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Asa Griggs Candler
Born
Candler was an Atlanta pharmacist and drug wholesaler who bought up the rights to John Pemberton's Coca-Cola formula between 1888 and 1891, and incorporated The Coca-Cola Company in 1892, at forty. His contribution was the business, not the drink: aggressive advertising, coupons for free samples, branded trays and calendars, and syrup sold to soda fountains across the country. He sold the company in 1919 for 25 million dollars.
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Henry Royce
Born
Royce had already run a successful electrical crane and dynamo business in Manchester for twenty years when he built his first car in 1904, at forty-one. Meeting Charles Rolls that year led to Rolls-Royce Limited in 1906, when Royce was forty-three. His earlier firm's engineering discipline carried straight into the cars, and later the aero engines, that made the name.
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Charles Ranlett Flint
Born
Flint was a veteran trader and arms dealer known as the father of trusts for organising mergers. In 1911, at sixty-one, he merged a time-clock maker, a scale company and Herman Hollerith's tabulating machine firm into the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company. He hired Thomas Watson to run it, and in 1924 it was renamed IBM. His skill was seeing which small firms fitted together, then handing operations to someone else.
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Rose Blumkin
Born
Rose Blumkin had raised four children and sold secondhand clothes before opening Nebraska Furniture Mart in 1937, at forty-three, with 500 dollars borrowed from her brother. Low margins and plain dealing grew it into the largest home furnishings store in the US, and she kept working into her hundreds after Warren Buffett bought it in 1983.
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Colonel Sanders
Born
Harland Sanders had been a railway fireman, insurance salesman and service station operator before running a motel and restaurant in Corbin, Kentucky. In 1952, aged sixty-two, he franchised his pressure-fried chicken to Pete Harman in Salt Lake City, and after a new interstate killed trade at his own restaurant he drove around signing up more franchisees. He sold Kentucky Fried Chicken in 1964 but stayed its face for life.
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Ray Kroc
Born
Kroc spent decades selling paper cups and then Multimixer milkshake machines, which is how he came across Richard and Maurice McDonald's busy restaurant in San Bernardino in 1954. At fifty-two he became their franchising agent, opened his own first outlet in Illinois in 1955 and later bought the brothers out. The financial structure that made McDonald's rich, owning the land under franchisees, came from his finance chief Harry Sonneborn.
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Momofuku Ando
Born
Ando had run several businesses and lost nearly everything when a credit association he chaired collapsed, before, at forty-eight, he developed flash-fried instant noodles in a backyard shed in Osaka. Chikin Ramen went on sale in 1958, and Nissin followed with Cup Noodles in 1971, when he was sixty-one. He built the company around one cheap, shelf-stable product that answered a post-war food shortage.
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Sam Walton
Born
Walton learned retail as a J. C. Penney trainee and ran Ben Franklin variety-store franchises in Arkansas for seventeen years, with a loan from his father-in-law for the first. He opened the first Walmart in Rogers in 1962, at forty-four, after the franchise company rejected his discount idea. Small-town locations, low prices and later distribution centres and computer systems built it into the world's largest retailer.
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Mary Kay Ash
Ash spent twenty-five years in direct sales, with Stanley Home Products and World Gift, and retired in frustration at being passed over for men she had trained. In 1963, at forty-five, she put her 5,000 dollars of savings into Mary Kay Cosmetics, with her son Richard Rogers handling finance. Her long sales career is the real foundation: she knew exactly how to recruit, train and motivate a commission sales force.
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Bill Bowerman
Born
Bowerman was a celebrated University of Oregon track coach of fifty-two when he and his former runner Phil Knight each put in 500 dollars to found Blue Ribbon Sports in 1964, importing Japanese running shoes. It became Nike in 1971. His decades of coaching gave him the product ideas, from lighter uppers to the waffle sole, while Knight, twenty-six, ran the company.
