“7 Over 70”

About 15% of the U.S. population is over the age of 65 and older. I(gulp) am one of them. And 14 months from now – kinehora – I will be gliding into a new cohort: those who are 70 and older.

Getting up there in age brings with a lot of peculiar emotions. I don’t feel old. I don’t (think I) look old. And yet, thar’ she blows: 70. And, despite the safety in numbers of going through this with the rest of the Baby Boomer colossus, it actually does kinda sorta blow. Who wants to be irrelevant, out of play? Which in truth, at least in some respects, we kinda sorta are. Most of us, anyway.

All this said, the best antidote to the geezering process is to keep moving, stay engaged. Eventually this antidote stops being quite so effective. But I certainly hope that in my case that will take a while. I hope a good long while. My age peers, and even those who are staring down 80 rather than 70, seem to be in pretty fine fettle. Maybe 70 really is the new 50. Or whatever.

Anyway, for now, I keep on working (a bit), volunteering (a bit more), and walking my 4-5 miles a day.

But I’m a big nothing, geezer-wise, compared to the “7 under 70” that Scott Kirsner listed in The Boston Globe the other day. When stacked up against them, I might as well be in a nursing home, looking forward to the weekly bingo game and hoping that there’s red jello for dessert rather than green.

Kirsner pulled his honorees together in honor of this week’s Forbes Under 30 Summit, which is being held in Boston.

…while people are constantly throwing parties for the Under 30s (and occasionally the Under 40s), it’s hard to find rosters that spotlight the septuagenarians and octogenarians who are still hustlin’ every day. So I wanted to put together a “7 Over 70” list to honor some of the veteran scientists, techies, entrepreneurs, and investors who still contribute daily to the innovation economy in Boston.

Joe Caruso is an unspecified somewhere “over 70.” As an angel investor, he’s been a pretty good picker, having backed HubSpot and Carbonite. And he’s still on the lookout, taking “about 30 face-to-face meetings a week.” 30 FTF meetings a week? I need a nap just thinking about it. And a bowl of red jello when I wake up.

David Friend is 70 and CEO of Wasabi, his “seventh startup  company since college.” Wasabi is Japanese horseradish – that nasty blob of green stuff that comes with sushi, and is only tolerable when swooshed around in soy sauce – and, in this case, a cloud data storage service. No surprise, given that a prior startup was Carbonite, the cloud backup service. And a quite good one: I’ve used it for years.

Sherwin Greenblatt sounds like an older guy. And he sort of is. He’s 77. He spent his career at Bose and ended up as the company’s president. He’s been out of that game for a while, so he had nothing to do with the expensive Bose noise-canceling headphones I just bought to combat the gut-reno going on next door. An MIT grad, Sherwin mentors “the next generation of MIT entrepreneurs.”

Phillip Sharp was a founder of Biogen and in 1993, when he was just a nipper of 49, he won the Nobel Prize for Medicine. He’s still on the MIT faculty, doing research on cancer cell growth. And sitting on biotech boards. He’s 74.

Michael Stonebraker – a much better name than Wasabi – is behind a few startups, including Tamr, a data management firm. “Running complex analytics on huge data sets is the Wild West,” he said. I’m quite sure it is the Wild West, given all those clicks and eyeball flickers and everything else about our day to day nanosecond to nanosecond behavior that’s being grabbed from somewhere and stored – no doubt in the cloud – awaiting analysis. So that eventually an ad for a nursing home and red jello can pop up in my Twitter feed. Thanks, Michael. And happy birthday next week, when you turn 75.

Does he ever think about slowing down? “I kind of wonder how much longer I’m going to be viable,” he admits. “But so far, experience counts for a lot. I can get my papers published, and I have interesting ideas that other people find valuable. I’m going to continue with Plan A until the real world tells me I’m not competitive.”

Alison Taunton-Rigby, like Joe Caruso, cops to being “over 70.” She’s one of the pioneering women to reach a senior position in biotech, including at Biogen. (This stuff sure does have a way of interlocking, doesn’t it?) She stays active on corporate, charitable, and scientific advisory boards.

At 79, George Whitesides is heading towards being part of next year’s “8 over 80” list. George runs a Harvard lab that focuses on chemistry and materials science. He’s also an advisor to local sciency-startups, “including Soft Robotics (robotic hands that can pick up many different types of objects) and Lyra Therapeutics (tackling chronic inflammation of the sinuses).” Who knew that chronic inflammation of the sinuses was a thing?

Three runners up didn’t quite make the cut: Mathsoft founder Allen Razdow (71), Jit Saxena (72), an early investor in Pinterest, and MIT’s Ed Roberts (82) – the only person mentioned in the article that I ever laid eyes on. I don’t think I ever took a course with him when I was at Sloan, but I definitely saw him in action and believe I met him back in my day.

Anyway, I keep going back and forth about whether to completely hang it up on the work end, if not now than next December when I hit the Big 7-0. But I still sort of get a kick out of getting paid to do something I enjoy (i.e., writing; never bothered to even try to monetize Pink Slip).

I’ll never make anyone’s “7 over 70” list, that’s for sure. And nothing I work on will do as much good for society as something that tackles the problem of chronic sinus inflammation.” But, what the hell, why not keep going? Can’t hurt…