In 1967, Margaret Crane was working as a graphic designer at a pharmaceutical company in New Jersey.
One day, she walked through a lab at work and noticed rows of test tubes sitting over mirrors.
She asked what they were.
Pregnancy tests.
At the time, doctors would send women’s urine samples to the lab.
A red ring would appear in the test tube if the woman was pregnant.
The result went back to the doctor.
The doctor told the woman.
The whole thing could take up to two weeks.
Margaret remembers thinking: That’s it? That’s all it takes?
And then: Why can’t a woman just do this herself?
So she went home.
Grabbed a plastic paperclip box.
Glued a reflective strip to the bottom.
Dropped in a test tube.
Added a pipette.
If the red ring appeared, it reflected clearly in the mirror.
That was it.
Simple. Private. Fast.
She called it Predictor.
The company’s reaction: absolutely not.
When Margaret showed the idea to executives, they shut it down.
They worried doctors would lose business.
They worried women would panic.
They worried women would get abortions…
In other words: they worried about women knowing.
Organon quietly filed a patent in her name in 1969, then shelved the idea.
Years passed.
Eventually, the concept made its way to the company’s parent organization in the Netherlands.
They approved a small test market.
Margaret wasn’t invited to the meeting where new prototypes were being discussed.
But she showed up anyway.
The other designers had brought prototypes covered in pink plastic, flowers, decorative details.
Margaret put hers on the table. It was clean and minimal.
The marketing lead picked it up and said, essentially: this one.
Predictor launched in Canada in 1971.
The ads promised something radical for the time: Find out. At home. In private.
The U.S. took longer.
FDA approval didn’t come until 1976.
The test finally launched there in 1977, ten years after Margaret built her first prototype.
By then, multiple pharmaceutical companies had licensed the product.
Her name was on the patent. The money wasn’t.
Like most corporate inventions, anything created on the job belonged to the company.
Margaret signed away her rights for $1.
And she never even received the dollar.
For decades, her role in creating the home pregnancy test was barely mentioned.
Then, in 2012, the New York Times ran a piece on the history of pregnancy tests.
Without naming her.
She was reading it at breakfast.
That’s when she decided to finally tell her story.
Source: Wikipedia
At what age should you start a company?
This is a question I keep hearing.
Not how to fundraise.
Not what market to enter.
But when.
For years, the startup ecosystem has implicitly answered this question for us.
The dominant narrative says: start young.
The idea that if you haven’t built something transformative by your early 30s, you’ve missed your window.
But the data, and the lived experiences of founders, tell a very different story.
One of the most comprehensive studies on entrepreneurship and age analyzed millions of U.S. founders, linking tax records, employment data, venture outcomes, and firm growth over time.
Conclusion: the average age of founders behind the fastest-growing startups is 45.
And across sectors, the probability of building a high-growth company increases with age.
A 50-year-old founder is nearly twice as likely to build a top-performing startup as a 30-year-old, holding everything else constant.
And it’s because certain advantages compound over time:
industry-specific experience
pattern recognition
credibility with customers and partners
managerial judgment earned through failure
financial and social capital
In fact, founders with three or more years of experience in the exact industry they start in are more than 2x as likely to build a top-tier company compared to outsiders.
So yes, there are extraordinary outliers who succeed very young.
But even among iconic founders, the most transformative work often comes later.
After all, Apple’s iPhone launched when Steve Jobs was in his 50s…
Can you/should you be a founder and a parent?
A few of my LinkedIn followers asked me to tackle this question.
So I did the only thing that felt right: I asked founders who’ve actually lived it!
Here’s what I heard…
Being a founder when the baby is very young is hard. Like, really hard.
Founders who became parents during the newborn phase were very open about how intense it is.
Little sleep. Big emotions. A feeling of being pulled in two directions.
One founder told me about having to constantly choose between work trips and staying home with her newborn. She said there was some guilt either way.
Another shared how she once had to pump milk during a meeting.
But all of them said something that surprised me: becoming a parent didn’t make them care less about their company.
With young kids, time becomes limited… and that changes how you work
Once kids get a little older, founders told me they stopped having endless time to throw at work.
And strangely, that made them better at it.
They became more focused. More decisive. More comfortable saying no.
Work still happens. It’s just sharper and more intentional.
Waiting until kids are older can help, but it’s not “easy mode”
Some founders waited until their kids were teenagers or grown before starting companies.
They appreciated the stability and flexibility.
But instead of worrying about sleep schedules, they worried about presence. About missed dinners or moments they couldn’t get back.
Basically, there is no perfect timing.
But what matters is:
having support (partners, family, teams)
being honest about limits
Closing thought: being a parent doesn’t make founding easier… but being a parent does make you better at building under uncertainty!
Liquidation preferences: how you can sell your company and still get… nothing
Liquidation preferences decide who gets paid first when your startup exits.
Spoiler: it’s usually not the founders or employees.
They’re designed to protect investors.
Which is fine.
But misunderstood liquidation preferences are one of the reasons some “successful exits” feel… financially traumatic.
Simple example:
An investor puts in $50M with a 2x liquidation preference
At exit, they get $100M first… before founders, employees, or anyone holding common stock sees a cent
1. Non-Participating Preferred
Investors must choose one: take their preference or convert to common and take their % of the exit.
They’ll pick whatever pays more.
Example: $10M invested for 10% ownership. Company exits for $60M.
Preference = $10M v.s. Convert to common = $6M
Investor takes $10M. No double dipping.
2. Participating Preferred
Investors get their preference first and then their pro-rata share of what’s left
:/
As you can imagine: very founder unfriendly…
So if you’re a founder, ask these before you get excited about valuation:
Is this participating or non-participating?
Is there a cap on participation?
Are there cumulative dividends or other kicker clauses?
Decrypting VC (meme edition)
VCs: we invest in PEOPLE
Also VCs...
“We’d want to see customer validation.”
Founder signs customers.
“Great. Are they paying?”
Founder gets them to pay.
“Nice. Now, just need to see a bit more traction.”
Founder gets traction.
“Nice. Let’s look at retention.”
Founder improves retention.
“Cool. What about LTV?”
Founder: you invest in people, huh? ...
If you’re working on a pitch deck and would like thoughtful feedback, I’d love to help.
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