THE NEW BUILDERS: Why Women, People Of Color and People Over 40 Are America's Economic Future

From Foundry Group and Pledge 1% co-founder Seth Levine and award winning business journalist Elizabeth MacBride comes this timely exploration of American entrepreneurship as it stands today and the new players who will determine the future of economic growth, offering hopeful personal stories as businesses are created from the ground up and detailing the need for innovative policies from the government, communities, and private institutions, especially in this time of crisis, to ensure their ultimate viability.

Contrary to popular belief, Seth and Elizabeth show that American entrepreneurship has been aggressively on decline since the Great Recession of 2008 and we are yet to feel the full negative impact of the Covid-19 related financial crisis. Large chains and "deliver everything" companies such as Amazon are displacing Main Street businesses and new firms are being started at a slower rate, are employing fewer workers and are located disproportionately in the major metropolitan areas, leaving much of the country out of the prosperity loop.
At the same time, our image of the "typical" American entrepreneur is frozen in time: a 30-something white male, with Ivy League credentials and a connected network of mentors who will help propel his tech start-up into the stratosphere. Wrong! The facts: today's American entrepreneurs, the people who we'll need to help us dig out of the current economic recession and help rebuild our economy, are more likely to be female and non-white and often immigrant. In fact, the number of women-owned businesses has increased 31 times between 1972 and 2018 according to the Kauffman Foundation (in 1972, women-owned businesses accounted for just 4.6% of all firms; in 2018 that figure was 40%). Meanwhile, the fastest-growing group female entrepreneurs are women of color, who are responsible for 64% of the new women-owned businesses being created.
These are the New Builders who are the future of American entrepreneurship - and economic growth -- and in this visionary book, Seth and Elizabeth detail how varied inspiring stories offer hope but why the need for extended support and new strategies and innovative policies from government, communities and private institutions, especially in this time of crisis, will be crucial to their ultimate viability.
Optimistic, timely, and focused on vital solutions, The New Builders also seamlessly ties into the broad debates about the overriding socio-economic issue of our time - rising income inequality -- and how to halt its pernicious advance that has caused so much dangerous polarization in our country in its wake. The success of broadly-based entrepreneurship is a key factor in this equation and Seth offers creative and achievable ideas that are a call to arms for business leaders, policy makers and the budding new entrepreneurs themselves, some 50 million strong. The audience for this book is substantial.
Seth Levine is the perfect author for this book. He is a partner and co-founder at the Boulder, CO-based venture capital firm Foundry Group. Foundry has over $2.5 billion under management and supports both a large direct portfolio of companies as well as investments in 35 venture funds across the United States with a combined portfolio of nearly 10,000 companies.
In 2016 Seth co-founded Pledge 1% - an international organization that encourages startups to give back to their local communities through gifts of equity, profit, product, and time. Pledge has over 7,000 members across the globe. Closer to home, Seth is an advisor to the Greater Colorado Venture Fund - a fund set up to invest in rural Colorado. He is also on the executive committee of StartupColorado - a public/private partnership designed to help spur economic development and growth outside of the front range. As you might imagine, Seth's network to support The New Builders is extensive - please see the proposal for his full reach.
Co-author Elizabeth MacBride is an award-winning business journalist. A former managing editor of Crain's New York Business, her work has appeared in Forbes, Newsweek, The Washington Post, Quartz, HBR.com and many others. Her stories about entrepreneurs, like those featured in The New Builders, have been viewed by millions of people and translated into languages around the world. She is the founder of Times of Entrepreneurship, a new publication covering entrepreneurs beyond Silicon Valley; it just added the Walton Family Foundation as a sponsor. Elizabeth is also the host of Sparkt, a new podcast featuring interviews of the world's leading entrepreneurs.