A new kind of entrepreneur may be emerging. Not the young technology founder chasing venture capital, investors and a billion-dollar valuation, but people in their 40s, 50s, 60s and even 70s who have already spent most of their lives working, organising, building, failing, succeeding and accumulating experience. People who no longer feel the need to prove their importance through the number of employees they manage, the revenue they generate or the size of their offices. They want to create something meaningful, maintain their independence, perhaps earn money from their ideas and, above all, have time to actually live the lives they are working for.
It is an idea being promoted by the American initiative Second Harvest, which works with people who want to shape the next chapter of their lives. In a recent post, its founders describe how they began by deciding what kind of life they wanted to live and then designed a business around it. Not the other way around. It is a simple statement, but it turns much of the traditional understanding of entrepreneurship upside down. And perhaps this is precisely where one of the more interesting transformations in working life is beginning to take shape.
When Success No Longer Means Getting Bigger
For much of the history of modern business, success has been closely associated with growth. A company is expected to expand, hire more people, increase revenue and conquer new markets. An entrepreneur who is satisfied with a small but functioning business is often considered less ambitious than someone determined to expand internationally. In the startup world, this has almost become an article of faith. Growth comes first, profitability perhaps later, and personal freedom somewhere in the distant future, assuming the founder eventually manages to escape the company they have built.
But what if the entire objective is wrong for a large group of people? What if there are entrepreneurs who do not want to build an organisation they must eventually manage, but instead want to create something they personally believe is valuable? People who would rather develop five interesting concepts than administer fifty employees? People who want to work from an apartment in Sofia, a café in Bansko or a small town in Sweden, without feeling any obligation to turn every idea into an international growth company?
This is not necessarily a sign of diminished ambition. It may just as easily be the result of greater self-awareness. After thirty or forty years in working life, many people have had enough time to understand the difference between appearing successful in the eyes of others and actually being satisfied with their own lives. They know what meetings, administration, personnel responsibilities and organisational conflicts cost in time and energy. They have also learned that high turnover does not automatically translate into a high quality of life.
This is where the Second Harvest philosophy becomes interesting. You begin with the life you want and work backwards to design the business. How much money do I actually need to earn? How many hours do I want to work? What kind of people do I want to collaborate with? What do I still genuinely enjoy doing? Which problems would I like to use my experience to solve? These questions are almost provocatively simple in a world where people have long been encouraged to adapt their lives to the demands of work.
At the same time, there is a danger of romanticising this new ideal. Freedom still requires income, and not everyone has a pension, savings or sufficient financial security to experiment for several years. Being able to reject growth is also a privilege. But that does not change the fundamental question: Why must success always be measured by how big something becomes rather than how well it works for the person creating it and the people who use it?
The Revenge of Experience in a Youth-Obsessed Technology World
There is something peculiar about the way entrepreneurship continues to be portrayed across much of the technology industry. The typical founder is young, technically skilled, fast-moving and bursting with ideas. The stories of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg have helped reinforce the impression that groundbreaking innovation almost automatically belongs to the young. But research presents a considerably more complicated picture.
In a large American study published in 2020 in American Economic Review: Insights, researchers from institutions including MIT and Northwestern University examined the ages of founders of successful high-growth businesses. Among the fastest-growing 0.1 percent of new companies, the average founder was approximately 45 years old. The researchers also found that previous experience in the relevant industry was strongly associated with the likelihood of success.
This does not mean that older people are automatically better entrepreneurs, or that a 65-year-old has a greater chance of success than a 25-year-old in every possible business. The study also focused on high-growth American companies, not small independent lifestyle businesses. Nevertheless, it challenges the assumption that youth itself is the decisive competitive advantage.
The OECD has also highlighted the entrepreneurial potential of older generations. In its report The Missing Entrepreneurs 2023, it noted that approximately 17 percent of employed EU citizens aged between 50 and 64 were self-employed in 2022. At the same time, people in this age group were considerably less likely to start new businesses than younger generations. There is therefore an enormous reservoir of experience that is not being fully translated into new entrepreneurial activity.
This raises an important question about what experience actually means. It is not simply a collection of outdated professional skills or an impressive résumé. It involves the ability to understand contexts, recognise connections between apparently unrelated problems, identify patterns in human behaviour and judge which ideas might actually work in the real world. Someone who has spent decades working with complex productions, technology, logistics, organisations or people possesses knowledge that can rarely be reduced to a diploma or professional certificate.
Experience, however, also has a downside. It can produce caution, deeply ingrained habits of thinking and the assumption that one already understands how everything works. This is why curiosity becomes so important. An experienced person who has stopped learning has no automatic advantage. But someone who combines decades of practical knowledge with a continuing willingness to experiment may find themselves in an unusually interesting position to create something new.
AI Is Changing What One Person Can Actually Accomplish
What makes this discussion particularly interesting today is that technology has changed the conditions. Only a few years ago, developing a digital product often required a team of programmers, designers, technical project managers and specialists. Moving from an idea to a working prototype involved costs, delays and dependence on the availability and expertise of other people.
Generative AI has begun to change parts of this process. An independent creator can now use AI to write code, construct user interfaces, develop presentations, analyse information, build digital services and explore ideas that would previously have required significantly greater resources. An OECD research review published in June 2025 describes how generative AI can lower barriers to entrepreneurship and contribute to productivity and innovation, while also emphasising that results vary depending on the task, the user's experience and how the technology is applied.
This distinction matters. AI does not mean that programming expertise, quality assurance or commercial understanding have become unnecessary. A working demonstration is not necessarily a secure and finished product. An elegant user interface does not mean that anyone wants to use the service, and the ability to create ten applications in rapid succession does not mean that any of them will generate a single euro.
