Entrepreneurs envision a different future and then set out to create it. They don't do so in a vacuum or out of whole cloth. Generally, they aren't artists, writers, or philosophers, working in the abstract or on beauty for beauty's sake. Instead, entrepreneurs translate society's values into reality by meeting the needs and wants of the time with products, services, and experiences. Collectively, they create much of the economic energy that sustains our way of life. As individuals, they play a key role in the process of creativity and innovation, bringing their own ideas and experiences to bear. What they chose to work on and where they put their wild‐spirit energy is a crucial question, especially in a country that has change and capitalism baked into its being.

But today's New Builders are different from the entrepreneurs who came before them. For the first time, the people often left out of the entrepreneurial narrative are walking onto center stage. If our finance and mentorship systems catch up to this new diverse reality, the New Builders will have a star turn on America's revolving stage. We believe that they will.

What does that mean for the future? New Builders have a visceral awareness of systemic unfairness. They aren't all successful, certainly, but they understand how an unjust system keeps good ideas and great entrepreneurs from getting the support everyone needs. They are likely to work outside those systems, even to upend them. We saw evidence of that in the New Builders we interviewed, who are redefining success on their own terms. In every generation, entrepreneurs rise to the challenges and opportunities of the time. It leaves us asking: What are the challenges and opportunities of this time?

The answer has only emerged for us over the course of working on this book, hidden in plain sight. The pandemic, the crisis of climate change, and the political divisions that have emerged in the past few decades, culminating in the rise of dangerous populist politics, show us the need for a new and different future. At the same time, consumer desires are changing. The convenience, low prices, and rhetoric delivered by companies of huge size and and at times overbearing technology seem increasingly empty, and not enough. The middle ground, diverse gathering places, uniqueness and pluralism, all built through real connections between people, are the needs of our time.

What do a family of wilderness guides in Montana, the dogged real estate developers in Oklahoma City, a Dominican baker in Massachusetts, a young man in Virginia making T‐shirts, and all the other New Builders have in common? They're working on building their businesses with connection to their communities and in the lost middle ground between big institutions and our cherished individual rights. The next turn of our economy, the place where the winners will be found, is likely to lie exactly there, in this middle ground.

The future might not be judged on the scales of the past. Size, wealth, and appearance were the lingua franca of the late twentieth century and the pre‐pandemic twenty‐first century. But different times call for new ways of measuring success. We believe communities will weigh heavily on those new scales. We deliberately focused in this book on New Builders working on Main Streets and in communities left out of the narrow economic expansion of the late twentieth century, But there are New Builders working on breakthrough innovations, in the arts economy, fashion, science, and elsewhere – in corners of the economy we haven't even thought of – to succeed in the new era.

It's up to us to support them.

See New Builders and See Ourselves

To wrap our hands around the changing nature of our economy, we need to understand who the New Builders are and to start seeing them. It's clear from the data that the trends we are seeing today – that an increasing percentage of new business owners are women, people of color, and older Americans – are permanent ones. In every aspect of our economy, but especially our entrepreneurial economy, we need to embrace this change and adapt to it, from the world of high‐tech venture‐backed startups to Main Street businesses and grassroots entrepreneurs. As a society, we need to rethink our relationship with local businesses, recognizing the collective power that comes from entrepreneurs of all kinds and the varied businesses they start and run.

To fully recognize New Builders, we need to fully recognize ourselves. Unlike many other countries in the world, America offered the promise of a better life for those willing to work hard and play by the rules. But this is changing. While the American Dream remains attainable to some, this vision of an egalitarian society, where hard work wins over status, is slipping away. Market economies such as America's offer advantages to those lucky enough to be born at the highest levels of society. For those whose family status offers them greater opportunities for education and advancement. For those whose skin tone gives them an advantage from birth. But the number of people from the bottom economic rungs who are able to reach the top rungs of that ladder has significantly dropped. Supporting all entrepreneurs, and especially supporting New Builders, offers an important way to start to reverse these trends. Especially coming out of the Covid‐induced financial crisis, recognizing the breadth and depth of America's entrepreneurial landscape is a critical step toward strengthening our economy.

