There is a packaging problem in how entrepreneurship gets told publicly.
Youth photographs well. A 26-year-old with a bold pitch and a clean slide deck makes a better magazine cover than a 47-year-old who has navigated two recessions and rebuilt a team after a key departure.
The result is a media portrait of company building that keeps selecting for the same narrow slice.
But endurance is hard to photograph. So is pattern recognition built from watching the same mistake play out across a dozen different companies over two decades. So is the judgment that comes from having been wrong before in ways that actually cost something.
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None of that is invisible in the work. It just does not make a clean narrative arc in 600 words.
The conversation is slowly shifting. The data on founder age has been available for years. But the framing around what makes a compelling entrepreneur still lags behind what company building at a serious level actually requires.
