Is 40 Too Late to Start a Business? What the Numbers and Real Stories Say
Indian startup news makes it easy to feel old at 27. Every other headline is about a college dropout who raised crores before they could legally order a beer. Ritesh Agarwal was 19 when he launched OYO. Tilak Mehta was 13.
Those stories are real. They also get far more attention than they deserve, because they're unusual. That's why they're news.
The number that surprised me
In 2018, a group of economists led by Pierre Azoulay looked at 2.7 million US founders whose companies went on to hire at least one employee. The average age at founding was 41.9. For the fastest-growing companies, the top one in a thousand, it was 45.
Yes, this is American data, and India's startup scene isn't the same. Still, it knocks a hole in the idea that business belongs to the young. The researchers also found that people with experience in the same industry did much better, which makes sense when you think about it. At 45 you know how the industry works, who pays late and which problems people will actually spend money on. At 21 you're mostly guessing.
Some Indians who started late
Falguni Nayar was 49 when she left her job as Managing Director at Kotak Mahindra Capital and launched Nykaa in 2012. She wasn't starting from scratch, and it would be silly to pretend otherwise. Decades in finance gave her savings, contacts and credibility. But that's the point. All those years were useful to her.
Nisha Madhulika was 52. The kids had moved out, the house in Noida was quiet, and she began filming vegetarian recipes in her own kitchen. No business plan worth mentioning, no investors, and she didn't need any to get started. What she did have was a lifetime of cooking, which turned out to be exactly what viewers wanted.
Deepa Malik took up para-athletics at 36, after a spinal tumour and 31 surgeries had left her paralysed from the chest down at 30. She isn't a business founder, but I'm including her anyway. If you've ever told yourself it's too late to begin something, her story is hard to argue with.
What's really harder at 40
I don't want to oversell this. Starting at 40 is a different kind of hard.
You've probably got EMIs, school fees and parents who are getting older. If it goes wrong at 22 you move back home. At 42 you might be the home. You also have less energy for all-nighters, and your family will have opinions.
So the sensible way is usually slower. Keep your income while you test the idea. See if strangers, and not only your friends, will pay. Put aside enough to cover a good stretch of household expenses before you leave a job, and agree with your family how long you'll give it and what "stop" looks like. None of this makes for an exciting Short. But it's how people with responsibilities can take a risk without betting the house.
Where to start
Ask yourself what people already come to you for. A homemaker who has run a household budget for twenty years knows something. So does the accountant whose relatives all call at tax time, and the shop floor supervisor who can tell you why the line keeps stopping.
Mamaearth came out of Ghazal Alagh's struggle to find products for her son's eczema. Problems like that come from living a life, and you've had more time to run into them than any 21-year-old.
It might still be a bad idea to start your particular business. That's worth thinking through carefully. But your age alone isn't the reason.