## The Rise of Senior Entrepreneurs

**The entrepreneurial urge doesn't necessarily diminish with age.** As people live and work longer, more are choosing to start a business in their 70s. These emerging septuagenarian entrepreneurs share many motives with younger counterparts. They want to be their own boss, set their own schedules, and pursue meaningful projects.

![Collage of three portraits of older entrepreneurs: Mary Rawles, Charlotte Bishop, and George Koenig.](https://images.wsj.net/im-32206887?width=700&height=466)

*Photo: Mary Rawles, Charlotte Bishop, Peter Kang*

Septuagenarians starting new businesses leverage technology, experience and decades worth of contacts

Unleashing the Power of Experience: Why 70-Somethings Are Dominating Entrepreneurship

## The Ambition Crisis in British Entrepreneurship

**Venture capitalists are sounding the alarm** about a worrying entrepreneurial ambition deficit in the U.K., pointing to **risk-averse parents** and an **expensive education system** as major barriers preventing young Brits from becoming founders.

![Mother and daughter using the laptop at home](https://image.cnbcfm.com/api/v1/image/108210030-1760022903712-gettyimages-1405269373-dsc04303.jpeg?v=1760022982&w=1858&h=1045&vtcrop=y)
*Mother and daughter using the laptop at home | Fg Trade | E+ | Getty Images*

### The Parent Problem: Risk-Off Mentality

**Harry Stebbings**, founder of **20VC** (managing $650 million in funds), doesn't mince words about the parental influence: "**Parents are a massive problem. Parents f*** you up.** Parents are inherently risk-off and not risk on in the U.K. So they say: 'Hey, get this job. Hey, you've been to university. Hey, I paid for all of your university. Hey, I pay for this. Get that job.'"

Stebbings contrasts this with the American approach: "Actually in the U.S., it's much more: 'Start a business. Go try that. Go join a startup.' **Very different mindset towards risk and careers**, and I think that's a really different element to how a child starts."

### Government Recognition of the Problem

**U.K. Business Secretary Peter Kyle** recently acknowledged the issue at an event hosted by AI chipmaker **Nvidia** in London, questioning: "In Britain, if you went to a group of undergraduates, how big would that group have to be before you found someone that said their choice of going to university... was because they wanted to become a founder?"

Kyle added bluntly: "**The entrepreneurialism simply isn't there – the drive, the vigour.**"

### The Education Cost Barrier

**Dama Sathianathan**, senior partner at London-based venture capital firm **Bethnal Green Ventures**, explains that parental risk-aversion stems from seeing entrepreneurship as financially unstable, especially when families have invested heavily in education.

"It's not being really infused, embedded in the whole scholarly curriculum... people opt to pay incredible fees to just infuse their children with better chances in school and ultimately university. **That's sort of the traditional pathway for people, which is just so expensive**," Sathianathan noted.

**The numbers are staggering**:
- **Private school fees** increased 22.6% on average in January after government VAT introduction
- Average termly fee for day schools reached **£7,382 ($9,799)** including VAT
- **University tuition fees** rose for the first time in eight years in 2025, reaching **£9,535 annually**

### The Perception Gap

**Tom Wallace-Smith**, a Forbes 30 under 30 founder who launched nuclear fusion startup **Astral Systems** in 2021, revealed he didn't even know entrepreneurship was a viable career path during his PhD at the University of Bristol.

Wallace-Smith argued that while the U.K. has no shortage of successful entrepreneurs, the government and media "**could do a better job of telling founders' stories**" and increasing exposure to startup environments.

Stebbings observed the continued preference for traditional corporate paths: "They [young people] still want to go and work at **Jane Street**. They still want to go and work at **Goldman**. They still want to go and work at **McKinsey**. It is astonishing to me, we do not have anywhere near the same entrepreneurial ambitions early."