To get there, we need to recognize the potential of entrepreneurs outside the Silicon Valley mold, at the same time letting go of the idea that we can generate enough real and inclusive growth solely by pouring money into software startups. Dynamism and innovation happen in unexpected places and from people who aren't necessarily interested in starting and running fast‐growth technology businesses. In fact, the next turn of our economy is likely to come from these overlooked people and places. That should be obvious, but after a half‐century during which Silicon Valley has dominated the narrative of entrepreneurship, many people seem to have forgotten it. We believe New Builders working in different parts of the economy can grow important and large businesses if they have access to mentorship and capital. New Builders won't create another Silicon Valley, because the software innovations that drove Silicon Valley won't be replicated. But if we support New Builders the right way, as Silicon Valley was supported in its early days, they will create new centers of innovation and growth. The split between startups and small businesses is a false dichotomy that ends up steering more and more capital to fewer and fewer new businesses. This concentration of both capital and mindshare isn't healthy for our economy. It's also not healthy for Silicon Valley and the technology startups that it serves.

We can see the effect of this concentration in the statistics around venture financing more generally. On the surface, the world of venture‐backed startups appears to be booming. According to data research firm PitchBook, in 2018, US‐based venture‐backed startups garnered $130.9 billion in financing. This figure was the highest total ever, surpassing the dot‐com‐bubble‐fueled year, 2000. Nearly 9,000 companies raised money from venture capitalists that year. However, upon closer inspection, the data suggest the same kind of consolidation occurring broadly is happening among venture‐backed companies. In 2018, 198 companies garnered over 60 percent of the financing dollars, according to Pitchbook. And while the total invested dollars has risen significantly in the past five years, funding into the earliest rounds (commonly referred to as seed financing) is down. Even among our most supported entrepreneurs, we're concentrating our money and effort on larger, later‐stage companies at the expense of new business ideas.

Change Starts with Individuals, but Collective Action Is What Really Matters

We need to respect local businesses, recognizing the collective power that comes from grassroots entrepreneurs and the businesses they start and run. In America, we love to celebrate the lone hero – the person who, seemingly on their own, creates something out of nothing or saves the day. We lionize these people as almost mythical creatures. They are the people who, through sheer force of will and charisma, are able to change an industry or society. And to be sure, there are many successful entrepreneurs who have started and led companies that had significant impacts on American business. These people are often worthy of our admiration for having pursued their business passions despite many obstacles that were put in their way.

But no one does it alone. And even the outsized impact of a few of these mythical entrepreneurs – think people like Steve Jobs – was only possible because of massive systems of support that surrounded them, from Jobs's Apple co‐founders to people like the legendary Apple designer Johnny Ive. Not to mention any number of the over 60,000 employees who worked at Apple at the time of Jobs's death. Steve Jobs, Andrew Carnegie, Joy Mangano, Jeff Bezos, Oprah Winfrey, Bill Gates, Margaret Sanger – the list of people our society lionizes for their entrepreneurial spirit is long and impressive. But all of these inventors and innovators ultimately built large businesses and thrived in the American entrepreneurial economy because of the help of a larger system around them, from their parents to their schools to the infrastructure of the country and the massive government investments that have fueled innovation for generations.

Collective support doesn't take away from individual achievement. It enhances it.

As Covid‐19 emerged, our first response to save small businesses was to act individually. We were urged to buy local, to buy gift certificates, and patronize small businesses over chains. All those efforts are crucial. But that our first instincts ran toward individual action and not to ways in which we could more broadly and effectively support businesses en masse perhaps suggests that we're missing the bigger picture. We've grown fond of individual action. It's easy (assuming you have the money), it's immediate, and it makes you feel good. But real change lies one level above that, in realizing that individual action is most effective and can be best amplified through collective action that supports it.

This is true at all levels of community and government. Once a base of support is built into a community's mindshare, it continues to show up, as it did when Covid‐19 struck and the hospitals near Staunton, Virginia, needed masks. Staunton's story shows it's not nearly as hard as we think it is. By coming together, individuals looking to effect change in their communities can achieve outsized results, the total of which is truly greater than the sum of its parts.

Safety Nets and Backstops

People with power and resources need to recognize that they have a privilege that enables them to take risks. The security that comes from the backstop of savings or the knowledge that family and friends have the wherewithal to soften the blow of a failed venture is easy to take for granted when you've always had it. But this security doesn't exist for large portions of our society. A reasonable social safety net, including broad access to health care, is a critical ingredient necessary to support our changing entrepreneurial economy. In our push toward libertarianism, we've forgotten some of the key ingredients that enable the risk‐taking and personal responsibility that libertarians so cherish. The United States was founded on the principles of shared destiny and collective responsibility. It was through these communal actions that our early cities and towns were built and upon which the infrastructure that enables our modern‐day economy was forged.

