There’s a tidy story we like to tell about this economy: the job market got hard, so people got desperate, so they started working for themselves. Call it the rise of the “forced founder”—the laid-off, passed-over, ghosted-by-recruiters professional who launches a business not because she always dreamed of it but because waiting around for the right offer stopped feeling like a plan.
It’s a compelling narrative. It’s also, according to the people sitting on the actual numbers, too clean.
The backdrop is real enough. LinkedIn’s most recent workforce data shows hiring down year-over-year—roughly 5% in the latest reading and as much as 8.5% earlier this spring—part of a prolonged slowdown that has shaved close to 30% off hiring over the past several years. Against that, the share of LinkedIn members identifying as founders has climbed about 75% since 2022. Education and tech are leading the surge, up 90% and 89% respectively. On paper, the math practically writes the headline for you.
But Sharat Raghavan, LinkedIn’s director of data science, was quick to complicate it when I asked whether the data confirms that this founder boom is a knee-jerk reaction to a brutal market.
“Unfortunately, LinkedIn’s data can’t really tell that story,” he told me.
That honesty is the most interesting part of this whole conversation—and the reason the “forced founder” framing deserves a second look.
Necessity and opportunity aren’t opposites
The instinct is to sort every new founder into one of two boxes: they’re chasing a dream (opportunity) or they’re escaping a crisis (necessity). Raghavan doesn’t think the data splits that cleanly, and he doesn’t think the rest of us should either.
For one, the founder surge isn’t moving in lockstep with the hiring decline.
“Making a decision to become a founder is a pretty important step, and I don’t think it necessarily happens in the course of one month,” he told me. “It could take months of planning.” The growth in founders, he noted, has been a steady, “secular” trend in the data—climbing consistently since 2022, not spiking in reaction to any single bad quarter.
And when you look for outside evidence on the necessity-versus-opportunity split, the scale tips toward opportunity. Raghavan pointed to the Kauffman Foundation, which tracks exactly this question and has found that roughly 85% of new founding activity in recent years has been opportunity-driven—a number that’s held in the 80s, well above the high-60s range it hit during the pandemic.
In other words: it seems that more people are starting businesses because they want to, not just because they have to.
But here’s where Raghavan made the point I keep coming back to. Even “necessity” isn’t one thing.
“I would separate necessity into two buckets,” he said—the income kind (“I lost my job and I need to become an entrepreneur to gain income”) and the career-change kind, where someone can’t find the right role in the industry or city they want and decides to build their own door instead of waiting for one to open.
Is that second version necessity? Or is it opportunity wearing a trench coat? “That’s a hard one to figure out,” he admitted—and that ambiguity is precisely the millennial experience right now. We are the generation that came up through one downturn, then another, then a pandemic, and now a labor market Raghavan describes plainly as “sluggish.” We’ve learned not to wait.
The solopreneurs who won’t call themselves founders
If you’ve ever watched a friend run a full consulting practice while insisting she’s “just freelancing for now,” you already understand the next wrinkle in this data.
Many of the people fueling the founder numbers don’t see themselves as founders at all. They’re consultants, coaches, creators, side-hustlers. I asked Raghavan whether LinkedIn’s data captures that solo activity or only formal company creation. It captures plenty of it, he said—LinkedIn doesn’t tie a “founding event” to a registered company. And he was careful not to wave off those one-person operations as somehow less real.
“There’s always a chance they will” scale, he said. “That’s why I’m very hesitant to say, well, these aren’t real businesses, because a lot of them could turn into real businesses. We just don’t know yet.”
The formalization is happening, too. U.S. government business-application data is up about 8% year-over-year, running ahead of last year’s pace. So even as people resist the CEO title, a growing number are quietly filing the paperwork anyway—hedging their uncertainty by making it official.
AI lowered the barrier. Authenticity raised a new one.
You cannot tell this story in 2026 without talking about AI, and Raghavan—who also teaches entrepreneurship at UC Berkeley’s business school—sees it as the real engine under the trend.
“Everyone’s talking about AI lowering the barrier to entry, and I think that’s absolutely true,” he said. “It’s becoming an enabler for a lot of people.” He compared it to the arrival of cloud computing: just as Amazon Web Services once meant a founder no longer had to buy and manage racks of servers, AI now handles the back office, the financial projections, even product pricing for a solo operator who would once have needed a small team. That’s likely a big part of why 77% of U.S. founders told LinkedIn that starting a business feels more accessible today, and 69% said it’s more achievable than it was for previous generations.
But AI giveth and AI complicateth. As the technical barrier drops, a human one rises: 59% of entrepreneurs in LinkedIn’s survey said they’ve had to become creators to grow their businesses. In a marketplace flooded with AI-generated everything, Raghavan argues, authenticity becomes the scarce resource—and the founder becomes her own best marketing agent.
“Fundamentally, people want to connect with a brand and a person,” he said. As a journalist feeling my own quiet pressure to step further into that creator pool, I’ll admit the point landed. This isn’t a passing trend. It’s the new baseline.
The real headline: agency
Strip away the doom framing and what’s left is something millennials should actually feel good about. The most defensible read of this data isn’t that a generation is being cornered into entrepreneurship. It’s that a generation is refusing to wait.
“A lot of people are just taking their own initiative, taking more agency over their own career, in a job market that’s sluggish,” Raghavan said. “That’s not too surprising. But it’s really interesting to see it happening in the data.”
He called it empowering, and I’m inclined to agree. The “forced founder” makes for a great headline, but it casts millennials as victims of the economy. The numbers suggest something closer to the opposite: a workforce that looked at a stalled market, did the math on waiting, and decided to bet on itself instead.
That might not be desperation. I honestly think it’s a generation taking the wheel.
