[terrellm]

My wife and I (both 40 today) are a husband-and-wife entrepreneur team that started our software business right out of college at 21. We had our first child at 30 and second at 33. At the opposite end of the spectrum, some of my wife's high school classmates who didn't go on to college are already grandparents.

We used our 20's to finish undergraduate college and go on to get our graduate degrees, do some traveling, and build & grow a successful software company. We looked at our 20's as the chance to build a business with little opportunity cost and even less overhead, knowing we had the rest of our life to recover from any failures. We put in a lot of hard & long hours, dealt with financial ups-and-downs, and had to learn how to build a team.

Today our software company, now a SaaS and e-commerce business, is stable and has a solid team in place. Being established, along with our kids enrolled in online school, enables us to have a significant amount of flexibility for family. We spend just over half of our year in Texas and the rest in Colorado. Work still has to get done, but we can work around family now.

I couldn't imagine us trying to build a business from scratch, especially as a husband-and-wife team, while also trying to raise kids.