The 2025 Founder
Being young is not enough
Photo by Yan Krukau
The 2025 founder prototype is over 50, overqualified — and on fire.
The Valley VCs hate this idea. But let’s be real: if AI is turning software development into a commodity, then raw coding skill is no longer a powerful edge.
Value will shift to people with deep expertise, sharp instincts, trust — and community.
👉 I see this every week on my podcast, where I talk with biotech founders changing the way we validate and deliver new treatments. On the last show, I interviewed Orr Inbar, CEO of QuantHealth, who’s helping pharma teams select better drugs and optimize study designs using predictive modeling.
The kindergarten teacher
This week, I went to the Land of Israel Museum in Ramat Aviv for the Miluim-Tech event. Over 400 people were there — a mix of combat reservists and tech executives who had mentored them over the past few months. An amazing group that symbolizes the strength and resilience of Israeli innovation.
On the way back on the train, I sat across from a woman cutting pieces of colored felt. She placed them on a flat green sheet — some looked like trees, others houses.
I asked, “Are you a kindergarten teacher?”
She smiled. “Yes. Children in my class get a kit on their birthday. They love sewing.”
“What ages?” I asked.
“It’s an anthroposophic kindergarten,” she said. “I have them from age 4 to 6.”
We kept talking after we got off the train. We were going in the same direction. We walked and talked.
She told me her students spend most of their time outside, playing in the sandbox. They run around constantly, although she does have a few chairs and tables for quieter moments.
“That’s beautiful,” I said. “If I were the World Education Minister, I’d make Tai Chi mandatory from age 2. By fifth grade, they’d be masters. And we’d have world peace.”
She laughed. “You have my vote. I totally agree. We were born to move.”
That’s the heart of this essay. The 2025 founder is likely over 45. They have deep domain expertise (say, in clinical trials) and are learning to wield AI-assisted development.
But expertise and tools aren’t enough.
You need community. And you need movement.
Just like a Waldorf-style kindergarten.
Expertise (The Teacher)
What you know today is shaped by decades of experience. You remember your wins and selectively forget your losses. You know that a clinical protocol is an unstructured PDF full of technical language that often bears little relation to the data model of the actual trial.
You chalk up your successes to skill. And your failures to people who got in the way.
Most of what we know about workflows in any industry isn’t documented online. It’s tribal knowledge, passed from supervisor to employee, from manager to supervisor, from senior leader to line manager.
It’s not in the AI models because it was never on the web.
That’s why people over 45 are valuable. Not because they can do a job.
But because they know how to do it.
Community (The Kindergarten)
When you’re over 45 and making good money, you can choose to unretire and build something new from your expertise.
In a large corporation, it’s unlikely. But not impossible. More likely, you’ll get caught in the next RIF.
In a small group, there’s low risk and high upside if you can build something fast using AI dev tools.
You can create a simple internal application using Bolt or Lovely in just a few days. Your immediate team becomes your first user base — your community. They’ll tell you what’s working, what’s broken, and what’s worth keeping.
Your little community is your product-market fit.
This isn’t new.
Back in the 90s at Intel Jerusalem, HR needed a recruitment system but had no budget or buy-in for Oracle HR. Pnina, our ERS, mentioned it to me.
I brought it up with my boss Uri.
“If you don’t need to spend any money,” he said, “and can build it in a few days, go for it.”
I found a spare Intel desktop, downloaded Informix and its development tools, and within a week, Pnina had her recruitment management system.
Once you step outside your company and want to build something larger than a single-user tool, you need a broader community.
You need a community that will:
Love it
Pay you for it
Debug it
Tell the world about it
Just like that kindergarten:
The kids love to sew.
The parents pay for it.
The kids give instant feedback.
And they talk about it to their friends.
Movement (The Joy of the Sandbox)
“You don’t stop running because you get old, you get old because you stop running.”
— Christopher McDougall, Born to Run
That book tells the story of the Tarahumara, an Indigenous group living in Mexico’s Copper Canyons. They’re known for running hundreds of miles over rugged terrain, often barefoot, with joy.
McDougall begins with his own injury-plagued running journey and ends up exploring ultrarunning, barefoot mechanics, and human endurance.
Our educational system was built for the Industrial Age — designed to mass-produce obedient workers.
We’ve modernized teaching, but we still shape students to fit chairs.
That’s why the Waldorf-style teacher keeps her kids outside and in the sandbox.
The 2025 founder needs to move. For three reasons:
Visibility. If you don’t move, your community won’t notice you. The human brain is wired to track motion and ignore the still. Online, this is 1000x more true.
Physical energy. Walk, run, bike, meet people, talk with them. Movement oxygenates your brain and unlocks ideas. Conversation debugs your thoughts. It’s better together — whether in a WeWork or walking home from the train.
Mental growth. You have to move intellectually. Challenge your assumptions, rewire your thinking, confront your biases — even (especially) the ones that feel personal.
Outro
In 2025, founders need more than expertise.
You need a community that sees you, supports you, challenges you, and spreads your work.
And you need to move — not just launch, but move: physically, mentally, and spiritually.
Because movement is what draws people in.
As Christopher McDougall writes in Born to Run:
“The reason we race isn’t so much to beat each other... but to be with each other.”
We don’t move to win alone.
We move to build something worth doing — together.
🎧 Want to hear how this plays out in the real world?
Check out my conversation with Orr Inbar of QuantHealth on the podcast.
We dive into how their predictive platform helps pharma select better drugs and optimize trials — a masterclass in turning domain expertise into value.
→ Listen here
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Once a week, I host people changing the life science industry in drug development, clinical operations and real-world data.
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