What has changed is that it has become considerably easier to investigate whether an idea is worth developing in the first place. And for someone who already possesses substantial practical experience, this may be the real revolution.
It is also the background to my own work with Made by PROTO. After a long professional life in production, events, project management and technical coordination, my ambition is not to build yet another large organisation. I want to combine that experience with AI and modern digital technology to develop concepts, applications and tools capable of solving real problems. Projects such as FRISTEG, a digital support tool for people facing financial difficulties, and SOFIA BELOW, a visualisation of the infrastructure beneath Bulgaria's capital, illustrate these possibilities.
Both projects are part of an ongoing development process in which prototypes, feedback and contact with potential partners represent important steps. There is no reason to confuse positive responses with commercial success at this stage. What is interesting, however, is that ideas which would previously have required a completely different organisation and financing structure can now be explored in practical terms by a single independent creator.
Perhaps the real transformation is not that AI replaces human experience, but that technology makes that experience useful in entirely new ways. Someone with forty years of professional experience does not need to compete with a 25-year-old programmer on the programmer's terms. They can contribute different forms of knowledge, while technology reduces the distance between an idea, its development and its practical realisation.
The Real Challenge Is Not Creating Something – It Is Creating Something Sustainable
There is, however, one question that rarely receives enough attention in the inspirational stories about independent entrepreneurship. If creating digital products has become easier, why should earning money from them automatically become easier as well?
It will not.
As more people gain the ability to create applications, services, images, texts and digital concepts, the supply of these products will also increase. Competition does not disappear because production costs fall. It moves elsewhere. Attention, credibility, distribution and trust may become far more important than the ability to produce something in the first place.
Someone who previously enjoyed a technical competitive advantage because they could build something sophisticated may discover that others can suddenly create a similar solution in a matter of days. This means that value may increasingly lie in understanding users, identifying the right problems, establishing credible relationships and developing solutions that actually work outside the promotional video.
This is where I believe experienced entrepreneurs may have an opportunity. Not by producing the greatest number of ideas, but by being able to judge which ideas genuinely matter. By understanding when a solution should be free for the end user, when it could be licensed to an organisation or when a larger partner would be better equipped to take development forward. That still requires commercial judgement, persistence and a willingness to confront reality, even when reality contradicts what one hoped to discover.
For me, this is a central question within PROTO. I have no need for every project to become a major company. But if an idea has genuine value, there should also be opportunities to build an economically sustainable model around it. This might involve licensing, partnerships, commissioned further development or other forms of compensation that do not require me to personally build and manage an extensive organisation.
The most difficult task may therefore be deciding what not to pursue. When technology makes it possible to create almost anything, the ability to concentrate on what is genuinely needed becomes more important than ever. An independent creator can easily drown in their own possibilities. The freedom to create is not the same as the ability to build something sustainable.
It is also worth remembering that Second Harvest is itself a commercial venture. Its message of freedom and independence forms part of an offering that includes memberships, conversations, resources and events. This does not make the philosophy any less relevant, but it demonstrates that even the story of a freer life requires a functioning economic model behind it. The decisive question is whether the business actually delivers the freedom it promises, both for its creators and for those who pay to participate.
The Second Half of Life Does Not Have to Be a Period of Decline
Perhaps the most provocative aspect of this entire discussion is that it challenges a deeply established model of life. We are expected to educate ourselves, work, pursue careers, accept responsibilities, save money and eventually retire. The later part of life has traditionally been described as a period when we should slow down, make room for younger generations and gradually withdraw from active professional creation.
But why should human creativity follow the same trajectory as a conventional career?
For many people, their 60s may be the first time in their lives when they genuinely have the opportunity to choose what they want to do rather than what they have to do. Their children may have grown up, housing costs may have changed, pension payments may have begun and the need for professional prestige may have diminished. At the same time, their experience remains, together with their curiosity, ideas and perhaps an increasingly powerful awareness that time is not unlimited.
Of course, this is not a universal reality. Many people are forced to continue working for financial reasons, others face health problems, and some simply do not have the opportunity to start again. But for those who do have room to make choices, the second half of life can become something other than a gradual winding down. It can become a period of independent creation in which the experience accumulated during the first professional life is used to build something entirely different.
I do not believe that the entrepreneur of the future will necessarily be older. But I do believe we need to abandon the idea that entrepreneurship primarily belongs to a particular age group, personality type or category of people. It might just as easily involve a retired engineer developing an assistive device, a former teacher creating digital education, a journalist establishing an independent publishing platform or an experienced project manager using AI to turn old and new ideas into functional prototypes.
It will not make everyone a millionaire. Most ideas will probably never become major financial successes. Some will fail completely. Others may create value that is measured less in money than in the problems they solve and the benefits they bring to other people.
But there is something liberating about no longer having to regard every new idea as the beginning of an empire.
Perhaps this is precisely where the next transformation of entrepreneurship begins. Not among people who want to work harder so they might eventually enjoy a better life in the distant future, but among those who have already decided that life should no longer be postponed. People who want to use the knowledge they have accumulated, the technology that is becoming accessible and the time they still have ahead of them to create something meaningful.
And perhaps we should begin measuring the success of these entrepreneurs differently. Not only by how many companies they establish, how much capital they raise or how many employees they have, but also by how much independence they achieve, which problems they actually solve and how well their work fits the lives they want to lead.
That would not be the end of entrepreneurship as we know it. It would be a welcome expansion of what entrepreneurship is allowed to become.
Work less. Create more. Live full.
Sources and Further Reading
Second Harvest – Official Website and The Club
OECD/European Commission (2023): The Missing Entrepreneurs – Older Entrepreneurs
OECD (2025): The Effects of Generative AI on Productivity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship
