America is in the midst of an extraordinary startup boom. How the country revived its go-getting spirit. Last year applications to form businesses reached 5.5m, a record. The monthly average is about 80% higher than in the decade before covid.

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/05/12/america-is-in-the-midst-of-an-extraordinary-startup-boom

by mafco

3 comments

  1. Every person here is a consultant and I have 0
    Idea what anyone even does. If I ask them their job they can’t even explain it. I’m suspecting a lot of fraud is taking place. Just found out the local charity gets grants and uses as little as possible and buys real estate with the rest for “student housing”. One is by me and no student lives in it. It’s some rando old dude who flies in from nyc.

  2. >Perhaps even more important than the numbers is the kind of ventures that are being created. **In 2020 and 2021 many new businesses catered to the working-from-home revolution. These included online retailers, small trucking firms and landscapers. Since mid-2022, however, the baton has been passed to technology companies**, according to Ryan Decker of the Fed and John Haltiwanger of the University of Maryland. A paper published in March by the Census Bureau found a particularly **sharp increase last year in business applications involving artificial intelligence (ai).** For researchers, this carries echoes of the 1990s, when computers and the internet took off. “It feels like a step-change increase across the economy in entrepreneurial potential,” says Kenan Fikri of Economic Innovation Group, a think-tank. “You never know which firm is going to be the next growth firm. So the more shots on goal you have, the better.”

    It sounds like tech and artificial intelligence in particular are fueling the current surge. Which is ironic because AI has also been blamed for recent tech layoffs.

  3. So there’s a startup, and then there’s a business. A startup is like an experimental business model that will most likely fail due to its unorthodox strategy.

    You can open a gas station (business) or you can try something new and make a subscription based gas station where you pay a monthly fee for unlimited gas plus car washes and snacks every visit (startup).

    So when somebody says they made a startup, it doesn’t necessarily mean they have the expect it to succeed.

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