in Japan as well as weaker labour market data and fears of a recession in the USA. In its wake 6.4 trillion USD was wiped off international currency and crypto markets according to Bloomberg.
The consensus was that Buffett, the old fox, had once again proved his instinct right, with impeccable timing realising a profit that he could then use in the chaos that followed the Nikkei crash for new, lucrative investments.
With his 59 years of experience as a businessman (Buffett acquired the majority of shares in Berkshire Hathaway in 1965 and restructured the textile firm to create the holding company which was managing assets worth 1.069 trillion USD at the end of 2023), with his accumulated expertise and instinct the Oracle of Omaha, the tenth richest person in the world in June 2024 with a net worth of 135 billion USD, had yet again shown everyone that he knew every trick in the book.
The coup pulled off by the 93-year-old, however, had a secondary effect. It challenged a business stereotype, according to which successful entrepreneurs are mostly young guns who revolutionise the business world from their parents' garage or basement. This idea is inspired by start-up celebrities such as Mark Zuckerberg, who as a 20-year-old abandoned his Harvard studies to set up Facebook, Bill Gates and Paul Allen as well as Steve Jobs, who also at 20 and 21 founded Microsoft and Apple respectively, and the 25-year-old inventors of Google Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
Such highflyers are, though, the exception. According to an analysis carried out by the Harvard Business Review in 2018, the average age of successful business founders is 45. A comprehensive study by MIT, Northwestern University, the Wharton School of Economics and the US Census put the median age of founders of all startups at 42, of those in the high-tech sector at 43 and for extremely fast growing unicorn (i.e. billion dollar) companies at 45.
The breakdown is also interesting. According to the data analysis company Statista, in 2022 just 6% of all entrepreneurs were aged between 20 and 30, with a modest 30% in the fourth decade of their lives. In contrast 64% had already passed 40. "Age indeed predicts success, and sharply, but in the opposite way that many propose", write Pierre Azoulay et al., the authors of the studyAge and High-Growth Entrepreneurship. "The highest success rates in entrepreneurship come from founders in middle age and beyond." Successful entrepreneurship, therefore, has more to do with age, experience and maturity than is generally recognised.
It doesn't take much common sense to imagine the reasons for this. Originality, creativity and youthful exuberance at the peak of physical fitness are indeed important ingredients for entrepreneurial spirit. But even more key than intrinsic motivation are professional experience and a successful track record, acquired specialist knowledge in a particular sector and empathy and sensitivity for group and team dynamics. This isn't learnt overnight, but over years and decades. "Key entrepreneurial resources such as human capital, financial capital, and social capital accumulate with age" is the simple conclusion of Azoulay et al. And only once the combination of experience and capital is right, is it easier to set up a company.
There is even some evidence that growth of the lucrative mix over the life of a business is linear. This means, where applicable, entrepreneurial aptitude and skills are proportional to age. This would explain why people like Warren Buffett (93), as well as fashion legend Giorgio Armani (90), Robert Greenberg (84), head of the trainer company Skechers, or Bernard Arnault (75), CEO of the French luxury goods group LVMH, are very much involved in managing things at the top of their companies.
Of course there are limits - as shown recently by the probably age-related withdrawal of Joe Biden at the age of 81 from running for re-election as the presidential candidate.
But the ageing process differs from person to person and from skill to skill - many older people may still easily outperform younger ones in specific aspects. Added to this, skills learnt and honed over decades in a management role such as vocabulary, general education, experience, expert knowledge and insight into human nature are more resistant to ageing processes than pure mental performance, multitasking or speed in processing information, which decline with age.
Geropsychologists differentiate here between fluid intelligence and crystallised intelligence. Whereas the former decreases, according to researchers of the ageing psyche crystallised intelligence tends to remain stable in old age - which may also explain the leadership and management qualities of some elders at the head of successful companies. Perhaps the Buffetts, Armanis, Arnaults, as well as the Arianna Huffingtons and Vera Wangs (as older women also continue to prevail as entrepreneurs) are no accident, but a logical choice. Good things take time.
There is now a growing sense that the experience and wisdom of age are at least as important an ingredient for successful entrepreneurship as youthful exuberance. This is also corroborated elsewhere: A study undertaken by a Swiss headhunting firm even suggests that, overall, there is increasing respect shown to age.
Consequently the senior managers of the 100 largest employers in Switzerland have become older since 2011. The average age of their executive board members is now 53 - compared to the round 50 at the start of the period studied. CEOs are on average 55 years old, as opposed to 52 in 2012. And chairs of boards of directors are currently 65 years old on average.
If the trend is sustained, an adjustment to age-related stereotypes in the business world can certainly be expected. There is likely to be less and less room for ageism, that is prejudice against older people in professional life. Entrepreneurship shows particularly that the old stars of entrepreneurship are shining brighter than ever.
