Rosalind Achterberg was sixty-six when she registered her first company, on a rainy Tuesday in Rotterdam, having spent the previous four decades designing medical devices for other people. Her start-up, Quietude, makes hearing aids that look like pieces of jewellery rather than prosthetics. It raised its first round in eleven weeks. When a young investor asked, gently, whether she had the energy for the years ahead, she told him she had already outlived two of the companies he had backed.
Achterberg is part of a cohort that the start-up world has been slow to notice. Founders over sixty are starting companies in growing numbers, even as the popular image of the entrepreneur has remained stubbornly fixed on the hoodie and the dormitory. Several investors I spoke to described the older founder not as a curiosity but as an increasingly deliberate part of their portfolios, and one admitted that her best-performing company of the decade was run by a grandmother.
The advantages are not mysterious. A late founder typically arrives with a network built over a career, a clear sense of a problem they have watched go unsolved for years, and often enough personal savings to avoid raising money on poor terms. Farid Benkirane, who founded a port logistics company in Marseille at sixty-two, put it bluntly. He had spent thirty years watching containers sit idle on the quay. He did not need a market study to know the pain was real.
Patience as a competitive edge
What older founders seem to lack, investors say, is an appetite for theatre. They are less likely to chase valuations, more likely to reach profitability early, and markedly less interested in being on stage. That temperament can frustrate funds built around rapid, outsized returns. One partner at a London fund admitted that her firm had passed on two founders over sixty-five precisely because they were too reasonable about growth, and that both companies are now thriving without them.
At my age you stop trying to impress anyone. You simply want the thing to exist, and to work, and to be kind to the people who use it.
The obstacles remain real. Ageism in hiring has its mirror in fundraising, and several founders described meetings in which their experience was treated as a liability, as though knowledge were a form of fatigue. Health and succession are questions that younger founders are rarely asked but which older ones must answer candidly. Achterberg named a successor within her first year, a decision she describes as the most generous thing she could have done for her small team.
There is also the matter of identity. Many late founders describe a strange double life, treated as elders in their personal lives and as newcomers in their professional ones. Benkirane says he has learned more in three years of running a company than in the previous twenty of managing departments, and that being a beginner again has been the great unexpected pleasure of his sixties. His grandchildren, he adds, find the whole thing hilarious.
None of this means the young founder is obsolete. But the stories suggest that the most interesting question in entrepreneurship may no longer be how early someone starts, but how much they bring with them when they do. Achterberg, for her part, has no plans to retire. She is sketching a second product and has taken up sailing, which she says teaches the same lesson as business: that the wind rarely asks your age.
