For these entrepreneurs, educators, athletes and dreamers, age has no limits.
By Maggie McGrath, Forbes Staff
When Miriam Rivera was born in 1964 to a pair of Puerto Rican migrant farmers in Dunkirk, New York, women in the United States could not get a credit card or mortgage without a male co-signer. Although the Civil Rights Act was signed that year—which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin—Wall Street was still three years away from seeing its first female member of the New York Stock Exchange.
Sixty years later, Rivera is thriving as the cofounder and CEO of Ulu Ventures, a Palo Alto-based venture capital firm with $400 million in assets under management and a portfolio that includes ten current or recently-exited unicorns. Rivera says that her personal journey, from a free-lunch kid learning English from watching Sesame Street to Silicon Valley power broker, is reflected in her investing philosophy.
“I’m really looking for those long shots,” Rivera says, “because in a power-law distributed world, it's really the few that will generate a lot of profitability.”
Rivera is one of the 200 all-new members of our fourth annual 50 Over 50 list—a collection of women who, like Rivera, have careers that are hitting powerful peaks during life’s second half. Produced in partnership with MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski and her Know Your Value initiative, the 50 Over 50 highlights women doing their most innovative, impactful work at 50, 60, 70 and beyond.
The list is divided into four broad categories—impact, innovation, investment and lifestyle. Within each are dozens of sub-sectors, including architecture, fintech, food— even robotics.
Peggy Johnson, the 62-year-old CEO of Agility Robotics, an Oregon-based startup that has raised $180 million in venture financing, has forged a unique “over 50” career: She was Satya Nadella’s first hire when he took over Microsoft in 2014 and became known as the company’s “chief dealmaker” after she led the company’s $26 billion acquisition of Linkedin two years later. From 2020 until last year, she ran augmented reality company Magic Leap. Her new outfit makes humanoid robots, which are easier to integrate into existing workplaces. This summer, Agility deployed its first robot with GXO Logistics (a spinoff of supply chain giant XPO) to handle repetitive tasks like moving products onto conveyors.
Like Rivera, Johnson points to her upbringing—she’s the second-youngest in a family of 15 kids—as a key to her success. “It was hard anyway to get a word in edgewise, as you might imagine,” she says. “And so I became a listener, and that has been one of the areas that I was able to leverage in my management roles over the years and then my CEO roles.”
Dawn Staley, who headlines this year’s 50 Over 50: Impact category for her work on and off the basketball court, first made a name for herself as a point guard at the University of Virginia and then professionally for a string of WNBA teams including the Charlotte Sting and the Houston Comets. She’s in the Hall of Fame—as in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, not just the WNBA Hall of Fame (though she’s in that, too)—and for a while, couldn’t imagine leaving her playing days behind. Now, at 54, she has realized that her record of excellence as a player is helping her teach the next generation of basketball talent. Staley has become one of the most successful coaches in the NCAA, having guided the University of South Carolina Gamecocks to three national championships since she took over as head coach in 2008. The most recent title, which she notched in April, capped a 38-0 perfect season.
“Coaching is my second skin,” she says. “It’s exactly what I’m supposed to be doing.”
The 50 Over 50 is the culmination of a five-month research and reporting process that includes vetting and judging from outside experts. We started in March by asking the general public for recommendations—an annual exercise that has, over the last four years, resulted in thousands of nominations—then supplemented and trimmed that list using the expertise of the Know Your Value team and Forbes beat reporters. The result: a collection of nearly 500 semifinalists.
To cull that group down to the final 200 we asked some tough questions: What are your greatest “Over 50” accomplishments? Did you step into a new or more powerful role later in life? Did you make a big pivot? Are you achieving at scale? Helping us assess the answers to these questions were seven judges, all 50 Over 50 alumni: venture capitalist Theresia Gouw, AnitaB.org president and CEO Brenda Darden Wilkerson, and five others you can read about here.
Once the judges’ picks were in, the Forbes and Know Your Value teams went through another round of debate, fact-checking and tire-kicking. The payoff from all this work is a collection of inspiring women who understand that age and experience can be the best tools for success—and that, ultimately, there is no deadline for becoming who you are meant to be.
“The reason why I think this is extraordinary is because when I was young, I always wanted to be in that 30 Under 30,” says filmmaker Ava DuVernay. “I never was. And I thought, ‘Oh, my chance to be in one of those cool things has passed.’ But look at me now: I'm 50 Over 50! It's fantastic.”
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