If you're building a company, it's easy to feel that everything depends on getting this one right. As one founder told me: 'I keep wondering whether I'm building the right company or just using all my energy on my only chance.' Startup culture has given us extraordinary stories. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg have become the archetype of entrepreneurial success: build young, build fast and change the world.

That's encouraged us to think of entrepreneurship as a race against time. Yet the evidence suggests otherwise. Research by Pierre Azoulay and colleagues, analysing millions of new ventures in the US, found that the founders of the fastest-growing companies are typically much older than popular culture would have us believe.

In fact, entrepreneurs in their forties are significantly more likely to build high-growth businesses than founders in their twenties. For me, the Azoulay research points to something much bigger than the age of successful founders. As more of us can expect to work into our seventies and beyond, starting a business becomes less of a once-in-a-lifetime gamble and more of an opportunity that more people can take over the course of a much longer working life.

In this longer life, multi-stages can emerge. Here is how it could look: start a business more than once; spend a decade inside a larger organisation before launching a venture; return to employment to build new capabilities; mentor younger founders or invest in the next generation of companies. So rather than following a single linear career, over a longer period of time, you can assemble an evolving portfolio of experiences.

Starting a business is no longer the one defining act of a career: it becomes one of several ways of creating value. It has the potential to develop the very same capabilities that help people navigate a much longer working life. The capabilities developed in building a company are the very capabilities needed to navigate a longer, less predictable career.

Navigating the traditional three-stage life of education, work and retirement required surprisingly little personal design. Indeed, the two major transitions were supported by institutions rather than navigated by individuals. The multi-stage life changes all of that.

Now there are more choices, more transitions and more opportunities for reinvention. It's less about getting that first career decision right, and more about developing the judgement and adaptability to navigate many decisions over decades. Building a business has taught him how to solve complex problems under pressure.

Yet in a longer life, he also has to learn how to navigate repeated transitions. But these are not separate challenges. My research on longer working lives suggests something surprising: the capabilities developed in building a company are the very capabilities needed to navigate a longer, less predictable career.

The companies you build matter. But so do the habits of experimenting, questioning, adapting, learning and judging that you develop along the way. Every business founder develops these five capabilities: they experiment, they question, they adapt, they learn and they judge.