America’s entrepreneurial boom begins long before venture capital

The United States has spent years worrying about slowing business creation. But one group of entrepreneurs has quietly prevented that decline. According to a new report out of Stanford, between 2017 and 2023, Latino-owned businesses added 180,000 new firms while white-owned businesses lost roughly 140,000. Put differently, without Latino entrepreneurs, America would have ended the period with fewer businesses than it started with.

Latino entrepreneurs weren’t simply contributing to America’s business growth. They were preventing its decline.

Yet this remarkable economic story has received surprisingly little attention. At a moment when business leaders are searching for new engines of economic growth, one of the country’s fastest-growing entrepreneurial forces has been hiding in plain sight.

Latino-owned businesses added nearly one million jobs during those six years, compared with roughly 658,000 among white-owned firms. Revenue climbed from $495 billion to more than $832 billion, a 68 percent increase compared with 45 percent growth among white-owned firms. Latino-owned businesses generated more net new firms and jobs than businesses owned by any other major racial or ethnic group.

But this isn’t simply a story about one community. The broader Latino economy now approaches $4 trillion in annual economic output, making it one of the world’s largest economies if it stood alone. It is growing more than twice as fast as the overall........

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