This-entire-thread-is-the-most-amazing-Rorsach-tes #

The first issue worth noting is that the definition of ’employed’(not discussed in the article or the original paper) vs self-employed incorporated vs self-employed non-incorporated are based on self-reporting from the census [5]: “CURRENT OR MOST RECENT JOB ACTIVITY. If this person had no job or business last week, give information for his/her last job or business. Once you understand where the data came from, you might not infer the same meaning to the underlying paper, whose abstract is here: “We disaggregate the self-employed into incorporated and unincorporated to distinguish between “entrepreneurs” and other business owners. We show that the incorporated self-employed and their businesses engage in activities that demand comparatively strong nonroutine cognitive abilities, while the unincorporated and their firms perform tasks demanding relatively strong manual skills. Let’s see if that makes sense, and if their ’entrepreneur’ is the same as what we might call a ‘startup founder’:

• The ratio of unincorporated to incorporated is 2:1 (approx 10 million vs 5 million in 2009 [1])
• The SBA says 600,000 new ventures are started each year (that they know about) [2]
• There are around 70000 angel deals in one year (2013) [3]
• There are about 4000 venture deals in one year (2014) [4] We can probably agree that the angel and venture deals are ‘real’ startup entrepreneurs. However, doesn’t it seem a little silly to analyze the 5 million incorporated self-employed vs the 10 million non-incorporated self-employed, and assume it’s telling you anything about start-up entrepreneurs ? [1] http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2010/09/art2full.pdf [2] https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/FAQ_Sept_2012.pdf [3] http://www.angelcapitalassociation.org/data/Documents/Resour… [4] http://nvca.org/?ddownload=1868 (2015 NVCA Yearbook) [5] http://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/methodology/ques… Edited to fix formatting issues