For us, this isn't a political argument for access to healthcare and a basic social safety net. It's an economic one. The exact parameters of whether and how we will continue to offer some level of societal protections for those who are either less advantaged or who take risks that don't pay off will have to be argued and decided by politicians. But without question, considerations of healthcare, of access to basic services, and the health and safety of their families were top of mind for many of the New Builders we spoke with. Tying healthcare to employment (and, most typically, to large‐company employment) is one of the single biggest impediments to entrepreneurial activity that we know of. We simply can't regain our entrepreneurial dynamism without some consideration for how we administer healthcare in our country. And, just as robust bankruptcy laws promote risk‐taking, so too does a basic social safety net that provides at least some back stop for those entrepreneurs whose business ideas don't work out. This isn't an argument for a socialist‐style society. To the contrary, it's a recognition that to maintain our entrepreneurial and capitalist edge, we need to consider exactly who constitutes the next generation of entrepreneurs in our country and create policies that enable and encourage their entrepreneurial spirit, rather than stifle it.

Rebalance Regulations to Help Small Business

We need to restore the regulatory frameworks that once protected smaller businesses and consumers. They have been slowly eroded over the past few decades, and the result is an economy that is too far out of balance. For small businesses and the entrepreneurs who are struggling to find their way in the current economy, regulations geared to big business represent a meaningful impediment to starting and growing a business.

Together, small businesses employ nearly 40 percent of the American workforce. Collectively they represent an important economic force we've been too quick to overlook. As more and more Americans turn to the gig economy to either build a career or supplement their income, we need to recognize that the future American labor force will look quite different than the labor force of past generations. The declining power of small business in politics is a reflection not of our stated priorities – politicians love to tout their love for small business – but of the realities of how power is currently wielded and influenced. That's a deliberate choice made by society based on the systems of influence and lobbying we've set up. Those systems are clearly out of balance.

It's certainly convenient from a consumer perspective to think big and to shop big. But doing so to the exclusion of small business reflects that too many of us are losing our patience for the simple pleasures of strolling Main Street and of browsing a local shop. Perhaps Covid‐19 will end up being a reminder of the human connections that are so important and that constitute the fabric upon which our communities are built. The frenetic pace many of us have tried to maintain, perhaps, meant we left too little time to enjoy those things that can and should be enjoyable. Shopping isn't always something to be checked off a list or done online. There can be pleasure from these things that we've come to make ourselves believe are just chores, but which allow us the opportunity to get out into our communities and to interact with our neighbors.

Despite the constant rhetoric about the importance of small business, government focuses on big. Big companies make headlines. Big companies bring in a larger number of jobs (at least at one time; not so when small businesses are taken as a group). Big companies can afford the lobbying and public relations often required to get attention from government officials. The result is that larger companies have an outsized say in crafting the rules and regulations that govern business activity. While this may be most obvious at the federal level, where big businesses are regularly given an audience to lobby Congress about their specific priorities, big businesses' resources also give them a disproportionately large voice at every level of government below that, including in more community‐based institutions. This is a mistake. By excluding small businesses in community‐building efforts, we ignore critical voices that contribute mightily to the vibrancy and dynamism of our economy at all levels. While these voices aren't a monolith – they don't all fall in line to one worldview or perspective – they represent a different perspective on community and on our economy that is critical for government officials to understand if they are to craft policy that encourages broad‐based economic development.

It's worth repeating here that our argument for small is not an argument against big. On the contrary, our economy has always thrived with a certain balance between big and small. The economies of scale that come from larger enterprises and the convenience they offer to our society are real and not something we discount. Yet in recent years we've allowed large businesses to gain too much power. Owning a small business used to be a reliable pathway to the American dream, and something that was celebrated. Not because these businesses grew large but because there is value in small businesses themselves. We need to get back to that way of thinking. Of recognizing that businesses of all sizes contribute to our economy. Instead, the voices of small business owners are drowned out. We certainly don't need to eliminate larger companies from our business landscape – to suggest so would be nonsensical. But we do need to find this balance once again. Refocusing on the question of what it takes for all businesses to succeed, rather than trying to control the future by making the bets on the kinds of companies that could grow big, will help. Call it a true “think small” movement. By thinking small, we'll ultimately benefit our economy, our communities, and ourselves.

Create a Movement of Support for New Builders

Many of the new ways of thinking about how to invest in New Builders still sit at the margins of our financial system. Impactful, to those directly affected, but on the whole dwarfed by the larger systems of mainstream finance that surround them.

