10 Amazing Entrepreneurs That Did Nothing Noteworthy Before 40

There is now scientific proof that most successful entrepreneurs get started in their 40s (41.9 to be exact). These highly successful entrepreneurs would be unknown today if not for their successes after 40.

Sam Walton – 44 Years Old

In 1945, before starting Walmart, Sam Walton took out a $20,000 loan (over $300,000 today) from his father-in-law and bought a franchised Ben Franklin variety store. Three years later, Walton bought another Ben Franklin store, over 200 miles away. Even with two stores, Walton struggled to pay his employees, because of his focus on keeping prices low.

In 1962, when Walton was 44-years old and had years of business experience, he opened the first Walmart in Rogers, Arkansas. Fast forward to 2024 and Walmart is doing $1 billion in revenue every day.

Snowqueens Icedragon – 46 Years Old

“Snowqueens Icedragon” was EL James’ username on fanfiction.com, where she posted the Twilight fan-fiction that preceded the eventual breakout success that is the 50 Shades Trilogy.

She got started writing at 46 and the success took her by surprise. “The explosion of interest has taken me completely by surprise,” she said. James has described the Fifty Shades trilogy as “my midlife crisis, writ large. All my fantasies in there, and that’s it.”

Even though she was surprised, she knew how to dream big. “Don’t tell anyone,” wrote James to an internet friend in 2010. “I have visions of being interviewed by TIME magazine for revolutionizing publishing.”

It only took two years, James was featured in Time Magazine’s People Who Matter in 2012.

Read our profile of Snowqueens Icedragon / El James.

Henry Ford – 40 Years Old

Although he would eventually create one of the biggest self-made fortunes in history ($199 billion), Henry Ford bankrupted his first two companies.

Ford, like Steve Jobs, was a perfectionist who cared deeply about every minor detail of his automobiles. Because of this he continually missed deadlines and failed to complete his first prototypes.

After years of repeated failures, Ford’s investors convinced him to hire James Couzen. Couzen convinced Ford to sell an “imperfect” car and to have mechanics throughout the country that were trained to fix automobiles.

He was 40 years old when he founded Ford Motor Company.

Andrew Huberman – 45 Years Old

Everyone’s favorite internet scientist was unknown outside of the science community before 2020.

The child of a Stanford professor, his parents divorced at 12. He was pretty much on his own from that point forward. Got big into the local skateboard scene and the drugs and alcohol that came with it.

Huberman was institutionalized as a freshman in high school for not attending classes. As a condition of his release he had to change high schools and start seeing a therapist, which he still sees to this day.

At 19, he hit a turning point in his life after a street fight defending the house he was squatting in. Huberman did not like the direction of his life and made a change.

He committed himself to working out, running and studying and became a straight A student and finished his PHD by 30. Similar to EL James he wrote under a pseudonym to make extra money while working on a post doc.

At 42, with a few published papers under his belt and having recently lost a few important people in his life, Huberman felt out of touch.

In 2019, a training buddy and former special teams member asked him “what are you going to do for the world in 2019?” What started as a long science based posts on instagram, eventually turned into the Huberman podcast which launched in 2021, when Huberman was 45 years old.

“I wouldn’t stop podcasting if you gave me $100 billion.”

The Zagats – 42 and 40 Years Old

Tim and Nina Zagat both earned law degrees from Yale. The Zagat’s married while in law school and moved to New York where they both worked in corporate law.

They both took jobs in Paris and while there started keeping track of their favorite Parisian restaurants, they called it Le Guide des Guides.

“We wanted to make sure that every time we had to take a client out, for example, we would be making a smart choice. It turned out that Le Guide des Guides was very popular among our friends and clients.”

After returning to New York, the Zagat Survey was initially launched in 1979 as a hobby for Tim and Nina who surveyed their friends about restaurants in New York City. The first Zagat Guide was published in 1982, when Tim was 42 and Nina was 40.

They would quit their corporate jobs two years later and eventually sell the company to Google for over $150 million.

Eric Yuan – 41 Years Old

After earning his master’s degree, Yuan lived in Bejing and was inspired to immigrate to the United States while watching Bill Gates give a speach. It was not an easy path. His visa application was rejected the first eight times. He says about the experience, “I got to practice perseverance.”

