Brazil Room - Venture Capital
Think venture doesn't matter? Companies less than five years old have generated all the net jobs in the US economy since the 1970s, according to the Kauffman Foundation. All the more pleasing, then, that Correlation Ventures raises their $165 million maiden fund : two years of blood, sweat and tears - but they got it done.
And here is the US jobs problem: from the mid-1980s to mid-2000s, 450,000 to 550,000 businesses with at least one employee created each year. In 2009, there were under 400,000 - the slow down began in 2006 BTW, and not just following Lehman. While most companies fail - over 90% of vc backed companies do so - the survivors account for a huge portion of the new jobs. Anyone in SV knows this.
For most of the 1990s, new jobs , equal to about 8% of total employment, created every quarter, while jobs disappeared at a rate of about 7.5% (Schumpter's 'creative destruction'), so the total number of people in work rose. Starting in 2000, both job creation and elimination began to drift downwards even as employment recovered after the 2000-01 recession. In the 2007-09 recession, job creation plunged while job losses soared- as would be expected - but the trend since has been less predictable.
Job destruction has fallen and is now well below its rate in the 1990s, when the economy much stronger. Job creation, however, remains weak - at about 6.5% employment. This why America's unemployment stubborn. Chronic?