## Entrepreneurship Isn't 'Financially Stable'

### The Financial Reality Check

Sathianathan explains the practical concerns: "**The risk appetite then is really a question about**: 'Will I have the chance to be financially stable in a cost of living crisis? Will I be able to actually make this into a career move when it doesn't work out because entrepreneurship doesn't always pan out.'"

### Survey Reveals Contradictory Attitudes

A **Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) and Simply Business survey** in March found that:
- **Nearly 60% of young British people** are interested in starting their own businesses
- But only **16% of 2,079 surveyed people** aged 18-34 had actually taken the entrepreneurial leap
- Most cited **lack of formal business education** as a primary obstacle

### The American Comparison

Although university fees tend to be much higher in the U.S., **salaries also tend to be higher**, meaning successful graduates can potentially take more risks such as starting their own business compared to their U.K. counterparts.

As young people and their parents absorb high educational fees, **pursuing entrepreneurship doesn't seem to offer worthwhile rewards** in the current economic climate, creating a cycle where ambitious young Brits opt for safer corporate careers rather than taking the startup plunge.

"Parents are inherently risk-off and not risk on in the U.K," Harry Stebbings, the founder of 20VC, told CNBC Make It. 

Why Risk-Averse Parents Are Killing Britain's Startup Dreams, According to Top VCs

## The Rise of Rapid Unicorns

Unicorns were once rare in the startup world, but today, they seem to be everywhere. As of July 2025, there were **1,200 startups globally valued at $1 billion or more**, according to CB Insights. Giants like **OpenAI** (worth half a trillion dollars), **SpaceX** ($400 billion), and **ByteDance** ($300 billion) dominate headlines, but reaching that $1 billion mark is still incredibly tough.

Out of roughly **10 million businesses started in the past two years**, only four have achieved valuations above $1 billion. Global startup funding in Q2 2025 was down 20% from the previous quarter, though 11% higher than a year ago. Founders have faced a three-year dry period, and if your startup isn't focused on **AI**, it's challenging to attract investor attention.

So, what set these four startups apart? They all center on **AI**, but only one has a product so far. Here’s a closer look at these young unicorns.

## Thinking Machines Lab

Founded in February 2025 by **Mira Murati**, former CTO of OpenAI, this San Francisco-based startup aims to help people harness AI for personal goals. It attracted a swarm of investors from the start, raising **$2 billion by mid-July 2025 at a valuation of $12 billion**. Backers included **Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia, Cisco, and AMD**.

Thinking Machines Lab has no revenue or products yet. It plans to operate as an **open-source entity**, frequently publishing technical blog posts, papers, and code to help other AI developers. Murati has stated the goal is to "advance AI by making it broadly useful and understandable through solid foundations, open science, and practical applications." Recent reports suggest it will create **custom AI models for companies**.

## The Bot Company

Co-founded in May 2024 by **Kyle Vogt** (founder of Cruise) with former Tesla and Cruise engineers Paril Jain and Luke Holoubek, this San Francisco startup focuses on developing at-home robots for household chores. In March 2025, it raised **$150 million in a second funding round**, reaching a **$2 billion valuation**.

Like Thinking Machines Lab, The Bot Company has no revenue or products yet. It reportedly avoids humanoid designs, opting for a different approach to robotics.

## Lovable

Launched in December 2023, this Swedish startup specializes in **vibe coding**, a software development process using AI to generate code from natural language prompts. It became a unicorn just eight months after founding. Co-founded by **Anton Osika** and Fabian Hedin, Lovable lets aspiring tech entrepreneurs describe their ideas without learning to code.

The company offers **free and paid service plans** and raised **$200 million in a Series A round in mid-2024**, valuing it at **$1.8 billion**. It has already announced **annual recurring revenue exceeding $100 million**.

## Safe Superintelligence

Founded in June 2024 by **Ilya Sutskever**, an OpenAI co-founder who was reportedly involved in the push to remove Sam Altman as CEO, this Palo Alto- and Tel Aviv-based company aims to build AI models with greater intelligence than humans that remain aligned with human interests. By September 2024, it raised **$1 billion**, achieving a **$5 billion valuation**.

