These 40-something founders say they have something the AI kids don’t

Amir Elaguizy has books about neural networks from the ’60s.

The 42-year-old serial entrepreneur doesn’t believe that being younger means you’re more AI-native. Elaguizy emailed with Geoffrey Hinton, the “Godfather of AI,” before Hinton started working at Google. He’s been learning about AI’s roots for decades.

“For me, AI is a continuum,” he said. “I watched it the whole time. It’s not like it came online for me in 2022.”

For Elaguizy, his age is a perk. It’s a sign to investors that he’s serious and knows how to build a business. (Elaguizy sold his first company to Zynga in 2011.) It also shows that he’s dogged, he said, and not taking his earlier cash-out and retiring.

These days, his age cohort wants in. Elaguizy said that many of his friends were coming out of retirement to launch new AI startups. “You have all these old guys who are not just back at it, but back at the keyboard, typing code,” he said.

Elaguizy called it a “vibe shift,” something Garry Tan would likely agree with. The Y Combinator CEO posted that we were entering an “age of the unc.” (“Unc,” for those unfamiliar with Gen Z parlance, is a shortening of “uncle” to call someone old.) Tan expected a new class of unicorn founders in their 40s.

It’s a bit ironic, given Y Combinator’s declining average founder age. In 2025, one cohort had an average age of 24. That’s a hallmark of the AI era: founders in their early 20s who pop Zyns and troll on X. Indeed, Business Insider once called it a “youthquake.”

But these founders say that their age is a benefit, not a bug.

‘The age of the unc’

Michal Cieplinski described AI as a reset — one that affected both older and younger founders.

“We had to learn Claude Code at the same time,” he said. “It’s not like a 21-year-old kid had a start on me. No! We all had the same starting point.”

Cieplinski is the 48-year-old founder of HiJenny, an AI home manager. He referenced the internet discourse about “taste.” The thinking goes: in the age of AI, technical skills will be less important than your sense of judgment.

With age, you have a better sense of taste, Cieplinski said. “I’d add to it: with age, you have persistence.”

Are older founders actually experiencing a renaissance? Throughout my chats, founders pointed to the ages of the CEOs of the AI labs. Sam Altman is 41. Dario Amodei is 43. They’re not college dropouts sleeping on futons.

Stanford University’s Venture Capital Initiative compared the average age at founding between a random sample and unicorns, or companies worth over $1 billion. The average age of a unicorn founder was 39.9 in the 2020s, compared with 35 in the random sample.

The average founding age of a unicorn is also going up: in the 2010s, it was 35.4.

Even if the data suggests older founders are more closely associated with unicorn status, it’s not clear that investors are eager to bet on them.

Ismail Pelaseyed, the 40-year-old cofounder of the cybersecurity startup Superagent, said he felt the push in Silicon Valley: “You have to be young, straight out of Harvard or Stanford.”

Pelaseyed was 39 when he went through Y Combinator. He said he felt like a father to many of his ultra-young batchmates.

“I think that most venture capitalists want someone young, because it takes a long time to build something big,” he said. After all, Mark Zuckerberg was 19 when het met Peter Thiel, Facebook’s first outside investor.

Elaguizy disagrees. Sure, there’s lots of money in the AI market right now, opening doors for founders with little experience. But what about when the going gets rough?

“In an environment where capital is less free, us old guys are a little bit more attractive,” he said.

Does age equal experience?

Both of Carmen Li’s jobs require deep technical experience.

Li is the 40-year-old CEO of two GPU-related businesses: Compute Exchange and Silicon Data. While a 20-year-old may be able to kick-start a social app — especially with the ease of modern AI tools — it’s harder to work on the compute side, she said.

Still, that doesn’t mean she benefits from her age. Li said that she benefits from her experience — and that the two aren’t necessarily tied.

“You can be a 40-year-old who’s done nothing with your life,” she said. “You’ll be a worse startup founder than a 20-year-old. 40 is just a number.”

There’s one demographic that Li said did particularly well in their 40s: women.

Many women founders leave the industry in their 30s to have kids, Li said, before returning to entrepreneurship in their 40s. (Li also clocked the subtle gendering in Tan’s post, which referenced the “gentleman unicorn founder.”)

Mo Shaikh is a fan of older founders, precisely because of their experience. “They draw from all these lessons that they’ve learned,” he said.

That doesn’t mean that they’re serial entrepreneurs, the 40-year-old cofounder and general partner of Maximum Frequency Venture said. Rather, he’s looking for people with deep technical knowledge in their field.

“There are many founders out there that don’t know that they’re founders yet,” he said.

The founders I spoke to quibbled about whether it was a better or worse time to be a mid-40s entrepreneur. Li said it’s always been a good time to be older. “They’re just not the sexy story,” she said. “They’re regular people.”

But Elaguizy was firm about his “vibe shift.” The industry was embracing a “what’s old is new again” mentality, he said.

“For every 22-year-old in a hoodie, I’m seeing a couple of 40-year-olds not in hoodies,” he said.