I turned forty recently. In advertising, that feels like a confession. The industry skews young, rewards youth, celebrates the new. There's a persistent, mostly unspoken anxiety that runs through agencies once you pass thirty-five: am I still relevant? Do I still understand the audience? Is someone ten years younger about to make me obsolete? These questions sat with me for years. They don't sit with me anymore.
Here is what happened. After fifteen years as a strategy director at independent agencies - the kind of agencies that win awards and lose pitches in equal measure - I found myself between roles. Not fired, not burned out, just in that liminal space where the next thing hasn't revealed itself yet. Most people in this position update their LinkedIn, call their recruiters, and start the circuit. I did something different. I started building.
Not building in the metaphorical sense. Actual products. Real things with URLs that real people could use. I had no coding background. No technical skills beyond basic HTML from the MySpace era. What I had was fifteen years of understanding audiences, a deep conviction about taste and design, and a new tool called Claude Code that let me bridge the gap between ideas and execution without learning to programme.
This isn't a career change
People keep calling this a career change, and I want to push back on that framing. A career change is when you leave one thing and start another. When a lawyer becomes a chef. When a banker becomes a teacher. The old skills stay behind. The new ones start from zero. That isn't what happened here.
What happened is that fifteen years of strategy skills - understanding audiences, finding insights, shaping narratives, knowing what resonates and why - turned out to be directly, practically applicable to building products. I didn't leave strategy behind. I brought it with me. Every product I build starts with the same questions I would ask in any agency brief: Who's this for? What problem does it solve? Why would someone choose this over the alternatives? What should it feel like?
The difference is that now, instead of answering those questions in a presentation and handing the result to someone else to build, I answer them and then build the thing myself. The strategy and the execution happen in the same brain, with the same intent, in the same session. There's no brief handover. No interpretation gap. No game of telephone between the insight and the product. And the result is better for it.
What experience actually gives you
There's a narrative in tech - and increasingly in advertising - that experience is a liability. That it makes you slow, conventional, stuck in old patterns. That the fresh perspective of someone with no baggage is more valuable than the deep perspective of someone who has seen it all before. This narrative is wrong, and it's wrong in specific, measurable ways.
Experience gives you audience intuition. After fifteen years of studying consumers, running focus groups, analysing research, and watching campaigns succeed and fail, I have an instinctive sense for what resonates. Not always right, but far more often right than someone guessing for the first time. When I built the London Pub Guide, I didn't need research to know that the audience wanted atmosphere and opinion, not just addresses and ratings. I knew because I've spent a career understanding what people want from recommendations.
Experience gives you pattern recognition. Every brand problem I worked on, every category I studied, every consumer behaviour I observed - they all sit in a mental database that fires up whenever I encounter a new situation. I can look at a product idea and immediately identify similar patterns from other categories. I can anticipate problems before they arise because I've seen versions of them before. This isn't conservatism. It's intelligence that only accumulates with time.
Experience gives you taste. Taste isn't innate. It's developed through exposure, reflection, and the accumulation of a thousand reference points. After fifteen years of looking at design, advertising, brands, and culture, I have a sense for what's good and what's merely competent that I simply didn't have at twenty-five. I couldn't have built Modern Retro at twenty-five. Not because of the technology, but because I didn't yet have the aesthetic judgment to know what it should feel like.
The myth of the young founder
Silicon Valley loves the young founder story. The twenty-something who dropped out and disrupted an industry. And yes, some of the most important companies were started by young people. But the survivorship bias is enormous. For every young founder who succeeded, there are thousands who failed, partly because they lacked the experience to navigate the complexities of building something real.
Meanwhile, the most interesting products I see being built right now are by people in their thirties and forties. People who have spent a decade or two in an industry, understand it deeply, and then apply that understanding to build something nobody inside the industry thought to build. They aren't disrupting from the outside. They're reimagining from the inside. And that requires experience that no amount of youth or energy can substitute for.
Building at forty
There are practical advantages to building products at forty that nobody talks about. You know what you like and what you don't like. You aren't chasing trends for the sake of it. You have enough life experience to build things that solve real problems, because you've experienced enough real problems. You have the patience to iterate rather than panic. You've seen enough cycles to know that the hype will pass and the substance will remain.
You also have something that's genuinely underrated: you know people. Fifteen years in an industry means fifteen years of relationships. People who will give you honest feedback. People who will share your work. People who understand what you're trying to do because they've been on similar journeys. Your network isn't just a contact list. It's a distribution channel, a feedback loop, and a support system.
The disadvantages are real too. I have a young son and limited time. I don't have the luxury of eighteen-hour days. I have responsibilities that didn't exist at twenty-five. But the constraint of limited time is, counterintuitively, an advantage. It forces focus. It forces prioritisation. It forces you to work on the things that matter rather than the things that are merely interesting. Some of my best product decisions have been things I chose not to build, things I cut because time was scarce and only the essential survived.
The advice I would give
If you're a strategist, or a creative director, or a planner, or anyone in advertising who feels the anxiety of age and relevance - I want to tell you something directly: your experience is the advantage. Not despite the industry changing around you, but because of it.
The tools to build products are now accessible to anyone. AI has removed the technical barrier that used to separate ideas from execution. What hasn't been democratised - what can't be democratised - is taste, judgment, and audience understanding. Those things only come from years of doing the work. They're yours, and they're increasingly rare in a world where everyone can build but few people know what to build.
You don't need to leave advertising. You don't need to rebrand yourself as a "founder" or a "maker" or whatever the current terminology is. You just need to use the skills you already have in a slightly different direction. The pivot isn't ninety degrees. It is maybe five. A small adjustment in trajectory that, over time, takes you somewhere genuinely new without leaving behind everything that got you here.
I'm forty. I have a young son. I live in London. I drink hot chocolate. And I've built fourteen products that people actually use, using skills I spent fifteen years developing in advertising agencies. This isn't a second act. It's the same act, performed on a different stage.
The experience was never the problem. It was always the point.
