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Failure to Launch?

Conventional wisdom holds that recessions are hotbeds of entrepreneurial activity, but will this time be different?

October 1, 2009

American economic history brims with big-name companies that can trace their beginnings to a recession. Coors was founded during the recession of 1873. Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard cobbled together the prototypical garage start-up at the end of the Great Depression. Bill Gates, undeterred by stagflation, founded Microsoft in 1975. According to a recent report by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, an organization devoted to the study and promotion of entrepreneurship, more than half of the companies on the 2009 Fortune 500 list were founded during a recession or bear market, as were nearly half of the businesses on the 2008 Inc. 500 list of the fastest-growing companies in the United States. Read more...

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