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Robert Mondavi
Born
Mondavi worked for decades at his family's Charles Krug winery in Napa until a bitter dispute with his brother Peter pushed him out. In 1966, at fifty-three, he founded the Robert Mondavi Winery, the first major new winery in Napa since Prohibition, and bet on varietal labelling, cold fermentation and French oak to make Californian wine respected abroad. The Opus One partnership with Baron Philippe de Rothschild sealed that reputation.
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Dietrich Mateschitz
Born
Mateschitz was an international marketing director for the toothpaste maker Blendax when he tried a Thai energy tonic on a business trip. In 1984, at forty, he founded Red Bull with its Thai creator Chaleo Yoovidhya, each putting in about half a million dollars; it went on sale in Austria in 1987. His years in consumer goods marketing showed in the guerrilla launches and sponsorship that grew it worldwide.
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Bernard Marcus
Born
Marcus was a pharmacist turned home-improvement retail executive who was fired, along with his colleague Arthur Blank, from the Handy Dan chain in 1978. Within months, at forty-nine, he co-founded Home Depot with Blank and Ken Langone's financing, opening warehouse stores in Atlanta with staff who could advise do-it-yourselfers. Losing that job was the push; his twenty years in the trade were the advantage. He died in 2024.
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Liu Chuanzhi
Born
Liu was a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, sent to labour on a rice farm during the Cultural Revolution, when in 1984, at forty, he and ten colleagues started a company in a guardhouse with 200,000 yuan from the academy. Legend, renamed Lenovo, first resold imported computers, then built its own and in 2005 bought IBM's PC business. State backing gave it a start most private firms lacked.
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Ren Zhengfei
Born
Ren was a former People's Liberation Army engineer who had been working for an electronics firm in Shenzhen when, in 1987, at forty-two, he founded Huawei with 21,000 yuan to resell imported telephone switches. It moved into making its own equipment and became the world's largest telecoms equipment maker, then a major phone brand, despite US sanctions since 2019. Its close relationship with the Chinese state is part of the story and much debated.
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Gary Burrell
Burrell was an avionics engineer in his early fifties at the aerospace firm AlliedSignal when he and a younger colleague, Min Kao, left in 1989 to build GPS receivers for pilots and boaters in Kansas. Garmin, named from their first names, grew into a maker of car navigators, fitness watches and aviation systems, and has avoided the boom and bust of many tech firms. His long industry career gave them credibility with early aviation customers.
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Vera Wang
Born
Wang was a competitive figure skater, then spent seventeen years as an editor at Vogue and two as a design director at Ralph Lauren. Planning her own wedding at thirty-nine and finding nothing she liked, she opened a bridal boutique in New York's Carlyle Hotel in 1990, at forty, with financial backing from her father. The wedding dresses became a global fashion house.
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Craig Newmark
Born
Newmark spent seventeen years as a programmer at IBM and then worked at Charles Schwab before starting an email list of San Francisco events for friends in 1995, at forty-two. It became Craigslist, incorporated in 1999, and he deliberately kept it small, plain and largely free, handing the chief executive role to Jim Buckmaster in 2000. A late start with no investors and no grand plan still produced one of the most used sites in America.
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Chip Wilson
Born
Wilson had already spent twenty years running Westbeach, a surf and snowboard clothing company, before he sold it and founded Lululemon in Vancouver in 1998, at forty-two, after taking a yoga class. The technical fabrics and the stores that doubled as yoga studios came from that apparel background. He left the board in 2015 after public controversies, but remains a large shareholder.
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Arianna Huffington
Born
Huffington was an author, columnist and political commentator, with a wide network from her years in Washington and California politics, when she co-founded The Huffington Post in 2005, at fifty-four, with Kenneth Lerer, Jonah Peretti and Andrew Breitbart. Mixing blogs by famous contributors with aggregated news, it was sold to AOL in 2011 for 315 million dollars. She then founded Thrive Global, a workplace wellbeing company, at sixty-six.
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