In April 2025, it secured another **$2 billion**, boosting its valuation to **$32 billion**. The company rejected a buyout offer from Meta, though co-founder and CEO Daniel Gross joined Mark Zuckerberg's company. Safe Superintelligence has no product yet.

These companies have reached unicorn status with less than two years in business. And they all have one big thing in common.

How These 4 AI Startups Became Billion-Dollar Unicorns in Under 2 Years

## The Staggering Power Demands of AI

The numbers are nothing short of staggering. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, reportedly wants **250 gigawatts** of new electricity—equal to about half of Europe’s all-time peak load—to run gigantic new data centers in the U.S. and elsewhere worldwide by 2033.

Building or expanding power plants to generate that much electricity on Altman’s timetable indeed seems almost inconceivable. "What OpenAI is trying to do is absolutely historic," says Virun Sivaram, Senior Fellow for Energy and Climate at the Council on Foreign Relations. The problem is, "there is no way today that our grids, with our power plants, can supply that energy to those projects, and it can’t possibly happen on the timescale that AI is trying to accomplish."

## Emerald AI's Innovative Approach

Yet Sivaram believes Altman may be able to reach his goal of running multiple new data centers in a different way. Sivaram, in addition to his position at the CFR, is the founder and CEO of **Emerald AI**, a startup that launched in July. "I founded it directly to solve this problem," he says—not just Altman’s problem specifically, but the larger problem of powering the data centers that all AI companies need.

Several smart minds in tech like the odds of Sivaram’s company. It’s backed by **Radical Ventures**, **Nvidia’s venture capital arm NVentures**, other VCs, and heavy-hitter individuals including Google chief scientist Jeff Dean and Kleiner Perkins chairman John Doerr.

## How It Works: Flexibility During Peak Demand

Emerald AI’s premise is that the electricity needed for AI data centers is largely there already. Even big new data centers would confront power shortages only occasionally. "The power grid is kind of like a superhighway that faces peak rush hour just a few hours per month," Sivaram says. Similarly, in most places today the existing grid could handle a data center easily except in a few times of extreme demand.

Sivaram’s objective is to solve the problem of those rare high-demand moments the grid can’t handle. It isn’t all that difficult, at least in theory, he argues. Some jobs can be paused or slowed, he explains, like the training or fine-tuning of a large language model for academic research. Other jobs, like queries for an AI service used by millions of people, can’t be rescheduled but could be redirected to another data center where the local power grid is less stressed.

Data centers would need to be flexible in this way less than 2% of the time, he says; Emerald AI is intended to help them do it by turning the theory to real-world action. The result, Sivaram says, would be profound: "If all AI data centers ran this way, we could achieve Sam Altman’s global goal today."

## Proven Success in Real-World Tests

A paper by Duke University scholars, published in February, reported a test of the concept and found it worked. Separately, Emerald AI and Oracle tried the concept on a hot day in Phoenix and found they could reduce power consumption in a way that didn’t degrade AI computation—"kind of having your cake and eating it too," Sivaram says. That paper is under peer review.

No one knows if Altman’s 250-gigawatt plan will prove to be brilliant or folly. In these early days, Emerald AI’s future can’t be divined, as promising as it seems. What we know for sure is that great challenges bring forth unimagined innovations—and in the AI era, we should brace for plenty of them.

Emerald AI, which launched in July, is trying to solve the problem of powering the data centers that all AI companies need.

This Startup's Genius Solution Could Power All of OpenAI's Data Centers Without Overloading the Grid

## Prezent's Strategic Move in AI-Powered Presentations

![Prezent](https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/GcPqBVS9rofKX8BsMY3gpQ--/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTY0MDtoPTQyNztjZj13ZWJw/https://media.zenfs.com/en/techcrunch_finance_785/a0a23f369afc772027ac12af772bad9b)

**Prezent**, an AI-powered presentation builder for enterprises, has secured **$30 million** in new funding. This round was led by **Multiplier Capital**, **Greycroft**, and **Nomura Strategic Ventures**, with participation from existing investors including **Emergent Ventures**, **WestWave Capital**, and **Alumni Ventures**.

