Growthology

Startup Trajectories

Everyone in the world of entrepreneurship would love to get better information on the trajectory of startups: how they start, what happens to them, what sorts of programs they go through, etc. Right now, anecdotes basically rule, and everyone can tell a different story about why this or that incubator or accelerator or training program is worthwhile or worthless.

A huge and awesome step was made today by Startup Weekend in a Forbes article on the value of accelerators. This graphic shows the value of Startup Weekend as measured by generating value-creating companies, as well as it global reach. It also provides a snapshot into the startup pipeline, with many teams moving or "graduating" from Startup Weekend to accelerators such as Y Combinator and TechStars in the United States, and Startup Bootcamp and others around the world.

Kudos to Startup Weekend for an outstanding graphic.

Firm Size, Age, Sector, Astrological Sign ...

I have a column up today over on Real Clear Markets commenting on a Huffington Post column last week by Jared Bernstein on the persistent debate over where job creation comes from:

No matter how you slice the data-by size, age, sector, geography, astrological sign-you will never see a monolithic pattern from which you can conclude, "all jobs come from X." Large companies creates lots of jobs in terms of gross numbers, but they also shed lots of jobs; new and young firms create lots of jobs, but they take lots of jobs with them when they close or fail.

Google Fiber Announced

I've been travelling this week and was in the airport yesterday when the July 26 Google Fiber announcement hit. Google's entry into the internet service provider market is just a little over a month away.

The long-awaited pricing and packages were released--free internet (with installation fee), $70 for gigabit internet, or $120 for gigabit internet + TV. TIME points out the TV package is missing ESPN currently, a potential deal breaker for some.

You can "pre-register" your Kansas City area neighborhood to signal interest. If enough of your neighbors sign up too, you may be one of the first to receive service.

I am tremendously excited about this offering (I live in an eligible neighborhood). From a residential perspective, the TV + internet package is more than competitive with other service providers in the Kansas City area, primarily Time Warner Cable and AT&T. TWC and AT&T offer reduced introductory rates, but from personal experience, after those intro rates expire you will pay around the same as what Google is offering (I have not been as successful as Timothy Lee in securing continued promotional rates).

I really hope this ends up being a profitable venture.

Global Entrepreneurship Week - 2012

Announcements for Global Entrepreneurship Week 2012 are starting--mark you calendars for the second week of November (press release with more information from the Kauffman Foundation here). Head on over to www.unleashingideas.org for event details.

News from Google Fiber - Kansas City

What looks to be a big announcement is coming on July 26. I have marked my calendar.

Female Fortune 1000 CEOs

With the news that Google's Marissa Mayer has joined Yahoo as CEO, the remarkable upswing in female CEOs continues. The following figure summarizes the trend, showing that there are currently 41 female Fortune 1000 CEOs, the majority of whom have joined in the last three years. Remarkable.

Employment Trends from Indeed

Job posting site Indeed released its latest monthly report on Friday, showing modest gains in job postings across each sector, with Real Estate, Human Resources, and Transportation leading the way. (The Indeed blog points out that, while experiencing growth in postings, Real Estate is also the sector with the least overall number of postings. This could of course be good news, if it indicates that the housing market is beginning to turn upward.

You can drill down to each sector here, and see the specifc jobs which are experiencing the highest demand from employers: HR assistants; staff accountants; construction project managers; financial analysts; medial assistants; housekeepers; and, by far, customer service representatives.

Likewise, several areas of the country continue to be plagued by large gaps between job seekers and job postings: Riverside, CA; Miami; Los Angeles; and, Las Vegas, particular. These were also among the hardest-hit spots in the recession. Notably, Detroit's labor market appears to have deteriorated recently.

Tight labor markets are: San Jose; Washington, DC; Boston; Oklahoma City; and, Raleigh, NC. Areas experiencing improvments in the last month or so include St. Paul, MN, Kansas City, Columbus, and Milwaukee.

Several of these tight labor markets, as Matt Yglesias has shown, are also those with high housing costs and tight land use restrictions, which prevents more people from moving there and filling the available jobs. Land use regulations are obviously highly localized, don't receive much national attention (with the exception of Yglesias and Ryan Avent), but they are highly important to the labor market and to business formation.

Immigrant Entrepreneurs Video Interviews

Cameron Cushman, a colleague here at the Kauffman Foundation, has a post over the Policy Forum Blog on entrepreneurship.org concerning some video interviews of immigrant entrepreneurs. As I have mentioned briefly previously, we are in need of immigration policy reform.

