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.
[Email-readers-continue-here]
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.
As an 84-year-old founding CEO, I’ve seen and studied several thousand innovative concepts come to entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial fruition. Mostly it’s been entrepreneurial concepts, as intrapreneurs are inundated with corporate inertia generators. In Europe this month, I note that even the entrepreneurs here are buried in BS.
On the other hand, here in the US, we have the wide-open entrepreneurial frontier now again in front of us. And I’ve seen many of spectacular, and not so spectacular, successes over the years.
In this age of Agentic AI, and the emerging age of self-guided robots, I’m seeing a thousand entrepreneurial flowers blooming. And thanks to our US health care system, I’m still around to ride out enthusiastically to one of the many forward tiers of this frontier.
But truth be told, riding alongside, and likely to take the lead soon, is our 22-year-old COO and Co-founder. And Dave, as you say, she’ll also look a lot better in our pictorial foregrounds! (I’ll be the older guy in the background.) Most importantly, I’ll be the one pointing out that this age of Agentic AI is the greatest new frontier since Homo Sapiens first discovered tool making.
So, thanks again, Dave for another great inspirational and very useful blog!