The Truth About the Entrepreneurship Boom, and and How to Manage Cash Flow as a Founder

**Scott Galloway** (0:01)
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Somewhere with a lot more tabs open.

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**Scott Galloway** (1:42)
Welcome to Office Hours with Prof G. This is the part of the show where we answer your questions about business, tech, entrepreneurship, and whatever else is on your mind. If you'd like to submit a question for next time, you can send a voice recording to officehoursatproptgmedia.com. Again, that's officehoursatproptgmedia.com. Or post your question on the Scott Galloway subreddit, and we just might feature it in our next episode.
Question number one comes from Cheddar Ben on Reddit. You recently spoke about the explosion of single person businesses. Are these businesses and gig work dramatically skewing the jobs report in a way that has never happened before?
So, yes-ish. The jobs report is actually built from two different surveys. The headline number everyone reacts to is payrolls added ex-jobs. It's derived from a survey of company payrolls. So by design, it only counts people on an employer's books. It doesn't count the self-employed or most gig workers at all. That's why the boom in one person businesses can't be inflating it. The second survey, the household survey, which asks people directly whether they're working, is the one that does capture solo businesses and gig work and what actually sets the unemployment rate. So in sum, the growth in single person businesses isn't skewing the jobs number, it's showing up in a different survey, but it's leaving that headline payroll figure increasingly blind to how many Americans are really earning a living and how they're doing it. So there was, now quote unquote, the entrepreneurship boom. I would call it a boomlet because some of it is misleading. There were almost 6 million new business applications last year. The most on record in the 20 plus years that the census has kept track. But it turns out the majority of these businesses are not expected to become companies that have an intention of hiring people and have any payroll. So in other words, there's more people starting a food blog where they'll be the only employee as opposed to starting a restaurant where they might hire 10 or 20 people. Also, there's a romanticizing of entrepreneurship and the number of people who self-identify as a CEO or a founder has exploded because people see those people as the new rock stars. One in three US adults say they plan to start a new business or side hustle in 2026 up 94 percent from last year. What I would be interested to see is how much, I mean, I think about, I immediately go when I think of this to the creator economy, and just how hard it is and how few people can make a sustainable living there.
I think these numbers hide how many people are using this as a side hustle, maybe to supplement income from another, in addition to another primary earner in the household, or because they enjoy it, or because it gives them flexibility. But I think the creator economy is slightly better. I mean, the long tail is better, so I was going to say it's like the NBA. It's not, it's better than that. But when you look at how many views you need to garner to earn a decent living, you have to be exceptionally talented, working your ass off, and get huge resonance across a bunch of platforms just to make and be thinking about content creation every day and be outstanding at it. In some, it's a hell of a lot easier to make a living being an insurance adjuster or an actuary than it is to be a creator. I find that the creator economy is romanticized, it's cool, but it's very misleading, and a lot of these jobs numbers hide what I think is sort of a deep underbelly, and that is there aren't nearly as many jobs being created by sustainable, enduring, well-paying job openings, if you will. I appreciate the question.