NFIB Small Business Index

The National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) released its latest Small Business Economic Trends report, finding a fall in optimism among those small businesses surveyed:

It also found that poor sales (i.e., weak demand) continues to be the leading problem among small businesses, with one quarter reporting it to be such. Taxes and regulations followed after that, though I'm not sure what they mean by "unreasonable":

H/T: Big Picture.

Entrepreneurs and Age: A Brief Overview

Tyler Cowen points to a new paper (gated) about characteristics in youth and correlation to entrepreneurial activity later in life. The abstract from Ingrid Schoon and Kathryn Duckworth:

Taking a longitudinal perspective, we tested a developmental–contextual model of entrepreneurship in a nationally representative sample. Following the lives of 6,116 young people in the 1970 British Birth Cohort from birth to age 34, we examined the role of socioeconomic background, parental role models, academic ability, social skills, and self-concepts as well as entrepreneurial intention expressed during adolescence as predictors of entrepreneurship by age 34. Entrepreneurship was defined by employment status (being self-employed and owning a business). For both men and women, becoming an entrepreneur was associated with social skills and entrepreneurial intentions expressed at age 16. In addition, we found gender-specific pathways. For men, becoming an entrepreneur was predicted by having a self-employed father; for women, it was predicted by their parents' socioeconomic resources. These findings point to conjoint influences of both social structure and individual agency in shaping occupational choice and implementation.

If you're further interested on this subject of characteristics of entrepreneurs, I recommend this paper by William Gartner; the literature review of studies should get you started.

Regarding this new Schoon and Duckworth paper, I can't comment on the specifics because I've not read the paper. But skimming the abstract, this feels like the right time to put some sunlight on an old, persistent problem. An old problem about youth.

I cannot emphasize enough that entrepreneurship occurs across all age groups.

This Kauffman Foundation Anatomy report series found the average and median age of entrepreneurs to be 40.

Education and Tech Entrepreneurship (Kauffman Foundation report):

Mean and median are 39.

Kauffman Firm Survey overview report (partial of Table 16):

Mean and median are 45.

Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity (based on self-employment data from the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey):

Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics II, data on nascent entrepreneurs (those who are interested and are taking steps to but have not yet formally started a business, so a bit of a leading indicator):

If your data cuts off at age 34, you are missing out on the majority of the entrepreneurial population. At any given age, you have a mix of entrepreneurs who really wanted to start a company and have wanted to do so for a long time and those who opportunistically became entrepreneurs/"I had no idea I would do this." My guess is that the younger age cohorts have a greater mix of the former and less so of the latter. Also, presumably at a younger age you are much more likely to be under the direct influence of your parents. I suspect both of these issues help explain the strong links between parents' characteristics and entrepreneurial activity that Schoon and Duckworth find. I would like to see this research updated when the data for up to age 40 are available, then age 50 (and so forth). My hypothesis is that the predictive power between early-life influences and adult-life entrepreneurship will diminish.

Higgs Boson Discovery, Maybe

In physics news, the Higgs boson may have been discovered at the Large Hadron Collider. I've seen a few stories about Higgs and how this relates to the Texas Superconducting Super Collider project that was scrapped in the 1990s (click any of the links for more information about the physics behind all this). Supposedly, if the U.S. had continued to build out the SCC, "we" would have made this Higgs discovery a decade ago.

What I call attention to is the question if it matters that the discovery was made in the U.S. or not.

From a spending perspective, I'm sure Texas would have loved to see the billions of federal dollars spent in the state. That was a loss for Texas. Depending on what you believe about government spending and multiplier effects, it was either a savings or a loss to the U.S. economy.

But from an innovation perspective, being bitter about the discovery being made by European scientists and countries I think would be short-sighted. I'm relying on Amar Bhidé's book The Venturesome Economy to inform this viewpoint. If you agree with Bhidé's argument, it doesn't matter where scientific discoveries originate. Rather, it is the ability of countries to apply and develop practical innovations based on the discovery that matters in the long run. I have no idea what sort of practical innovations could come from the Higgs discovery. But it is hard to imagine that they would be limited to just the European continent.

Monday Reads

A passionate take by Umair Haque on the underlying meaning of the Libor scandal.

For all those economists who think housing supply elasticity, and not air conditioning, was the real spur to the Sunbelt's growth. And it seems there are several mega-cities that will rely heavily on air conditioning.

A good, if partial, overview of the ACA decision (albeit less partial than most other coverage).

Where did the modern Olympics come from?

History and today intersect in Greece.