About Launch Key

The Launch Key is a weekly newsletter for executives and senior professionals building something of their own after a corporate career. It's written by Rob Norris, it's free, and it's been arriving on Tuesday mornings since September 2023. About 18,000 people read it.

Not the MIDI controller - different Launch Key.

The mean age of the founders of the fastest-growing new ventures in America is 45. A fifty-year-old founder is roughly twice as likely as a thirty-year-old to build a top-growth company. That's from Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship, a study of US Census data by researchers at MIT, Northwestern, Penn and the Census Bureau, published in the American Economic Review in 2020.

The Launch Key exists in that gap. You are not too late. You're loaded — with experience, with pattern recognition, with decades of knowing what works. The corporate merry-go-round taught you everything. This is about using it.

Who It’s For

People somewhere between 45 and 65 who have done the work, built the career, and found themselves asking what's next — and whether the answer might be something they own rather than something they're hired into.

Some are still employed and building an exit on nights and weekends. Some have already left and are assembling a career portfolio out of consulting, products, and projects instead of another job title. Some are launching a first company at fifty-five, which is a far more ordinary thing to do than the business press lets on.

What they have in common: decades of pattern recognition, a low tolerance for nonsense, and no interest whatsoever in being told to hustle harder.

What’s In It

One email a week, usually under 1,200 words, on some combination of:

• Digital products — building and selling things that don't trade your time for money

• AI and tools — what actually works for a solo operator, in plain English

• Career portfolios — the alternative to one more linear job

• Encore careers — fractional work, consulting, advising, and what each really pays

• Innovation and product development — validating an idea cheaply, before you build it

• The honest stuff — what failed, what it cost, and what it taught

No hustle-culture language. No income screenshots. No 10X anything.

Who Writes It

Rob Norris has spent nearly four decades in digital technology — building companies that made online healthcare understandable, banking simpler, and data useful. Along the way: a Fortune 500 exit, National Science Foundation grants, published patents, a SXSW award, tens of millions in digital work sold, and a respectable collection of expensive mistakes.

He is not finished, which is rather the point.

The newsletter occasionally features guest writers from the same stage of life — among them George Pillari, former Alvarez & Marsal partner and co-founder of Truven Health Analytics; and Patrick McLean, award-winning novelist and ghostwriter of three business books.

The Details

• Published every Tuesday, 6:00 AM Eastern

• Free. No paywall.

• Since September 2023

• Readers: roughly 18,000

• Written by Rob Norris

• Archive: every issue, free to read

• Sponsorships: contact Rob