Start-up activity now higher than during Dotcom boom

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

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:<p><a href="http://www.charlierose.com/guest/view/6897" rel="nofollow">http://www.charlierose.com/guest/view/6897</a>

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.<p>This is a result of Perú's economy being a giant crater in the ground.<p>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<p>* <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble</a>

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