It doesn't always have to be the "30 under 30" or "40 under 40" lists of the next entrepreneur stars drawn up by Forbes, Fortune and Co. In the equivalent "7 over 70" or "8 over 80" you can find just as many examples of seasoned entrepreneurs who were still active late in life as successful entrepreneurs or blossomed into one.
However, let's steer clear here for once of Warren Buffett (93, founder, CEO and chairman of Berkshire Hathaway), Harland David aka "Colonel" Sanders (who founded the Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant franchise in 1952 at the age of 65) and Chaleo Yoovidhya, who had to wait until the age of 61 to find fame as the co-creator of Red Bull. It doesn't always have to be the men.
Instead, here is a selection of perhaps less well-known, but no less impressive, older women, female pioneers and trailblazers who also prefer to play in the top entrepreneur league rather than think about retirement.
Together with her husband, Marian Ilitch founded the Little Caesars pizzeria in a suburb of Detroit in 1959. Today, the company is the third largest pizza restaurant chain in the US and the official pizza sponsor of the National Football League.
At 91, Ilitch is still the chair of Ilitch Holdings, whose empire includes the American football and baseball team from Detroit. She is estimated to be worth over 4 billion USD, which according to Bloomberg makes her one of the seven richest women in the world.
Doris F. Fisher is co-founder of international clothing firm The Gap. Since the company was launched in San Francisco in 1969, it has grown to over 3,500 branches worldwide with an annual turnover of over 15 billion USD.
The multi-billionaire invested some of her wealth in an art collection. Over 1,000 works of art by 185 artists (including Andy Warhol, Ellsworth Kelly and Richard Serra) belonging to the patron and philanthropist are on permanent loan to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Following the death of her husband Reinhard in 2009, the 68-year old Elisabeth "Liz" Mohn took the helm at the Bertelsmann media group. She became chair of Bertelsmann-Verwaltungsgesellschaft and sat on the Executive Committee of the influential Bertelsmann Foundation.
While Liz Mohn is still active today with the foundation, she has now passed control of the media group, which achieves an annual turnover of 21 billion USD through activities that include book publishing, music rights, TV stations and technology subsidiaries, to the next generation. According to Bloomberg, she and her family are worth 6.8 billion USD.
At the age of 55, Athens-born Arianna Huffington set herself up as the queen of the blogosphere and founded the eponymous webzine, "The Huffington Post" in New York. With its fast, progressive mix of journalism, video reporting and user-generated texts and content, the online news site set the benchmark in digital journalism for the noughties.
In 2012 the Huffpo, which had by then been acquired by media giant AOL for 315 million USD, became the first digital medium to win a Pulitzer Prize. TIME Magazine includes Arianna Huffington among the world's 100 most influential people. Huffington left her company in 2016 to set up her own tech start-up Thrive Global. The author of 15 books has estimated wealth of over 100 million USD.
During the time she was actively involved in business, Johnelle Hunt was the Business Manager of the company she co-founded with her husband in 1961 in the state of Arkansas. She supported the development of J.B. Hunt from a packaging company to one of the largest American transportation and logistics companies.
Hunt served on the company's board of directors until after the death of her husband in 2006. She is estimated to have a net worth of 3.5 billion USD.
After graduating in biochemistry from the University of Berkeley in California, Alice Schwartz together with a fellow student - who later became her husband - founded Bio-Rad Laboratories.
As a director and chair of the board, Schwartz was involved in her company's rise as one of the first biotech companies in life sciences and clinical diagnostics until 2022 and still holds 16% of Bio-Rad's shares. According to Forbes, she is one of the richest women in America with a net worth of 2.5 billion USD.
At 88, Ernestine Shepherd is still an active bodybuilder and nutritionist. In 2011 and 2012 the Guinness Book of Records declared her the oldest competitive female bodybuilder.
Shepherd's reputation as a "musclewoman" also earned her an appearance in Beyoncé Knowles' musical film "Black is King".
Model, chef, stockbroker, journalist, author, publisher, TV star, style icon, media businesswoman - all part of the professional life of New Jersey-born Martha Stewart, making her one of the best-known entrepreneurs in the USA. Stewart and her "Martha Stewart Living" brand is a household name in America in the true sense of the word: hardly an area from the home, food and baking through to design, interior/exterior architecture and gardening has not been covered in her magazines and TV shows as well as by her companies and suppliers.
Even a sensational and highly publicised five-month prison sentence in 2005 for insider trading did not seem to tarnish her brand. Two years ago, she smiled from the cover of Sports Illustrated magazine as the oldest model in its history (81), and even today she is still involved in podcasts and on Roku with her own shows. The net worth of the 83-year-old is estimated at around 500 million USD.
