"America’s entrepreneurial boom begins long before venture capital," by Anthony Hernandez, Ph.D.

Friends,

Dr. Anthony Hernandez’ just-published piece in Fortune, “America’s Entrepreneurial Boom Begins Long Before Venture Capital,” makes a powerful and necessary point: entrepreneurship does not begin in boardrooms or venture-capital meetings. It begins in classrooms, community colleges, Hispanic-Serving Institutions, HBCUs, Tribal Colleges, and other Minority-Serving Institutions that cultivate the talent, confidence, and opportunity on which our economy depends.

His argument matters because it reframes education policy as economic policy. At a time when Latino entrepreneurs are helping drive business formation, job creation, and revenue growth across the United States, disinvesting in the institutions that prepare these future innovators is not only unjust—it is economically shortsighted.

Dr. Hernandez reminds us that America’s competitiveness depends on whether we are willing to invest in the students, workers, and communities already shaping the nation’s future. This is an important essay for educators, policymakers, business leaders, and anyone concerned about inclusive opportunity and shared prosperity.

I encourage you to read and share it: https://lnkd.in/gcsSzf2k

-Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.


America’s entrepreneurial boom begins long before venture capital

by Anthony Hernandez, Ph.D. July 5, 2026

Dr. Anthony Hernandez is a faculty member in the Department of Educational 

Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.©courtesy of Anthony Hernandez


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 U.S. economy.

These entrepreneurs did not simply appear. Every founder begins somewhere. Behind every successful entrepreneur is a talent-development system that helped prepare them. We often celebrate entrepreneurs after they build successful companies but spend far less time thinking about the institutions that helped prepare them.

Colleges and universities, particularly Minority-Serving Institutions, are part of America’s economic infrastructure. They produce workers, innovators, and entrepreneurs. If policymakers and business leaders want more business creation, they cannot afford to weaken one of the country’s most productive talent pipelines.

As a former Title V administrator at a Hispanic-Serving Institution, I have spent years studying how colleges create pathways into economic mobility. Research consistently shows that these institutions produce strong workforce, degree completion, and economic mobility outcomes despite serving students with fewer resources.

The story is visible at Compton College, a Minority-Serving Institution in California. Over the past decade, the college has invested in the supports that help students complete college and enter the workforce like dual-enrollment programs, workforce advising, childcare, healthcare access, basic-needs supports, and transfer pathways. These are often described as “student services.” Business leaders should recognize them as investments in future workers and entrepreneurs.

Corporate America spends billions searching for talent. Yet one of the country’s fastest-growing entrepreneurial pipelines already exists. Partnerships with these institutions offer companies access to future founders, engineers, healthcare workers, technology professionals, and business leaders. Supporting these institutions is not charity. It is a long-term talent strategy.

IPEDS data show that Compton College outperforms many peer institutions in completion and transfer despite serving large numbers of Pell-eligible students. Those outcomes strengthen local labor markets and expand the nation’s talent pipeline.

But federal support for Minority-Serving Institutions has become increasingly uncertain.

This debate comes at a pivotal moment. Even as new research documents the rapid growth of Black and Latino entrepreneurship, policymakers are reducing or redirecting investments in higher education, including programs that support many Minority-Serving Institutions. America cannot expect to produce more entrepreneurs while investing less in the institutions that educate them.

Policymakers should strengthen these institutions through investments tied to workforce development, entrepreneurship education, and student success. Business leaders should do the same. Rather than viewing partnerships with Minority-Serving Institutions as philanthropy, companies should view them as long-term talent investments through internships, workforce partnerships, entrepreneurship centers, and research collaborations.

Returns on educational investment also extend well beyond the individual student. They benefit their families, neighborhoods, employers, and regional economies. A healthy workforce pipeline is not a social luxury. It is fundamental to doing business.

The future of American entrepreneurship will not be determined solely by venture-capital or startup investment. We can invest in the institutions preparing tomorrow’s entrepreneurs or continue treating them as expendable.

America cannot celebrate record entrepreneurial growth while underinvesting in the institutions producing tomorrow’s entrepreneurs. America’s next generation of entrepreneurs is already in our classrooms. The question is whether we will invest in them before our competitors do. Strengthening those institutions is not simply education policy. It is economic policy.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

Texans are rushing to start businesses during the coronavirus pandemic. Why?

