# America Has Become a Nation of Founders > Americans are starting businesses at a pace the country has never seen, and a new wave of them is being built by one person with a laptop. The boom is real, its newest engine is artificial intelligence, and Europe is being left behind. - Source: Morning Week - Canonical URL: https://morningweek.com/article/america-has-become-a-nation-of-founders - Author: Morning Week Newsroom - Section: Business - Published: 2026-07-27T15:29:28.518Z - Updated: 2026-07-27T15:29:28.518Z - Tags: United States, entrepreneurship, small business, startups, artificial intelligence, solopreneurs, economy, Europe --- For most of the past half century, the romance of the American start up lived in a few square miles of California and a handful of glass towers in New York. The rest of the country was where big companies employed people, not where ordinary people built companies of their own. That picture is now out of date. Across small towns and mid sized cities, on main streets and in spare bedrooms, Americans are forming businesses at a rate the country has simply never recorded before. The scale is hard to overstate. In the first six months of this year alone, Americans filed to create close to 3.5 million new businesses. June by itself produced more than 548,000 of them, edging past the frenzied summer of 2021 when the pandemic first sent people rushing to work for themselves. Last year the country minted almost 6 million new firms, up 8 percent on the year before. Set against 2019, when roughly a million applications came in during the first quarter, this year's 1.6 million over the same stretch looks less like a blip and more like a new normal. ## A boom that refused to fade What makes the numbers striking is that they were supposed to come back down. The surge that began in 2020 was widely written off as a one time reaction to lockdowns, stimulus cheques and sudden unemployment, a bubble certain to deflate once life returned to something like normal. Instead the line kept climbing. Higher interest rates did not kill it. Nor did inflation, nor the wobble in global markets. The habit of starting a business, once picked up by millions of Americans, has proven remarkably sticky. Some of the fuel is the old fashioned kind. A tight labour market and a bruising white collar hiring slowdown have nudged people who might once have chased a corporate promotion into working for themselves instead. Confidence has held up too, with close to nine in ten owners reporting that their businesses are steady or improving. When the safe path narrows, the entrepreneurial one starts to look less like a gamble and more like the sensible choice. ## The rise of the company of one The newest driver is different, and it may prove the most consequential. A growing share of these ventures are companies of one, founded and run by a single person with no plan to hire anyone. Applications from one person firms have jumped more than 20 percent since early last year, even as filings from businesses likely to take on staff have stayed flat. The classic image of a founder assembling a team in a garage is giving way to something leaner and stranger, a lone operator commanding a fleet of software. Artificial intelligence is the reason. Tasks that used to force a founder to recruit a technical co founder, hire a marketer or pay a virtual assistant can increasingly be handled by one person pointing the right tools at the problem. Agentic coding assistants write the software, generative models draft the copy and handle the support inbox, and a single laptop now does the work of a small early team. One study of 2,400 solo businesses found that those leaning hard on automation earned more than four times as much per hour worked as those grinding through tasks by hand, with the median automated owner clearing around 127 dollars for every hour of real work. ## Beyond the coasts The map of American enterprise is being redrawn along with its methods. The action is no longer concentrated in the expensive coastal hubs but spread across lower cost, business friendly states where a dollar of savings stretches further and paperwork is lighter. North Carolina recorded nearly 20,000 new business filings in a single April, more than a third above the year before. Mississippi's tally leapt by almost half over the same period. Wyoming, Montana and Nevada are pulling in founders who a decade ago would have felt obliged to move toward Silicon Valley rather than away from it. That dispersal matters because it changes who gets to take part. When starting a company no longer requires an expensive zip code, a venture capitalist's blessing or a team of specialists on the payroll, the pool of people who can plausibly try their hand widens dramatically. The barrier to entry, once a wall, has become a step. ## The gap with Europe The contrast with the other side of the Atlantic is becoming impossible to ignore. Europe frets endlessly about why it cannot grow a rival to its American technology giants, yet the deeper problem shows up long before any company gets large. By one count the United States produces close to four times as many standout entrepreneurs per head of population as Europe does. Where America treats business failure as a rite of passage and makes forming a company a matter of minutes, much of Europe still wraps the whole endeavour in caution, cost and the quiet suggestion that a steady job is the more respectable path. None of this guarantees a happy ending. Many of these new ventures will fold, plenty of the solo firms will stay tiny by design, and it is far from settled whether a nation of one person companies will lift the productivity of the wider economy or simply rearrange how people earn a living. But the raw fact is not in doubt. At a moment when much of the rich world is aging, cautious and short of workers, America has turned itself into the easiest place on earth to start something new. For an economy that has always run on reinvention, that may be the most valuable advantage of all. --- Originally published by Morning Week. Free to cite with attribution and a link to https://morningweek.com/article/america-has-become-a-nation-of-founders.