At 63, after a life of public service, Keir Starmer could be forgiven for opting for semi-retirement upon handing over the reins. However, as our new study on the age of some of Britain’s most successful founders shows, many of Britain’s most well-funded companies were started not by a sprightly teenager, but by those with a few miles on the clock.
In How Old Are Britain’s Top Founders? Dr Mann Virdee analysed 183 founders across 100 of Britain’s highest-raising companies, showing that entrepreneurship is far less age-restricted than the Silicon Valley myth would have you believe. Specifically, he found a median founding age of 37, a range from 18 to 67 years old at the time of founding, and, crucially, that almost as many founders were 50 or older (20%) as were under 30 (23%) when the company was founded.
Energy and climate founders were the oldest, with a median age of 53. Several had clocked up 25+ years in the industry first. Biotech and pharma came next at 46, reflecting the academic, clinical and regulatory grounding needed to bring a drug or device to market. Fintech founders skewed younger at 34 — old enough to have worked inside the systems they set out to disrupt, but not yet institutionalised by them. And AI and software founders were the youngest at 33: younger than their peers in other sectors, but still older than the stereotype suggests, with most having started after 30, often coming from research or established tech firms first.
This is the first pass. We want to expand this beyond fundraising data in future iterations. If this is the sort of thing you might want to partner on, drop Mann an email to find out how you can get involved.
Infinite Jest
Keir Starmer is a man who had, by every available measure, won — a glittering legal career, the leadership of his party, a landslide — and then watched all that winning curdle the moment he was in office. So what went wrong?
In Finite and Infinite Games, James Carse separates games played to win, which end when someone does, from games played to keep the play going, in which the rules and even the boundaries shift to that end. As he puts it, the finite player plays within the boundaries; the infinite player plays with them.
Bernard Suits, in The Grasshopper, comes at the same idea from another angle: a game, he says, is “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles” — we accept the rules precisely because they make the play possible. A prosecution is a finite game: fixed rules, a judge, a verdict, and an end. So is a leadership ballot. Governing isn’t. It could be argued that Starmer was so used to winning at finite games, he didn’t know how to approach an infinite game.
Entrepreneurship is mostly an infinite game.
In the past, I’ve sometimes pushed back when entrepreneurs tell me the answer is to get more of them into the heart of government — people who have built things. But I’ve come around to thinking they’re right, because the evidence has started to stack up. The exceptional people who disprove my rule: Matt Clifford, Alex Depledge, Emma Jones, James Wise, Martha Lane Fox and Kate Bingham, to name a few. Bingham has called for an “entrepreneurial mindset” in government, and Emma has been telling me much the same for over a decade.
A note of caution. It’s possible — not least given how much we love to copy the US — for this thinking to lead to something like DOGE, which managed to break more things than it fixed. But that isn’t Britain’s problem — sclerosis is. We need more infinite players in government.
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Rumour Mill
Equalising capital gains tax with income tax and instituting an exit tax are being discussed again. I’ve written before about why it’s bad for the UK. When we get a new Prime Minister, one of the first things they should do is rule out the most damaging scenarios. These rumours are exactly the problem of recent decades.
Fractional Future
I’m delighted to welcome Liberti to the fold, and to introduce Alex Evans, who directs Liberti Club — a campaign making the case that fractional is the future.
Liberti Group is the UK’s leading home for fractional C-suite talent, bringing together The CFO Centre, People Puzzles, The Marketing Centre, YRH Finance Team and Kiss The Fish, alongside a network of more than 1,000 principals across finance, marketing, people and sales worldwide. Alex has spent twenty-five years building communities of just this kind. I’ve known him for at least a decade of that time and so I know he brings deep expertise in the practicalities of business to the Network. Connect with him here.