The Los Altos, California-based startup is now valued at **$400 million** and has raised over **$74 million** to date. A significant portion of this new capital is earmarked for **acquisitions**, marking a strategic expansion phase.

### First Acquisition: Prezentium

Prezent has made its first acquisition by purchasing **Prezentium**, a services-led presentation company operating in the life sciences vertical. Founded by Deepti Juturu, Prezentium has a unique connection to Prezent—**Rajat Mishra**, Prezent's founder, was a co-founder of Prezentium and has served as its non-operating president since starting Prezent.

This acquisition brings Mishra's two ventures under one roof, leveraging Prezentium's existing client base to expand Prezent's AI suite offerings. The companies already had a partnership, with Prezent using Prezentium as a **go-to-market partner**.

![Prezent](https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/pGFL9x02ET3IpNFCRucAYg--/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTY0MDtoPTQyNjtjZj13ZWJw/https://media.zenfs.com/en/techcrunch_finance_785/8823f2014d66d7073d3a72ca7b96577a)

### Competitive Landscape and Enterprise Focus

The AI presentation tool space is crowded, with competitors like **Presentations.ai**, **Lica**, **Gamma**, and **Chronicle**—all backed by **Accel**. While many focus on consumers and small businesses, Prezent is doubling down on its **enterprise strategy**, targeting larger corporations.

Previously, Prezent expressed intentions to expand into verticals such as finance and manufacturing. However, founder Rajat Mishra now emphasizes focusing on the **life sciences and tech industries** for the time being.

Mishra, a former McKinsey employee, stated, "There are plenty of tools that are trying to make presentations pretty. We want to provide the best tools for **business communications**. I think presentation is one of the frontiers in businesses that is not automated yet. We want to help data scientists and designers to communicate effectively with this automation."

![Prezent founder Rajat Mishra](https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/bRJJamOUjxjlv3gs2clQUQ--/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTY0MDtoPTY0MDtjZj13ZWJw/https://media.zenfs.com/en/techcrunch_finance_785/c71860a6106f49f260c44c13515a5f32)

### Specialized AI Training and On-Site Support

Prezent is taking a **specialized approach** by training AI models tailored to specific industries. To facilitate adoption, the company places **presentation engineers** within enterprises. These engineers are familiar with both the industry and Prezent's offerings, helping teams integrate AI tools into their workflow.

Mishra explained, "The reality of AI in enterprise is that while AI can do many things, it can’t teach people [how] to use AI. That is why we want to place presentation engineers in companies to help our customers **adopt the product faster**."

Months after raising $20 million, enterprise-focused AI presentation startup Prezent is raising $30 million for acquisitions.

Prezent's $30M AI Acquisition Strategy: Uniting Founder's Ventures Under One Roof

## The Unexpected Revival of E-Commerce Startups

Lately, venture capitalist **Ben Lerer** has found himself experiencing a bit of déjà vu: Once again, there's a whole nest of **thriving e-commerce startups** worth his attention. When I reached him a couple weeks ago, his firm, **Lerer Hippeau**, was just putting money into two of them: **Elm Biosciences**, a company developing innovative health products for direct-to-consumer sales.

This renewed interest marks a significant shift in the startup landscape. After years of being overshadowed by SaaS and fintech, **e-commerce is back in the spotlight** with venture capitalists showing renewed confidence in online retail ventures.

The resurgence isn't just about traditional online stores. We're seeing **innovative approaches** to e-commerce that combine technology, data analytics, and unique product offerings to create compelling consumer experiences.