We need to encourage more people in our financial systems to put their creative energies into rethinking how we fund new business endeavors. While there is a lively group of people who invest in women and diverse founders, funding for founders such as these and through alternative funding models such as revenue‐based financing has largely been the purview of impact investing. It's hard to overstate just how limiting it is to pigeonhole support for new and innovative forms of capital into this subset of the investment universe. Some $300 billion in funding has been allocated to impact investing, which is a great start. But this pales in comparison to the trillions of dollars invested more broadly in businesses across the United States. We can – and need – to start thinking more holistically about investments in companies operating in other parts of our economy and to recognize that the returns they generate are competitive with (and by some accounts, greater than) those generated by more “traditional” investing. If we continue to confine investing in women and people of color to the purview of “impact,” we are inherently limiting them, as well as suggesting to these communities that they are somehow lesser.

Collaborative models offer glimmers of hope as well as a roadmap for how we might better support New Builders and their companies. Greater support for the CDFI banking system would be a great place to start. In that system, the infrastructure already exists to provide capital to grassroots entrepreneurs, especially those who are women and minorities. But the system lacks the overall funding required to properly support these business owners. Supporting the economic vitality of the next generation of entrepreneurs in the United States shouldn't be a political issue. There is a clear economic argument for doing so that is getting lost in the mix. Government efforts shouldn't be distracted by the high‐tech promise that was the last generation of change, but we can learn from Silicon Valley's growth and the way that government funding without too many strings attached helped enable individual entrepreneurs and entire entrepreneurial ecosystems.

More support for community banks and tighter controls on the consolidation of the banking sector are also important factors to consider as we look to bolster our entrepreneurial ecosystems across the United States. Consolidation across our banking sector has reached unsustainable levels. Ironically, it may be the overregulation of banking that is to blame, as the costs of complying with rules put in place after the Great Recession of 2008–2009 have become too great for many smaller banks. There are relatively easy changes that would alleviate this burden but will require both leadership and forethought to implement – two things that are often in short supply among those charged with doing so. We hope they can find the strength, political and otherwise, to consider the changes that need to be made to better support a robust community banking system. At the same time, there are provisions in place, primarily through the Community Reinvestment Act, that require larger banks to extend and expand their banking services to communities that have historically been underserved by financial institutions.

Strengthening these actions by enforcing existing laws is another easy way to start.ⁱ Ultimately we believe that there is a strong economic argument for investing in these communities – something that banks like JPMorgan Chase have also publicly declared. But sometimes large institutions require a nudge in the right direction to get going.

Broadening Capital Ownership

Ultimately, the ability to create wealth in a capitalist economy comes from more than just earning a wage. Investment and the accumulation of capital assets are critical pieces to ensuring greater access to prosperity in our society. It's through investments in these appreciating assets – whether stocks and bonds or businesses – that we can provide a pathway to wealth in ways that simply relying on earning a wage can't. As a society, we should consider better and more far‐reaching ways to achieve the goal of more broad‐based participation in capital appreciating markets. People with access to capital will start businesses.

One idea that has been floated for years, and which has at various times been supported by politicians of both political parties, is for the United States to adopt a so‐called baby bond. The idea is simple but powerful. Every child born in the United States would have an investment account set up for them by the federal government. This account would grow tax‐free through investments in a selection of low‐cost investment funds overseen by the US Treasury. Money in this account couldn't be accessed until the child turned 18, after which the money could be used, but only for certain purposes (education, starting a business, etc.). At some point, the money would become freely available for account owners to do with as they please. If such an account grew at 7 percent annually (approximately the yearly overall market return since the end of the Great Depression), it would be worth nearly $17,000 when that child turned 18. If they waited to pull the money out – say to start a business – until they were 30, they would have nearly $40,000.

The beauty of these accounts is what everyone from Ben Franklin to Jack Bogle, the founder of Vanguard, has called “the miracle of compound interest,” which is the multiplying effect of earning interest upon interest.¹ The other benefit is that it would encourage others – family and friends – to contribute as well. Even a small amount of contributed capital makes a significant difference. And having an account already set up for this purpose makes it easy for relatives to add to it. Contributing just $150 annually would increase the value of a baby bond account to over $22,000 at age 18, for example.