Stories of resilience and entrepreneurship are very encouraging to learn about in these challenging times. 

-Angela Valenzuela

Technicians Melani Florez, right, and Cecilia De La Luz work with subjects as 

Meghan Garza and Juan Cano supervisor their operation, BexarAid, on location 

at a rehabilitation facility in Boerne on Nov. 10, 2020.

Tom Reel /Staff photographer 

Texans are rushing to start businesses during the coronavirus pandemic. Why?

By Madison Iszler, Staff writer

Nov. 12, 2020Updated: Nov. 12, 2020 6 a.m. | San Antonio Express News

When the coronavirus pandemic forced Pinch Boil House partners Sean Wen and Andrew Ho to close their downtown restaurant for months, they decided to use the extra time to check off an item on their to-do list.

They reached out to South BBQ & Kitchen owner Andrew Samia about opening a restaurant combining Southeast Asian curry with Texas BBQ, an idea they’d been contemplating for a while.

“We just never had the time to do it because we were caught up in the everyday stress and struggle of running a restaurant,” Wen said.

The trio teamed up on pop-ups to test out their idea before opening a permanent Curry Boys BBQ location at 2334 N. St. Mary’s St. last month. The building is small and the restaurant doesn’t require much staffing — it’s a low-cost set-up, Wen said.

Customers can take their meals to go or eat at picnic tables outside. While traffic at Pinch Boil House downtown is still about half of what it was before the pandemic, Curry Boys BBQ has sold out every day since opening.

“Too early to say if we’re crazy or not,” Wen said, laughing. “I’m going to count my blessings for now when I have them.”

With COVID-19 cases rising again in San Antonio and winter approaching, the restaurant might add delivery or to-go family packs.

“We built this thing with the idea that it could scale for the future,” Wen said. “Obviously, the future for food and beverage, for better or for worse, is skewed toward … ease of take-out or contact-less ordering and delivering.”

Starting a business during the coronavirus pandemic — which is ravaging the economy, throwing employees out of work and disrupting myriad industries — may seem crazy. But plenty of people are considering striking out on their own, even as hordes of businesses fold permanently.

Census data shows business applications for employee identification numbers have risen in recent months, totaling more than 3.2 million over the first three quarters compared to about 2.6 million during the same period last year. That includes independent contractors and gig-economy workers.

The number of startups that are likely to become employers — as gauged by so-called “high-propensity business applications” to register the ventures with the government — reached a record level in the third quarter. In Texas, they are up about 19 percent across the first three quarters of 2020 compared with the same stretch in 2019, seasonally-adjusted data show.

The COVID-19 recession may be one of the biggest motivators for these entrepreneurs.

Layoffs and uncertainty about future unemployment may be pushing more people to take their working lives into their own hands, whether that’s turning a side hustle into full-time work or finally fleshing out a business idea they’d been gestating for years.

“They’d always been thinking about doing their own thing, and (the pandemic) ended up being that sort of trigger point,” said Luis Martinez, director of the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Trinity University.

Another factor: new opportunities created by COVID-19. The virus has reshaped how people work, attend school, shop and spend their free time, and there’s money to be made with each change.

Just think of face masks, said Thomas Tunstall, research director at the Institute for Economic Development at the University of Texas at San Antonio. For many wearers, they’ve become small fashion, or personal, statements. Somebody has to meet the demand for face coverings that tell something about us to passersby.

There’s also the fact that entrepreneurs may also be able to borrow at lower rates than before — through Small Business Administration programs or micro-lenders such as San Antonio-based LiftFund — or lease space more affordably.

“We live differently than we did before the pandemic started,” Tunstall said. “The economy is essentially restructuring in response to different demand patterns.”

Test market

COVID-19 is the reason Meghan Garza and Juan Cano launched BexarAid. Their startup provides testing for the virus for individuals and businesses.

It began as a website they set up this spring to connect essential workers with people wanting to donate masks and other protective gear. But conversations with friends in health care prompted them to shift to COVID-19 testing. They wanted to provide a quick, efficient way to get tested in South Texas.