His first job in the United States was at Webex, which was eventually acquired by Cisco. He grew frustrated in this role because none of his customers were happy with the product. It got so bad that he didn’t want to go into the office. Yuan would try to pitch his bosses product improvements, but they were always shot down.

Yuan decided it was time to go out on his own. He founded zoom in 2011 with the goal of making video conferencing easier for everyone. He was 41 at the time. During the pandemic his net worth would sky rocket to $16.4 billion as zoom became the default way to video conference for pretty much everyone on the planet.

Tony Fadell – 41 Years Old

One day Tony Fadell was frustrated by the clunky dumb thermostats in his house and decided to do something about it. He founded Nest at the age of 41 to develop a new programmable thermostat.

Four years after founding the company, Fadell sold it to Google for $3.2 billion. Nest was not Fadell’s first time working in consumer electronics. He was actually well established in the industry.

He worked on the iPod and is known as the “father of the iPod” and co-creator of the iPhone.

Tony was no overnight success. While he has an impressive track record, working for Apple spinoff General Magic, Phillips Electronics and Apple itself, his first entrepreneurial attempt was a failure. Fadell started a company called Fuse, but the company failed after being unable to find a second round of funding for the company.

Suzy Batiz -42 Years Old

Married, divorced and bankrupt by the time she was 20, Suzy Batiz could have easily given up many times before she created a breakout product that helps all of us reduce potential embarrasment in the bathroom.

But after her second bankruptcy at the age of 38 she was burnt out and almost quit, but went on a spiritual sabbatical that changed everything.

“In that spiritual sabbatical, I found happiness really for the first time in my life. I had really been looking at external themes to provide that particular pleasure, and, you know, I thought that something outside of myself was going to give me something. And, what I discovered is that really our happiness, and our peace and abundance is really an internal state of being. So I became really happy within myself for the first time in my life. And of course, ironically, after that is when the idea for Poo-Pourri came, and I came back into business.

At the age of 42, after a viral commercial and positive review on the Today show, sales of Poo-Pourri took off. Suzy Batiz’s net worth is currently estimated at over $200 million.

Ray Kroc – 52 Years Old

Before starting McDonald’s, Ray Kroc worked as a pianist in a bootlegging bar, a paper plate salesman, a real estate developer, a failed housewares inventor and a milkshake machine distributor. He was a member of a country club and could have cruised into a comfy retirement. Instead, he chose to take another swing at entrepreneurship.

Here is what Ray Kroc had to say about his age when he was starting McDonald’s:

“I was a battle-scarred veteran of the business wars, but I was still eager to go into action. I was 52 years old. I had diabetes and incipient arthritis. I had lost my gall bladder and most of my thyroid gland in earlier campaigns. But I was convinced that the best was ahead of me.”

Ray Kroc started his McDonald’s franchising system at 52 years old.

Read our profile of Ray Kroc.

Rick Schwartz aka “The Domain King” – 43 Years Old

Rick says he started investing in domain names around 1973. At the time he was a traveling salesman, every night he’d have to call information lines to track down hotels. Eventually, he started only calling hotels that had a vanity 800 number because he could remember them and it saved him a bunch of time.

When the internet was taking off a few decades later Rick started registering the top 800 numbers as domain addresses. From there he started registering adult themed domains. It was a good idea. Rick bought porno.com for $42,000 in 1997 and sold it for $8.88 million in 2015. The best part is that domain earned $15 million leasing traffic while he owned it.

In 2003 Rick sold men.com for $1.3 million, in 2008 candy.com for $3 million. He’s made over $20 million all from an initial investment of about $1,800. In an email exchange, he told me he got started buying domain names at “about 43.”

You Mentioned Science

At the beginning of this post I mentioned a study that showed most successful entrepreneurs got started in their 40s. The study I am referring to is “Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship,” American Economic Review 2(1)(2020) by Pierre Azoulay, Benjamin F. Jones, J. Daniel Kim and Javier Miranda.

It’s a fascinating study. They analyzed the age of every founder for each business created in the United States between the years of 2007 and 2014. They found the average age of a business founder in the United States is 41.9 years old.

This is way older than what you typically see covered in the media.

A few other surprising takeaways from the study:

• Probabilities of success increase as you age. A sixty-year old startup founder has roughly three times higher chance of creating a valuable business than a thirty-year old startup founder.
• The average age of founder of a highly profitable technology company, the researchers found, is 42.3 years old.

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