Читать книгу The New Builders - Seth Levine - Страница 22

According to the statistics site FiveThirtyEight, “Main” is the most common street name in America, with 10,902 streets carrying this moniker. Strangely, the second most common street name in America is 2nd Street, followed by 1st Street – which seems counterintuitive but is backed by the data.⁶

The name Main Street has expansive connotations. It evokes nostalgia for smaller towns and simpler living. But, importantly, the idea of Main Street USA isn't just a part of our history and days gone by. It turns out that thriving Main Streets and the robust set of local entrepreneurs who line them, or who operate out of office parks, strip malls, and other clusters, are critical to our economy's future.

The high‐tech entrepreneurs who garner so much of our collective attention are a tiny sliver of the small businesses that drive the US economy. Fewer than 1 percent of entrepreneurs are backed by venture capital. Less than 250,000 businesses are “high‐tech.”

America's army of entrepreneurs includes many Main Street entrepreneurs – people whom we like to think of as grassroots entrepreneurs. Many New Builders come from their ranks and create much of the entrepreneurial activity across our nation. In the United States, small business is big business. Small businesses employ nearly half of the US workforce, over 60 million people. Smaller firms created over 1.6 million jobs in 2019. Importantly, firms that drove the most job growth were those that employed fewer than 20 people – a trend that matches that of prior years.

In a widely cited 2010 report, The Kauffman Foundation's Tim Kane argued that startups – companies less than a year into their existence – were responsible for essentially all of the job creation in the US economy.⁷ In other words, without entrepreneurs, our economy would not add new jobs. The report further notes, “Gross job creation at startups in the United States averaged more than three million jobs per year during 1992–2005, four times higher than any other yearly age group.”

There already was a cloud over the US small business economic engine. Even before the Covid‐19 pandemic, that same 2018 SBA report that described small businesses as the “driving force behind US innovation and competitiveness” showed that the percentage of overall economic output produced by smaller firms was declining relative to that of larger companies. In the 16 years from 1998 to 2014, the small business share of GDP fell to 43.5 percent from 48.0 percent, according to the report.

This shift away from recognizing the value of small business and the entrepreneurs who build them has occurred over the last 40 years. The Silicon Valley/high‐tech narrative is part of the reason. But there have been other changes in our economy that are important to understand as well.