BexarAid offers drive-thru testing at a facility near the Pearl for $150, an at-home test for $200 and mass testing for businesses and organizations. Customers can set up appointments online for the polymerase chain reaction tests, which are administered by medical assistants hired by BexarAid.

The company partners with several laboratories. Results currently are delivered the next day, though they’re guaranteed within 48 hours, Cano said.

BexarAid was providing about 2,000 tests a week on average in July — one of the peaks in San Antonio’s COVID-19 cases — and has worked with “dozens” of employers, Cano said.

Garza and Cano aren’t strangers to starting a business: the pair launched companies together and individually before the pandemic. With BexarAid, they hope to help flatten the curve and “get us out of this pandemic as fast as possible,” Cano said.

“We’re extremely blessed that it’s now an actual business,” he added. “We were not intending for it to be. I think entrepreneurship can many times be accidental, but it doesn’t make it any less rewarding.”

The pace of U.S. business applications is starting to drop back to pre-pandemic levels, but still remains elevated compared to last year, according to an analysis of census data by the Economic Innovation Group.

Many of the new startups are non-store retailers; personal and laundry services; professional, scientific and technical services; administrative and support services; truck transportation; and restaurants and bars.

There are caveats. Applications in some of those sectors are automatically marked as businesses with a higher likelihood of hiring workers even if that’s not necessarily happening, and the data includes some acquisitions of existing companies, the public policy organization noted.

It’s hard to tell “how much of the increase is attributable to entrepreneurs finding opportunity in the crisis to form businesses likely to hire employees as opposed to newly unemployed individuals starting their own businesses,” EIG said in the census report. “The latter are more likely to be non-employer firms (opting for self-employment) that are not well-positioned to fuel a rapid jobs recovery.”

“Nevertheless, the sustained and unprecedentedly high rate of new business applications hints that the current crisis could be part of an accelerating restructuring of the economy, as entrepreneurs and everyday workers adapt to a new economic reality,” the organization said.

San Antonio Startup Week, a conference for startups and entrepreneurs, was held online in October due to the pandemic. As part of the event, attorney David Jones participated in a free legal clinic to help aspiring entrepreneurs in under-served communities set up their own businesses.

More than 50 people signed up in one day. Legal clinics typically draw decent turnouts but “everybody who was involved in it was frankly kind of blown away that the interest came as fast as it did,” Jones said.

Attendees consulted with attorneys and filled out paperwork for limited liability corporations, which costs about $300 to register. The clinic helped form about two dozen startups, a number of them launched by Black, Latino, LGBTQ and women entrepreneurs, Jones said.

“It’s just an absolutely joyful experience to see people get as excited as they get when they realize ... ‘I’m a real live business owner,’” Jones said, adding that he hopes to organize another clinic before the end of the year.

Anastasia Calhoun was already launching her own business when the pandemic began.

The kernel of an idea started materializing about two years ago. After benefiting from massage treatments, Calhoun started researching spa kits with upscale organic products to use at home but couldn’t find what she was looking for.

She decided to start her own venture, selling handcrafted skin and body care products through a subscription model. She set up a limited liability corporation for the business, dubbed Godtliv, and targeted an April launch date.

Cue the pandemic. When it disrupted the supply chain for the materials and ingredients she needed, Calhoun switched to selling items she already had in stock through an e-commerce website and launched just a few weeks later than planned.

Another COVID-19-related upheaval followed. Calhoun, an architectural researcher, was furloughed and later laid off from her job in architecture. After her apartment lease ended, she headed to Oklahoma, where some of her family members live.

“In one sense, it does suck, but on the other hand, I was already so invested in it both emotionally and financially that to stop it I think would’ve been worse,” Calhoun said of starting a business during the pandemic. “If I had been at a different spot in the business development process, no, I probably would not have opened it.”

With people stuck indoors and grappling with pandemic-induced stress, it’s also a good time to be selling self-care items. And an e-commerce concept fits the current business conditions, Calhoun said.

Aside from working on Godtliv, she’s part of a team that received a grant to research the intersections of climate change, racial justice and pandemics in the built environment.

“Even though everything’s so uncertain, I’m really loving my day-to-day right now,” Calhoun said, laughing. “My office smells amazing ... I’m not opposed to taking something in architecture again, but if I can build this, I’m pretty happy here too.”