This Is the Best State for Entrepreneurs

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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This Is the Best State for Entrepreneurs

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Starting a new business is risky. About 20% of new businesses last only two years. Companies with fewer than 100 workers employ a third of the U.S. workforce, according to the Census Bureau.

Of course, many entrepreneurs believe that they can create companies like those which have been the most successful in the past several decades. Google was started in 1998. Tesla was founded in 2003. Facebook launched in 2004. The founders of each of these companies are now billionaires and have made some of their employees millions of dollars.
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CardConnnect set out to determine the states where entrepreneurs are most likely to start businesses. The methodology for its “The Entrepreneur Capital of the USA” study includes the use of Census Bureau data and Google Trends.

The researchers found that the best metric was new business applications per person in each state. The period measured was between September 2020 and August 2021.
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The methodology leaves out a number of factors typically used in similar studies. It does not take into account tax breaks for start-ups, quality of the workforce (which usually includes education), the quality of life for workers and whether a business is near a large population area. Perhaps the most critical data left out are those on business regulations.

The study does show how large the number of people who want to start a new business is. The authors pointed out:

[A]ccording to a study conducted by FreshBooks in 2019, a staggering 24 million Americans wanted to leave their jobs and work for themselves by 2021. That’s more than the entire population of Florida.

Wyoming is at the top of the list because about one in 20 people made a new business application over the measured period. There is no concentration of states by this category. Wyoming was followed by Delaware and Georgia.

These are the 20 most entrepreneurial states:

  • Wyoming (1 in 20)
  • Delaware (1 in 25)
  • Georgia (1 in 30)
  • Florida (1 in 35)
  • District of Columbia (1 in 40)
  • Mississippi (1 in 45)
  • Nevada (1 in 45)
  • Louisiana (1 in 45)
  • Utah (1 in 50)
  • Maryland (1 in 50)
  • Colorado (1 in 50)
  • South Carolina (1 in 55)
  • New Jersey (1 in 55)
  • Montana (1 in 60)
  • Texas (1 in 60)
  • North Carolina (1 in 60)
  • Illinois (1 in 65)
  • New York (1 in 65)
  • Alabama (1 in 65)
  • Michigan (1 in 66)

Click here to read see which is the best state to start a business.
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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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