The US Startup Is Disappearing

[DamianTV]

https://news.slashdot.org/story/18/0...s-disappearing

Historically, startups have been the engine of US economy. By creating new jobs and surfacing new ideas, startups play an outsized role in making the economy grow. It's too bad they are a dying breed. While companies that were less than two years old made up about 13% of all companies in 1985, they only accounted for 8% in 2014. From around 1998 to 2010, the share of private sector workers in companies that were less than two years old plummeted from more than 9% to less than 5%. A new report from the Brookings Institution, finds that in nearly every industry, from agriculture to finance, the share of new companies is falling.

From 13% to 5%, but Everything is Awesome?

[Zippyjuan]

http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/08/news...low/index.html

[kfarnan]

the fear pushed by society discourages producers.

[timosman]

The startup needs to be looked at in its current role, not what we used to think about startups back in the year 2000. A startup is simply a position in VC's book. As the experience has shown us disclosing the size of the bubble prematurely is a recipe for disaster. The way to avoid this is to inflate the value of an asset, usually not performing one and blow the bubble a little. This allows us to tell everybody when the time comes, didn't you see that? You think that was an exception?

[devil21]

Gee, I can't imagine why that is. I mean, it's not like the Fed has been pumping free cash into monopoly mega corps via the equity and debt markets, choking out organic competition. Nothing like that has been happening at all. Especially not to Amazon.

[Ender]

Couldn't be all those zillion regulations to simply start a business, now could it? Nah........

[devil21]

Couldn't be all those zillion regulations to simply start a business, now could it? Nah........

That too.

[gaazn]

Go to Apple and Android store, and there are thousands of app startups that the government does not count as startups.
Same as etsy, kickstarter, alibaba hustlers ....

[osan]

https://news.slashdot.org/story/18/0...s-disappearing

From 13% to 5%, but Everything is Awesome?

Clearly, everything is not bunnies and light, but nevertheless better than they were.. There is a good dose of half-baked stuff on that page, but a few good comments by those using their brains as more than hat racks were also present. To wit:

There is a historical precedence where wild west era was followed by consolidated power of robber barons. Comparable is happening in modern technological world - we have Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and so on filling all technological niches and monopolizing them. So until the next niche opens up, be it applied AI or something else, there is less to start up to.

The only thing there to which I take exception is the implications of the use of "robber baron". Beyond that, the statement is on the money.

I see three general factors beyond the usual cycles of discovery as cited above to be of major influence. Firstly, government regulation. Consider ACA, the costs of which serve as a barrier to entry for entrepreneurial endeavors. SOX is yet another HUGE cost that keeps little guys out of play.

Then there is the lingering aftermath of the dotcom fiasco where imbecile investors tossed money around without due analysis and got burned in wide and deep fashion. Consider that 23 year old infant who was handed $30+ million and threw a launch party with The Who as the entertainment. He went to prison as I recall, but that didn't get the investors' cash back.

Finally, there's the generational issue: millennials are thin-skinned, weak über-fagz who mostly expect the riches to fall into their laps simply because they exist, not to mention that so few of them appear to have the sand necessary to cobble and grow a business.

There's a lot more complexity than this, of course, but these are good places to look, for starters.

At this point, given the Hershey Highway down which Obama and his white masters took us and down which Hillary would have continued, we should be glad that things are going as well as we find them. Whether it will last remains unanswerable at this juncture, but we all know it likely will not unless Trump or whoever, and the Congress gets it together and gets their mitts off our lives. I won't hold my breath in wait.

Letting this economy loose to the tune of mopping the global floor with the competition is a simple matter. The problem is our corruption, both governmental and individual. That is what keeps us from dismantling this stifling status quo that hobbles and thwarts us.

Were the American people to be set loose, China and Europe would be economically buried within one decade, guaRONtee. Euros are moribund and the Chinese simply have little to no concept of the truer meaning of "entrepreneurial spirit". The Pet Rock could never have issued from anywhere other than America because it takes the American flavor of insanity to bring such ideas to fruition.