| The global business landscape is full of empires born from crisis — General Electric, Walt Disney Co., Venmo and Airbnb to name a few. The Covid moment will eventually give us another batch of industry-warping companies; in fact, they may be amongst us already. A wave of entrepreneurial activity generally requires a set of somewhat contrarian conditions. New businesses require capital and the confidence that customers will be spending, so they tend to be scarce in the depths of a recession. Yet, it also helps if the labor market is shabby enough that scores of people don't have cushy, traditional jobs. Collectively, we respect the hustle. But individually we respect the benefits more often than not. In short, entrepreneurial activity can be both a leading and a lagging indicator. The ramp up tends to come in advance of economic growth and the swoon tends to come after the economy has peaked, as would-be founders fold back into full-time positions. For example, entrepreneurship, by at least one measure, spiked in 2009, just as the Recession ended and months before the stock market started consistently chugging north. But new business formation stayed low for the next decade as would-be founders hitched onto a surging labor market and took the path more traveled — the route that often included a 401k match and health insurance. The share of people starting a business by choice, rather than by necessity, has been hovering at close to 90% for the past four years. So where are we now? New business applications in the U.S. plummeted in mid-March for obvious reasons. They slowly clawed back and by mid-May started running ahead of last year's pace and accelerating steadily. In the third week of June, the U.S. counted 87,950 new business applications, almost one-third more than in the year-earlier period. It appears that we are, once again, becoming a nation of inventors, hardscrabble salesmen and bootstrap opportunists. In a matter of weeks, we have drastically altered how we shop, commute, travel and communicate. Even what we eat and how we dress are morphing in strange ways. In short, there have seldom been so many opportunities, so suddenly for entrepreneurs to jump into. What's more, capital and human capital are both cheap. In teaching children how to process tragedy, Mister Rogers famously told children to "Look for the helpers." Similar advice applies for economic fallout; look for the hustlers. They are showing up now, seeding the Covid wasteland with green shoots.  Bloomberg Businessweek, June 29, 2020. Subscribe now. | 
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