Nine years ago, a few days before Christmas, I was a director at a company in San Francisco, and I was called into a meeting that was already in progress. That meeting turned out to be my exit interview. I was 64 years old at the time. It wasn't completely unexpected. I signed a pile of papers and left the company.
So, 40 plus years of employment was over. I had a good reputation and background. Retirement was not a choice for me. I wanted to do something. And then an idea came into my mind, born from my concern for our environment. I wanted to build my own business, designing and producing biodegradable(可生物降解的)packaging from waste. This is called clean technology, and it was really meaningful to me. It could help reduce billions of pounds of single-use plastic packaging wasted each year.
Five years later, I'm delighted and proud to share with you that our income has doubled every year and we have no debt. Meanwhile, I have a wonderful partner, and we've won more than 20 awards for the work that we've done.
And I am doing the most rewarding and meaningful work of my life right now. But what I really long for is to find other first-time entrepreneurs(企业家)who are my age. I want to connect with them.
So I want to do something about that in a few years. I want us to start talking more about people who don't become entrepreneurs until they are seniors. And then connecting all of them across industries, regions and countries—building a community.
