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Comment by wschroter | Hacker News Reader

haha - mpb - spoken like a true valley insider. 550,000 businesses are started every month in the U.S. alone. How many are VC-funded? I'm glad you've seen startups get funded with a half-baked demo and get $100k salaries from well-funded VC's. As it happens, the rest of the world doesn't work like that.

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Wait .... 550K businesses a month = 6.6M businesses a year. There are 300M _people_ in the US (including children, and others not immediately suited for the entreprenurial life). If each business was started by only one person, that would mean that about 1 out of every 45 people started a business in any given year.

That seems high. May I ask the provenance of the 550K/mo number?

"Over the period from 1996 to 2004, an average of 0.36 percent of the adult population created a new business each month, representing approximately 550,000 new businesses per month." from a Kauffman report

http://www.kauffman.org/pdf/kauffman_entrep_index_0905.pdf

Interesting .... thanks for the link. Though, in the context of that report, a 'new business' need consume only 15 or more hours per week to 'count'. Such low-intensity enterprises aren't really what the YC (or VC) crowd is interested in (whatever their other virtues), so I think there's a bit of an apples-and-oranges problem with the 550K/mo number, even assuming there are no deeper statistical problems with the report.

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