Key insights
- The article highlights a surge in new business creation in the US, driven by factors like remote work, low interest rates, and stimulus. Increased entrepreneurship can spur innovation and competition, potentially leading to long-run economic growth and a positive, albeit moderate, influence on US equities.
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More U.S. adults say they want to start their own businesses, and the data shows it's not just talk.
Among nonbusiness owners, 74% of Gen Zers and 58% of millennials said they wanted to own a business someday, according to the 2026 Wells Fargo Money Study, out last month. The survey found that 61% of adults and 69% of Gen Z consider business ownership "part of the American dream." Among Gen Z non-owners who want to start a business, 80% said it would let them "control their own destiny."
The survey tracks a pandemic-era trend still going strong. Since COVID-19 shuttered much of the economy in 2020, Americans have been filing business applications at rates well above pre-pandemic levels—1.6 million in the first quarter of 2026, up from 1 million in the same quarter of 2019, Census Bureau data show.
Waves of new businesses tend to spur innovation and force incumbents to compete, two drivers of long-run economic growth, according to economists.
Researchers have offered several explanations for why the startup surge has outlasted the pandemic.
First, there was the sudden shift to remote work that restructured the economy, John C. Haltiwanger, a professor of economics at the University of Maryland, argued in a 2022 paper. The new firms clustered in different industries than those they replaced—mostly businesses catering to the work-from-home economy. For example, online retailers drove 33% of the surge.
Financial conditions helped, Haltiwanger found: unlike the 2008 recession, financial institutions stayed healthy during the COVID-19 downturn, while interest rates were at near zero.
That made it easier for people, including those laid off during the lockdowns, to get business loans. On top of that, the federal stimulus kept consumer spending afloat.
The business-start-up boom hasn't gone the way of footprint stickers dotting the floors of public places, and technological changes may be reinforcing the trend.
AI adoption may be driving a wave of new businesses, according to Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo Global Management, the private-equity firm.
Apollo Global Management
AI and large language models are "dramatically reducing the cost and complexity of launching a company," Slok wrote in a recent note, pointing to data that new-firm creation is running faster in sectors with above-average AI adoption—led by information, professional services and finance—than in sectors where adoption lags, such as transportation, mining, and food services.
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