## What's Driving the E-Commerce Renaissance?

Several factors are contributing to this unexpected revival:

- **Changing consumer behaviors** post-pandemic have created new opportunities
- **Advanced technology** has lowered barriers to entry for new e-commerce ventures
- **Supply chain innovations** are making direct-to-consumer models more viable
- **Data-driven personalization** is creating better customer experiences

Venture firms like Lerer Hippeau are betting that these **next-generation e-commerce companies** will be able to scale faster and more efficiently than their predecessors, thanks to lessons learned from previous e-commerce booms and busts.

Lately, venture capitalist Ben Lerer has found himself experiencing a bit of déjà vu: Once again, there’s a whole nest of thriving e-commerce startups worth his attention. When I reached him a couple weeks ago, his firm, Lerer Hippeau, was just putting money into two of them: Elm Biosciences, a ...

E-Commerce Startups Are Making a Surprising Comeback - Here's Why

**Shark Tank** star Kevin O'Leary acknowledged that President Donald Trump's tariffs are a headache and increase input costs, but said entrepreneurs have not only survived in similar environments but also thrived.

In a wide-ranging [interview with Politico](https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/10/06/shark-tank-kevin-oleary-trump-economy-interview-00595013) on Monday, he said entrepreneurs have endured trade wars, periods of sky-high interest rates, and a real-estate meltdown.

"In fact, the best time to start a business, proven by the statistics, is in chaos," O'Leary added. "Every time the American economy is going through some kind of a correction is a fantastic time to be an entrepreneur and start something. And then you have to figure out how to pivot through it."

According to [the Census Bureau](https://www.census.gov/econ/bfs/pdf/bfs_current.pdf), business formations soared during the pandemic after falling in the immediate aftermath of lockdown and have been volatile since then, with several big spikes and sharp dives.

In August, the number of business applications rose 0.5% from the prior month, continuing an uptrend that began earlier this year despite a brief retreat that coincided with Trump's tariff rollout, which triggered chaos in financial markets as duties headed for the highest levels in nearly a century.

However, most of the recent gains have been concentrated in retail trade, while construction, administrative support, professional services, as well as transportation and warehousing, have been flat.

![Business Formation Chart](https://fortune.com/img-assets/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/business-formation-census-1010-25-e1760107364503.png?w=1440&q=85)

O'Leary added that the advent of **AI** has boosted productivity and contributed to the stock market hitting record highs.

"Every single one of my companies uses it today, and it's very productive. It helps enhance margins. It reduces costs in every sector of the economy," he explained.

For example, homebuilders are using AI to help allocate capital expenditures and labor. And while large companies like automakers are getting hit with higher costs, O'Leary said trade deals are getting worked out.

Deals with the European Union, Japan, and South Korea, for example, have lowered auto tariffs to 15% from 25%, while also committing them to hundreds of billions of dollars in U.S. investments.

In such an environment, the key is to look past the politics and focus on the policies "so you can make radical investment decisions at minimal risk," O'Leary argued.

"If you look for the path of least resistance, you want to find big opportunities because of disruption," he explained. "You want to find something that has completely been dislocated and invest in that because of the policy changes."

Meanwhile, O'Leary also cautioned the Trump administration against its deal with [Intel](https://fortune.com/company/intel/), interfering with the Federal Reserve's independence, and the spillover effects of its H-1B visa policy on startups, which will have a harder time paying the proposed $100,000 fee than large companies.

O'Leary pointed out there's highly specialized talent that can't all be filled with domestic workers. And startups that hire AI engineers from abroad, for instance, gain a competitive advantage amid the global talent race.

"I don't think we want to take that away from American companies," he said. "So I would adjust this H-1B mandate for only large corporations at some size where they can afford it."

“If you look for the path of least resistance, you want to find big opportunities because of disruption.”

Unleashing the Power of Experience: Why 70-Somethings Are Dominating Entrepreneurship

Summary:

The Rise of Senior Entrepreneurs

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