Now Is the Best Time in a Century to Start a Business

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There has never been a better moment to start a business. Now The Economist agrees with me (archive link): America has become an entrepreneur’s paradise, and the data is stronger than most people realize.

  1. The formation numbers are staggering. Since the start of 2024 an average of 466,000 Americans applied to start a business every month; June saw 531,000, nearly double the 2019 average. Full-time self-employment hit 16.8 million in 2025, a century high.

  2. A century-old trend just bent. Self-employment fell from 36% of American workers in 1910 to under 10% by 2020. About 60% kept telling Gallup they would rather be their own boss. The dream never died; only the practicality did. That is what changed.

  3. This boom is not a Silicon Valley story. The fastest-growing application categories are professional services (up 25%), retail (18%), and health care (18%). The Mad Hatter Company sells novelty hats from Georgia and heads for eight figures. Ordinary people in ordinary towns are the ones moving.

  4. Part of it is push, not pull. Firms barely hired or fired between 2021 and 2025, and the share of young Americans who think it is a good time to find a job fell from 75% to 43%. When payroll doors stop opening, people build their own.

  5. The deepest driver is AI as activation energy. The share of founders who used AI to launch doubled to 60% between 2023 and 2025, per Gusto. Chatbots build the website, decode local regulations, and draft the invoices, so being tech-shy no longer disqualifies you. AI lowers the activation potential on reactions that were always willing.

  6. The honest counterargument: only 30% of new applications are likely to hire anyone soon, down from 38% in 2019, and Stripe’s economists warn of an age of the solopreneur where AI fills gaps that once demanded employees. The SBA administrator expects the opposite. I land in between: solo-first is a feature; start alone, prove demand, then hire. The coffee-cart founder did exactly that and now employs five baristas.

  7. Niche beats crowded, and algorithms found that out before we did. More than half of Shopify-supported sales now come from categories outside its top 100, so custom pill cases pay rent while generic stores starve. Ideas also travel faster than ever; a Tennessee entrepreneur bought his cold-brew canning machine after seeing one in a video online, and his cart now takes in $10,000 to $15,000 a month.

  8. The century-long shift toward working for The Man is bending, with gains accruing to Etsy sellers and small-town accountants rather than giants, as Gusto’s economist put it. Capital requirements fell, brain-power got rented for $20 a month, and the market rewards smallness. That combination has never existed before.

The takeaway: Pick the niche you actually know, let AI clear the paperwork and the website, and sell before you scale. The window is open right now, and it will not feel this uncrowded once everyone else sees the same chart you just did.

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