Every great American company was once a startup. Under Armour launched in a basement in DC; Nike grew up on a running track in Oregon; Microsoft started in a garage in Albuquerque, and Dell kicked off from a dorm room in Texas.
Three hundred thousand people work for those four companies — and none of those jobs existed forty years ago. In the past four decades entrepreneurs have created 100% of the net new jobs in our country.
Yet American entrepreneurship is in decline. Over the past 20 years, startup investment in three states (California, Massachusetts, and New York) has jumped threefold — but new firm creation has declined nearly everywhere else. The “Big Three” states eat up 78% of all venture capital dollars. Put another way, a total of 20 counties have created half of the new jobs since the Great Recession.
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By: Ross Baird, Virginia Review of Politics
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