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Good morning Launch Key 🚀 community

One of the reasons I started this newsletter was because I didn’t think I was quite finished at 60.

It turns out, that may be on the younger side for olderpreneurs. A few interesting articles have shown more people are starting new ventures even later than I understood.

Let's get into it.

• Gmail users may wish to read online since some parts may be clipped.

• Comment below and let me know if we’re on the right track.

Table of Contents

• Pull to Eject

  • Kentucky Fried Chicken

• Old School Wisdom

• Free Knowledge

• Recommendations

• Visual Crapshoot

Pull to Eject

More than a dozen of you sent me the October Wall Street Journal article titled “The New Age of Entrepreneurship: 70-79.”

Which told me that one, you understand the premise of Launch Key. And two, we may have undershot the target aiming for professionals in their 50’s.

In fact more than a million people in their 70’s – are running their own businesses in the US.

Some can’t find a successor. Some just want to keep busy. And many of the articles focus on people who need to make extra income. As I’ve covered before (Better After 50, Age is just a Number), ageism is alive and well in the work world. Self employment may be one of the more realistic solutions for making a little extra cash after 60.

More importantly, older entrepreneurs have a better chance of success. We’ve been led to believe that the wunderkinds are the only ones with outsize success. And that is just factually wrong. The 20-something tech superstar is actually the outlier.

A 50-year old founder is twice as likely to build a healthy business as opposed to a 30-year old founder.

Success odds go up not based on Silicon Valley valuation metrics but on real-life experience, networks and financial stability. We’ve solved problems for decades. That ability can only be gained via doing.

Kentucky Fried Chicken

Colonel Harland David Sanders had many failures and was 62 when he founded finger-licking good Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC).

His 11 herbs and spices started in a Kentucky roadside restaurant during the Great Depression. And it turned into the first fast food franchise in China and ballooned to more than 20,000 worldwide locations after he sold it. His story was made for TV and is celebrated in the History channel episode on Food that built America.

Over the past few years, I’ve posted a series of similar late career olderpreneurs via LinkedIn. Just a few examples include:

• Henry Ford - Ford Motor Co. - 40

• Leo Goodwin - Geico - 50

• Ray Kroc - McDonalds - 52

• Charles Flint - IBM - 61

• Bernie Marcus - Home Depot - 49

• Bill Porter - E-Trade - 54

• Chaleo Yoovidhya - Redbull - 53

• Julia Childs - TV Chef - 50

• J.R. R. Tolkien - Lord of the Rings - 56

• John Warnock - PDF - 52

• Martha Stewart - magazine - 51

• Peter Mark Roget - Thesaurus - 70

• Bob Parsons - GoDaddy - 47

• Morris Chang - Taiwan Semiconductor - 55

• Gordon Bowker - Starbucks - 51

• John Pemberton - Coca-Cola - 55

Not all ideas can grow into Fortune 500 status. And I am not saying that you will start the next KFC, IBM or E-Trade.

What I am saying, is that you’d be in very good company when you create a late-career business.

Now go launch something 🚀 

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Old School Wisdom

One of the most in-depth studies on the relationship between age and startup success was conducted by researchers from MIT, Northwestern, Wharton and the U.S. Census Bureau. And they found that average age of successful founders wasn’t 25. It was 45.

Free Knowledge

Recommendations

💼 Thriving Freelance - Gigs and Growth : Hundreds of job opportunities sent directly to your inbox each week, plus timely resources to support you as you grow and evolve.

🎓️ Daily MBA : Compound Your Knowledge. Join the free Daily MBA community to start receiving daily, 5 minute lessons in Strategy, Finance, Marketing and more.

📕 MGMT Playbook : Practical management insights straight to your inbox every Wednesday.

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🖥️ Startup Marketer Newsletter - Your cheat sheet for marketing news, insights & tips tailored for the startup space.

Visual Crapshoot