• 94% of Americans agree that everyone deserves a fair shot to start and build a business. But that consensus may be at risk if entrepreneurship becomes synonymous with tech billionaires.
• The K-shaped trend: High-growth startups and poverty-level gig work are both surging, while the middle (firms with 50 employees or fewer) has been cut in half since the 1990s.
• In the United States, we once told stories of opportunity. Entrepreneurship alone won’t save anything. But the stories we tell about entrepreneurship, hope and the future might.
Farmers like to tell Hollie Mackey that they’re fifth generation, sixth generation, seventh generation on their land.
“That’s cute,” Mackey will say, with her wry smile. She’s a member of the Northern Cheyenne, a Great Plains tribal community, and runs the National Science Foundation-funded AgTech Engine in North Dakota. She works with tribal and rural communities on food security and agricultural innovation.
“I’m a 250th-generation farmer on this land,” she told 200 entrepreneurs and economic development leaders at last week’s Builders Conference in Philadelphia — a city celebrating 250 years since the founding of a nation built on territory her ancestors worked for millennia.
If a priest, a cop and a scientist walk into a bar, most Americans would trust the bar owner over the rest.
She wasn’t there to relitigate colonization. The conference focus is on how we communicate the importance of entrepreneurship, technology and the sciences in our local communities.
She was on stage for a live recording of our Builders Live podcast to answer a question: Can entrepreneurship save the American soul?
Americans are grumpy. 60% of us say our country is on the wrong track. Trust in government has been declining for 50 years. Americans dislike national media, and are losing faith in higher education and science. We even question each other: The share of Americans who said “most people can be trusted” declined from close to half in 1972 down to a third in 2024.
At root is collapsing confidence in the American promise of shared prosperity. Three-quarters of Americans no longer believe hard work is enough to get ahead, the worst reading since that polling began in the 1980s.
That’s why improving economic mobility is so essential, and access to entrepreneurship and in-demand skills is a necessary component. It’s telling that of the issues that most Americans still agree on, the importance of entrepreneurship ranks close to the highest. If a priest, a cop and a scientist walk into a bar, most Americans would trust the bar owner over the rest.
According to polling from pro-entrepreneurship advocacy group Right to Start, 94% of Americans believe everyone deserves a fair opportunity to start and build a business. It’s true across Republicans and Democrats, urban and rural.
Entrepreneurship — or more precisely, the right to start something and get a fair shake — may be one of the last threads holding the American project together. The question is whether we can keep it from fraying too.
Even if the American dream was never real, we can’t take the idea for granted
The tension is old. In May 1862, amid the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act. For a $10 filing fee, any citizen, including formerly enslaved people and single women, could claim 160 acres of public land. Work it for five years, and it was yours.
It was one of the most radical economic mobility policies in American history. It was also built on dispossession. The “public land” had belonged to Indigenous nations. The Homestead Act accelerated their removal. Later, the famed “forty acres and a mule” pledge to formerly enslaved people came to represent unfulfilled promises of ownership.
The American promise of entrepreneurship has always been this tangled: genuinely transformative for some, extracted from others. The question at the Builders Conference wasn’t whether that history is complicated. It was whether the promise can still be redeemed.
Victor Hwang, who leads Right to Start, thinks it can — but only if we fight for it.
Hwang’s parents came to the United States as immigrants with $300 and two bags of laundry. The immigration bet worked: Hwang did well enough in school to make it to Harvard, before getting his law degree at the University of Chicago.
In the 1990s, he was a corporate lawyer working on venture capital deals and mergers and acquisitions. Then helped commercialize university research before leading a Silicon Valley venture studio. In 2012 he co-wrote “The Rainforest,” an influential book about developing innovation ecosystems. That led to a prolific stint at the Kansas City-based Kauffman Foundation at a time when its decades funding pro-entrepreneurship research was being put into practice. Hwang helped shape a generation of local pro-entrepreneurship organizers before launching Right to Start to address policy gaps.
