Start-up activity now higher than during Dotcom boom | Hacker News Reader

Start-up activity now higher than during Dotcom boom

kauffman.org

35 pointsadamhowell10 comments

I wonder how much increased startup activity is a result of increased unemployment. I would speculate that startup activity peaks in the best of times (when people have strong financial resources and high degree of certainty that they can find another job is their startup fails) and in the worst of times (when you get laid off and don't have job prospects, you have no choice but to dust off the business plan that's been sitting on your desk waiting to be acted on).

These are new small businesses, not startups, specifically. They are the restaurants, catering services, print shops, laundromats, and interior design firms taking up the strip malls of the world. By the metrics used San Jose would rank as rather non-entrepreneurial, because there are many larger, fast growing startup companies, and fewer small businesses.

It's not a value judgment, but they're different things.

Chinatowns across the USA are exceptionally entrepreneurial, but mostly people own small shops. They are not making new things or business models, just running something that's already worked before as well as they can.

It will be interesting to see if startups born in a global credit crunch will do better than the dotcoms born in an easy credit bubble.

Other than the outliers, things like like Yahoo or Amazon that were created during .com days, I can't see how you wouldn't do better today then back then. In my opinion, having something like heroku exist as a resource to your startup is like someone handing you a million dollars in funding 10 years ago. Its almost absurd what we can do with small teams these days.

Carl Schramm, President and CEO of the Kauffman Foundation, was interviewed on Charlie Rose last night. Had some interesting statistics and thoughts on the relationship between politics, culture and entrepreneurship:

http://www.charlierose.com/guest/view/6897

When I visited Perú in 2006, I was really impressed with the level of entrepreneurial activity. Every downtown street in every city was bustling with entrepreneurs. I had entrepreneurs walking up to me everywhere to try to sell me stuff. I couldn't walk down the street without entrepreneurs honking at me in case I wanted a ride in their taxi. My wife finally gave up and wore earplugs whenever we went outside.

This is a result of Perú's economy being a giant crater in the ground.

I suspect that what's happening is that the US is becoming more like Perú.

I might be wrong, but I think it's mostly because at that time people was driven by the possibility of making money in a more, at the time, profitable industry. Now a great number of startups are created by people that, once lay off, decided to give it a shot.

since doing a startup isn't a zero-sum game; the market for startups has been growing since the crash was 10 years ago; I would hope we would have fully recovered to previous levels and then exceeded by now

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble

I wonder what percentage of these start ups wouldn't exist if it wasn't for PG writings?

Down voting me, Kinda harsh? I am not saying PG is the only reason people people are pursuing a startup, but I would argue he is responsible for giving some people the fortitude to go through with it.

For example, before reading PG's essays, even as a child I knew I wanted to be an inventor. Later in 6th grade my dad joined a start up as computer engineer (around 1997) and I was able to go to work with him on many occasions. This combined with the invention of the World Wide Web and home computers, resulted in me knowing I wanted to start a company that made internet applications. However, if it wasn't for Paul's writings I don't know if I would have had the fortitude to follow it through to the the point where I am now. I think a lot of other people can identify with this.

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