The CEO and Founder of LinkedIn Reid Hoffman had a pretty interesting Op-Ed in yesterday’s Washington Post, entitled “Let Our Start-Ups Bail Us Out”, with a follow-up today in TechCrunch.
He promotes the idea that if we want to pull out of the current economic times that we’re in we need to incentivize small business, make it easy for them to innovate, and inevitably create brand new powerhouses which employ a lot of people.
Here’s a pretty cool chunk from the WaPo op-ed:
To translate the stimulus into sustainable growth, we need incentives for business innovators.
Entrepreneurs are the fertile soil for job growth and recovery. Small companies represent 99.7 percent of all employer firms, Commerce Department data show. They pay nearly 45 percent of U.S. private payroll and have generated 60 to 80 percent of net new jobs annually over the past decade.
Consider a few start-ups from the past century: Microsoft, MTV, CNN, FedEx, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Burger King. Each opened during a period of economic downturn. Today, these brands employ hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. We need to prepare for the next Burger King. By empowering individuals and small businesses, an innovation stimulus can help germinate stable industry players for the long term.
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