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Tim Westergren is the founder of Pandora, but he didn't get started
until he was 35. What was he doing up until that point? At various ages,
he was a hippie, a male
nanny and a part-time music composer. In the late 1990s, he started
composing music for films
and created a concept that allowed him to customize music choices
based on the personalities
of each director he worked with.
This new career didn't pay much, but it did provide the foundation
of an idea that turned into a forerunner of Pandora, the Music
Genome Project. It wasn't
until 2007 that he created Pandora, and in 2010, he was
named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people.
2. Milton Hershey
Carlo Allegri/Reuters
You see this name every time you have a piece of his signature chocolate,
but you might not suspect that Hershey didn't see success in founding
the Hershey Chocolate
Company until he was 37 years old. Much earlier, at age 13, Hershey
dropped out of school and started apprenticing in candy-making.
He borrowed money to open a candy shop of his own, but
failed after five years of work.
Then, when he was 26, he started the Lancaster Caramel Company,
but it wasn't until 1893, when Hershey was 37, that his focus turned
to milk chocolate, and the
Hershey Chocolate Company was born.
3. Gordon Moore
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
For decades, we've referred to "Moore's Law" to describe the
exponential growth we see in the number of transistors that
can be fit into an integrated circuit.
The man the "law" is named after, Gordon Moore, was the
founder of Intel— and he didn't start
Moore got his start when he was 27, joining up with seven
other talented techies to create Fairchild Semiconductor.
After a decade of corporate stagnation and frustration,
Moore left and started his own business, Intel, with his
partner Bob Noyce.
4. Jan Koum
Albert Gea/Reuters
Jan Koum has one of the best rags-to-riches stories in modern
entrepreneurship history. Born in Ukraine, Koum came to the
United States with his mother when he
was 16, relying on food stamps and his work as a janitor to get by.
He learned to code when he was
18 and started college, but dropped out before getting a degree.
He then worked at Yahoo! for nearly a decade, but quit at 30 to pursue
something bigger. At 32, he started WhatsApp, and after a series of
false starts and challenges,
thought about shutting the company down. Thankfully, he didn't,
because, at 37, he sold
WhatsApp to Facebook for a whopping $19 billion.
5. Jack Ma
Amir Cohen/Reuters
Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, has an inspiring story, as well. Born
to a family without much money, Ma decided that the only way to get
ahead was through education — but he failed his college entrance
exams twice. He finally gained admission on the third
attempt, however, and started applying to any job he thought
might take him.
After more than a dozen rejections, Ma started teaching English, for
$12 a month. After visiting the United States at age 31, Ma realized
what a massive opportunity there was for internet companies in China.
He created two ventures that eventually failed, but, when
he was 35, pulled together a group of friends to gather investments for
his online marketplace idea.
This would later turn into Alibaba. At the end of 2017, Jack Ma was
worth $46.6 billion, a major
step up from his previous $12-a-month salary.
It doesn't matter if you're 20, 30, 40 or older: If you have a solid idea,
the passion to follow through on it and access to the resources you need
to get things done,
you too can become a successful entrepreneur at any age.
Certainly there are pros and cons to getting started at any age, such
as the inexperience of youth or the low risk-tolerance of age, but
with the right mentality and knowledge of the stakes, it's possible
to turn things in your favor.
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