Duncan Hines didn't start over at 56. He cashed in thirty years of notes.  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌

October 13, 2026   |   Read online Your first career was the R&D Thirty-one late-career founders, one pattern: almost none of them started over. In partnership with Welcome back to the Launch Key 🚀  One of the first principles of this newsletter is that older entrepreneurs have better success metrics. We just know stuff. I’ve written about it on multiple occasions and in July gave you the numbers: the most successful founders start, on average, at 45. (Missed it? Old Folks Rule.) Numbers tell you that you can. They don't tell you how. So this week: a few people behind the numbers, and the one thing nearly all of them had in common. Let's get into it. Read online Gmail users may wish to read online since some parts may be clipped. Comment below and let me know if we’re on the right track. Table of Contents Pull to Eject 1. They kept notes 2. They knew the industry from the inside 3. They'd seen how it breaks Why the stories matter more than the stat Your move Old School Wisdom Modern Tools Free Knowledge Recommendations Visual Crapshoot Pull to Eject Duncan Hines spent most of his working life as a traveling salesman for a Chicago printing company. Decades on the road. Thousands of meals in towns he'd never seen before. And he took notes. Where the kitchen was clean. Where the pie was worth the detour. Where you should never, ever order the fish. In 1935, he and his wife sent friends a list of 167 favorite restaurants instead of Christmas cards. The requests for copies wouldn't stop. The next year, at 56, he published Adventures in Good Eating. Within a couple of decades his name was on cake mix boxes. It still is. He didn't start over in his mid-50s. He cashed in thirty years of field research. I've been collecting stories like his on LinkedIn for a few years and have shared them as #olderpreneur. Thirty-one people and counting. Read them back to back and a pattern jumps out: Almost none of them started over. They started from. Their first career wasn't the thing they escaped. It was their personal R&D. That R&D shows up in three forms. See which one sounds like you. 1. They kept notes Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote a farm column for the Missouri Ruralist for more than a decade. Chickens, household advice, small-town life. Nobody would have called it a literary career. Then, at 65, Little House in the Big Woods came out. The column years were where she found her voice, her readers and her discipline. The material she'd been carrying her whole life. Hines had restaurant notes. Wilder had columns. What have you been writing down for twenty years without calling it anything? 2. They knew the industry from the inside Morris Chang spent 25 years at Texas Instruments, rising to run its worldwide semiconductor business. He was passed over for CEO. A few years later, at 55, he founded Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company on an idea only an insider would bet on: chip designers would happily outsource manufacturing to a company that never competed with them. Plenty of people called it a niche. TSMC now makes most of the world's most advanced chips. Several of you sent me the Wall Street Journal piece on Chang. Its best line: he wasn't successful despite his age. He was successful because of it. The Acquired interview below is longform fantastic insight directly from Chang. TSMC founder Morris Chang Outsiders see an industry's products. Insiders see where it's stuck. 3. They'd seen how it breaks In the early 1980s, cheap Japanese quartz watches were flattening the Swiss watch industry. Swiss banks hired a consultant named Nicolas Hayek to tell them how to wind down its two biggest watchmakers. Hayek had spent decades inside struggling companies. He told the banks no: merge them, fix them, and fight back on price with a cheap, fun Swiss watch. He was in his mid-50s. The result became the Swatch Group, one of the largest watch companies in the world. David Duffield learned the hard way. Oracle took PeopleSoft, the company he'd co-founded, after an 18-month hostile bid. Within months, at 64, he co-founded Workday. Same customers. Same problem. Rebuilt for the cloud, with every lesson from the last fight. Scar tissue can be a business plan, if you read it right. Why the stories matter more than the stat The data says you're right on time. It's true, and I'll keep citing it. But a statistic is an average of people who aren't you. The stories show the mechanism. Hines, Wilder, Chang, Hayek, Duffield — none of them got lucky at 55. They'd been doing the work for thirty years. They just hadn't put their own name on it yet. You've got the same raw material. Probably more than you think. Your move Three questions. Ten minutes. Write the answers down — that's the point. What have you been taking notes on for years, formally or not? What do you know about your industry that outsiders don't — and wouldn't believe? What have you watched break up close that you know how to fix? Whichever answer comes fastest is probably your R&D. What will you do with it? Now go launch something 🚀  ❝   Don't look back. You're not going that way.   Bob Parsons, founded GoDaddy at 47 and PXG at 65 Old School Wisdom Peter Mark Roget was a London physician who started keeping lists of words, grouped by meaning, in 1805. He kept at it on and off for nearly fifty years. In 1852, at 73, he published them as Roget's Thesaurus. It has never gone out of print. He didn't set out to build a product. He built a habit, then noticed it was a product. Your files are full of things like this: the onboarding checklist you wrote for new hires, the pricing model you keep reusing, the way you size up a deal in ten minutes. One of them may be a thesaurus waiting for a publisher. Modern Tools Readwise — your notes, resurfaced. It pulls your highlights from Kindle, Apple Books, articles and PDFs into one place, then emails you a handful each morning so they come back around. Years of reading stop disappearing into a shelf. If notes are your R&D, this is the lab notebook. Readwise: Get the most out of what you read Easily revisit and learn from your highlights and annotations. Readwise   Free Knowledge Paul Tasner's TED talk, under ten minutes. After 40 years in manufacturing and supply chain, he was let go at 64. Two years later he started a company making biodegradable packaging from waste. Insider knowledge, second act. Plus the best line in the genre: "I have shoes older than some of the entrepreneurs I'm competing against." How I became an entrepreneur at 66 It's never too late to reinvent yourself. Take it from Paul Tasner -- after working continuously for other people for 40 years, he founded his own start-up at age 66. And he's not alone. As he shares in this short, funny and inspirational talk, seniors are increasingly indulging their entrepreneurial instincts -- and seeing great success.   Every headline satisfies an opinion. Except ours. Remember when the news was about what happened, not how to feel about it? 1440's Daily Digest is bringing that back. Every morning, they sift through 100+ sources to deliver a concise, unbiased briefing — no pundits, no paywalls, no politics. Just the facts, all in five minutes. For free. Read the newsletter trusted by 4.5 million fact-seekers. Recommendations 🚏 The Cautionary : Learn to challenge conventional wisdom. 📕 MGMT Playbook : Practical management insights straight to your inbox every Wednesday. 🏢 Retirepreneur : Your guide to turning decades of experience into profitable consulting, coaching, or course businesses, without risking your retirement security. 🗃️ Dealroom Business Success Uncovered : Learn directly from billionaire entrepreneurs on how to grow a business. Join a community of 2,000+ innovators. 🧾 Redefining Retirement : Too Young to Retire, Too Old To Take Orders? Yeah, Me Too. Visual Crapshoot   You've Spent 30 Years Building Expertise. It's Time to Turn It Into Income That Works for You. The complete framework for professionals 50+ who want to build multiple revenue streams without quitting their job or betting everything on a startup. 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