The cost of such a program would be relatively modest in comparison to the overall size of the US budget. There are approximately four million children born in the United States each year, meaning that the cost of the program would be in the neighborhood of $20 billion annually. Certainly a lot of money, but it represents less than one‐half of 1 percent of the current federal budget. If that was too much for politicians to swallow, the program could be structured as a loan, where participants had to pay the original principal back when they turned 18. The point is to turn every American into an investor and to provide each child with a nest‐egg on which they can build. Whether they use this money for education or to start a business or for some other purpose, an entire generation could reap the benefits of investing in themselves and such a program could provide critical capital infrastructure for our next generation of builders.

A shift in mindset toward opening broader investment in private enterprises will also help. With few exceptions, ordinary Americans have been unable to participate in most private investments. This started to change a few years ago as the JOBS Act began opening the doors to new investors and new investment opportunities by lifting a number of key restrictions on private investment while at the same time maintaining reasonable controls and protections. The result has been opportunities for those with more limited capital to invest in local businesses and in their communities. We should double down on these opportunities and create new pathways and partnerships between individuals and the businesses they could be supporting. We applaud the work that a number of platforms are doing to enable investors to invest relatively modest sums into businesses. These sums are banded together with investments from other individuals and together constitute a meaningful source of capital investment for the companies they support.

There are other interesting and innovative pathways that communities are developing to help support their local business communities. Local banks are putting together community loan funds that allow local businesses to access risk capital to start or expand their businesses. The federal government would be well served to anchor these community funds by offering matching funds that both encourage and enhance the power of local dollars raised. This could be administered through the existing CDFI program with relatively low incremental overhead. But the incentive it would offer to communities would be meaningful and, we believe, would accelerate the adoption of models that have been proven to effectively spur community investment and development.

Tax is another area where we can offer additional incentives to encourage local investment. There are already a number of tax incentives available for investments into certain types of businesses and into businesses operating in specific locations. These programs should be expanded to include more businesses operating in more areas, and the requirements streamlined so that more small investors can take advantage of these opportunities. State and local governments should match these incentives and set up programs to direct funds to businesses operating in targeted development areas.

Why Should You Act? Because Communities Matter.

We found New Builders working at the hearts of their communities, on businesses that have more value than it may seem to casual observers. Appearances can be deceiving and New Builders surprised us with their resilience and the depth of their vision to transform communities. Many people haven't valued Main Street businesses and grassroots entrepreneurs because today's business world doesn't have the right scales to measure their value.

What is clear from the stories of New Builders that we have told in this book is that community and place are critical parts of their startup journeys. Many have strong and deep ties to the people they work with, and many were helped along the way by communal infrastructure – whether a local banker, a locally sponsored co‐working hub, local funding, or local mentors. Many look for ways to give back and to deepen their community ties, through volunteering at schools, mentoring other entrepreneurs, and advocating for local and small businesses. Their stories inspire us, and inspire other entrepreneurs to become New Builders.

We didn't set out to become passionate advocates on their behalf, but their grit, determination, passion, and drive drew us in. We were often struck by how much New Builders had overcome in their startup journeys. The Covid‐19 crisis, hitting after we had conducted our initial interviews and just as we were starting to write up our findings, added another layer of complexity and urgency to the stories we were telling. As a group, New Builders have faced more than their share of obstacles in a system that has lately made it harder for most entrepreneurs from almost every background to succeed. Women, people of color, and older people in particular often don't fit the mold of a rigid business world.

But being overlooked is the secret power of New Builders. One reason we found many New Builders working on some of the hardest problems facing society today is that setbacks of the kind they have endured give them an uncommon perspective on what's important. One of the unfortunate consequences of success, especially easy success, is that it makes people less sympathetic to the struggles of others. The walls that separate the privileged from everyone else grow higher as a result. One of the seemingly inevitable consequences of running into those walls as an outsider is that it leads to a lack of trust of both other people and the world more generally.

Yet, we found New Builders working across divides to achieve their business goals and to carry people, and not just those who look like them, along on the journey. It's common these days to talk about building an inclusive economy, but across large swaths of society it is merely that, talk. New Builders and the people working to support them are an exception – they are turning talk into action. As Desh's vision for EforAll shows, an inclusive economy is not one that can be dictated top down. It must be built from the ground up, organically. New Builders are the invisible army in this fight, emboldened by the experience and empathy that comes from being outsiders.

New Builders are the future of our economy. They are building that future with a deep connection to their communities. This is the most important lesson we took away from our time with New Builders. Their commitment leaves us hopeful for our collective future.