The image of hoodie-wearing college students launching billion-dollar businesses from their dorm rooms has become an entrepreneurship cliché. And while leaders say there are advantages to being a young founder—having more energy and fewer responsibilities—there are also perks to starting a business later in life. Actress Jennifer Garner became a cofounder of $732 million business Once Upon a Farm at 45, and says her age was an asset in the career move.
“I’m so grateful to be a grown-up in that room and not a kid, because I think that I would think I need to prove myself, I need to say ‘This is how we should do this,’ or ‘This is how this should run,’” Garner said recently in an interview with Forbes. “I’m blissfully not motivated by needing to be in charge.”
The now-54-year-old celebrity launched her company with two decades of Hollywood success to her name, including major hits like 13 Going on 30, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, Dallas Buyers Club, and Love, Simon. But in 2015, she took a temporary step back from the acting limelight, this time pursuing a different dream: building a business.
Garner joined Once Upon a Farm as a cofounder in 2017, two years after creators Cassandra Curtis and Ari Raz first launched the organic baby food brand (which had expanded to products for toddlers and older kids). And looking back on her entry as “Farmer Jen” eight years ago, Garner is glad the opportunity came later in life. It was an adjustment, and she admits that she’s still learning; before stepping into the business world, she had never taken an economics or business class, and to this day, is still overwhelmed by spreadsheets. But Garner says she loves being “the student in the room, always”—a humility that often comes with decades of work experience.
Her advice for women trying to accomplish all of their career goals before hitting 50?
“Keep following your interests. Keep being part of a team,” Garner continued. “Keep putting yourself in the position to be one of many. And if you do need to be the one pushing that rock up the hill, then put your shoulder to it and find some friends to do it with you.”
Leaders launching businesses in their 40s are the rule—not the exception
Young, aspiring founders are watching a litany of Gen Zers like Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang and Mercor’s Brendan Foody launch billion-dollar businesses. But in reality, leaders who find business success in the middle of their careers, like Garner, are more of the rule than the exception.
The average age of entrepreneurs who start their own businesses still rests at 42, according to the Harvard Business Review. And when it comes to the top 0.1% of start-ups, creators typically launch at 45 years old. Some of the world’s most wealthy and successful leaders lived entire careers before becoming founders themselves—and there are some real upsides to launching later in life.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos—the third richest person in the world, with $288 billion to his name—didn’t create the shopping giant until he was 30, after a brief career on Wall Street. He said that young success stories like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates are actually the “exception” to the trope that tech titans are all founded by college drop-outs. While it’s “possible” to find success during that early time in life, Bezos explained, it’s much harder to come by. Instead, aspiring entrepreneurs can “increase their odds” by working at a company before starting one.
“I always advise young people: Go work at a best-practices company somewhere where you can learn a lot of basic fundamental things [like] how to hire really well, how to interview, etc.,” Bezos said during Italian Tech Week last year. “There’s a lot of stuff you would learn in a great company that will help you, and then there’s still lots of time to start a company after you have absorbed it.”
And The RealReal founder Julie Wainwright is a testament to that notion. She founded the online consignment giant when she was 53 years old, and her business hit $10 million in sales within its very first year. She later took the business public in 2019, and made her exit in 2022, with the business currently valued at $1.3 billion. And she didn’t stop there; continuing her entrepreneurial streak, Wainwright launched personalized nutrition company Ahara in her mid-60s.
Even though spry 20-somethings may have a bit more pep in their step than most, Wainwright told Fortune: “I have a lot of energy, and I’ll probably work for the rest of my life because I love it.”
