Start-Up Boom in the Pandemic Is Growing Stronger
Summary
They set up a website and opened a business, Songlorious, writing custom songs for weddings, birthdays and similar events. And though it began in New York, they are building the business in a midsize city, Chattanooga, Tenn., where they moved in December looking in part for a lower cost of living. Early evidence suggests the increase in start-ups has been strongest outside the big-city downtowns that have been hit hard by the exodus of office workers. Researchers at the Kauffman Foundation found that about 30 percent of new entrepreneurs last year were unemployed when they started their businesses, roughly double the prepandemic rate. The preceding recession, more than a decade earlier, also led to millions of job losses, but entrepreneurship, by a variety of measures, fell sharply and rebounded only slowly.