Second-career founders

Reading path

• Bootstrapping versus raising over a ten-year horizon

  Most new firms start with little outside money. What Kauffman Firm Survey and federal survival data say about funding choices when the horizon is ten years.

• Encore founders: starting a company after fifty

  What Census Bureau research says about founder age, prior industry experience and prior business ownership, and what a founder past fifty can plan around.

• Founder age and growth: what the Census study of 2.7 million founders found

  Mean founder age rises with how fast firms grow. What a Census Bureau study of 2.7 million founders measured, and what it cannot say about one founder.

• SBIR and STTR as patient capital for research-based companies

  How federal SBIR and STTR awards fund research over years without taking shares, what the 2026 reauthorization changed, and what to ask first.

• Using SBA resource partners: SBDC, SCORE, WBC and VBOC

  Federal business counseling centers, volunteer advisers, women's centers and veteran centers. What each does, who it serves, and how to find one.

• Women and immigrant founders: what the Census and research data show

  Census Bureau counts of women-owned and minority-owned firms, and peer-reviewed research on immigrant entrepreneurship, with the limits of each source.

• Edtech SaaS: considerations before you build

  Questions to settle before you build education software in the United States: student records, children under 13, school official status and web accessibility.

• From client work to a product: productizing a service business

  How a service business can turn repeated client work into a product: what to check about ownership, client data and pricing before the first version ships.

• Joining as a founding team member: what to ask before you commit

  Questions to ask before joining an early company: role, equity, pay, work authorization and exit terms, for people changing careers or countries.

• Legal software: considerations before you build

  Questions to settle before you build legal software: client confidentiality, supervision, privilege, e-signatures and the unauthorized practice of law.

• Part-time to full-time: deciding when to commit

  Moving from a side project to a full commitment is a staged decision. How to write the criteria in advance, and what to leave to your own professionals.

• Second-career founders: turning domain knowledge into a SaaS idea

  Years in an industry give you a problem others cannot see. How to separate what you know from what you assume, and turn it into a testable SaaS idea.

• Three ways to start: an idea, a skill, a problem you have lived

  Founders begin from an idea, a skill or a problem they have lived. This article sets the three starting points side by side and names what each skips.

• Vertical SaaS: depth over breadth

  What vertical SaaS is, how building for one industry changes the product, the sale and the rules you work under, and the trade-offs to weigh before you narrow.