If entrepreneurship has been proven to be so economically important and culturally valued, why have Hwang and so many others spent careers trying to center it in state and local strategy?
“This country got so used to this idea that we’re this startup nation, this entrepreneur place, that we just kind of started taking it for granted,” Hwang said. “And just like everything in life, if you take it for granted, it starts to wither away.”
Two-thirds of Americans say it’s harder to start a business today than it was in their parents’ generation, according to a Wall Street Journal poll. Right to Start’s own research found 92% of Americans say it’s difficult to start a business. Half say it’s very difficult.
The reframe matters, Hwang argued. When advocates pitch entrepreneurship to policymakers, they get treated like another special interest group fighting for a carve-out. When you call it a right, suddenly everything is in scope — education, childcare, healthcare, capital access, taxes, regulation, workforce.
“If you have a right to speech or a right to worship, and something impedes on that, you have the ability to speak up about it,” he said. “Entrepreneurial opportunity is a right. Everyone has it.”
But the word itself is slipping away. “When you say entrepreneur, they often think it’s Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg,” Hwang said.
As I argue, pro-entrepreneurship is not necessarily pro-business, but they’ve become muddled. Zuckerberg is an entrepreneur like celebrity wrestler-turned-actor Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is a college football player. They both were once those things, but the term ceases to be a helpful descriptor of what they do today.
Hwang said the term has “been co-opted by a certain type of entrepreneur,” but in polling many Americans say they are people who identify problems, create solutions and distribute them.
Hwang adds: “When you ask them about the entrepreneurial spirit, they all say they have it.” But even much-lauded entrepreneurship appears to be at risk.
The key: Remembering what (and why) entrepreneurship inspires
Over the last 20 years, according to a recent Technical.ly analysis, the two fastest-growing categories of new firm creation have been high-growth startups and non-employer firms (particularly those whose owners are disproportionately likely to live in poverty). The middle is disappearing: Between 1997 and 2020, nonemployer businesses grew five times as fast as those with employees.
Rae’Mah Henderson, a third-generation entrepreneur who now invests SSBCI dollars through Innovate Alabama, sees a shift in what people actually want from starting something.
“I think the main selling point for entrepreneurship has been wealth building,” Henderson said. “But the appetite for that is changing. People are now seeking out entrepreneurship for quality of life.”
She pointed to founders who recently relocated to Alabama and opened a vintage clothing store. “A lot of times when people are turning to entrepreneurship today, it’s more so just for legacy. And I think a lot of times we think we’re speaking about legacy when we tie that to wealth. But I think now it’s just for community.”
Mackey pushed harder. Rights come with responsibilities, she said. The entrepreneurial spirit is real, but so is the damage done in its name.
“We speak about rights, but we often don’t talk about the accountability and the responsibility we have in exercising those rights,” she said. “How are we anchoring that in the humility and the responsibility that comes with being an entrepreneur, ensuring that we are not harming people and communities in the process, in the pursuit of profit?”
So can entrepreneurship save the American soul? Mackey’s answer was direct: “No.”
Then she kept going, about how the United States, like any nation, is held together by the narrative we share about a place and its people.
“Can the stories we tell about entrepreneurship, hope and the future change our soul? Save our soul? Yeah, I think that’s highly possible. But I don’t know that as Americans we are quite ready to grasp that we have the power to do that.”
Her view is shaped by a longer timeline than most. “Souls don’t go away,” she said. “All of that entrepreneurial spirit is with us. Anyone who ever was with us, their soul is here, helping guide us through these very troubling times.”
Entrepreneurship is a tool. The question is whether we remember what it’s for. If it becomes just another word for billionaires, we’ll lose the consensus. If it stays connected to the farmer fixing a tractor, the scientist with a solution, the immigrant with $300, the innovator with an industry insight, the woman opening a shop for her community — then we might keep something worth saving.
“We are the stories we tell,” Henderson said. “If the story is one of triumph, we can be part of that. If the story is one of dissension and breaking apart, we will tell that story too.”
