Why Black America Creates Virtually No Jobs and What We Can Do About It

An unemployment line, courtesy of The Patron Saint

Black Americans are no strangers to entrepreneurship. But sheer numbers of entrepreneurs do not translate into fast-growing companies that create jobs.

Case and point: The Bureau of Labor Statistics data show a 60 percent spike in Black entrepreneurship between 2002 and 2007, equivalent to 1.9 million Black-owned businesses. However, more than 1.8 million of those businesses were sole proprietors with zero employees. Thus, it’s no surprise there’s zero job growth and chronic high unemployment across Black America. According to a 2010 report published by the Kauffman Foundation, nearly all net new job growth in the nation since 1980 has come from “high-growth” growth companies, those whose revenues grow quickly.

To add insult to injury, the nation’s 1.9 million Black-owned businesses combined produced less than 1 percent of the nation’s GDP. And that was at the height of entrepreneurship in Black America … before the economic collapse.

Why do our businesses stagnate? Many reasons have been put forward, but one that is critical —lack of funding — will very soon have a potential solution.

High-growth entrepreneurship often requires the risk of significant capital investment in the beginning of a company, in the seed stage, where the difference between the life and death of an idea depends upon the availability of capital to sustain the business long enough to reach critical milestones. Without enough capital to maintain the startup through the “Valley of Death,” where entrepreneurs start their race against time and depleting cash reserves to reach a sustainable stream of revenue, the vast majority of these risk-taking job creators will watch their ideas die in the incubation or “seed” stage.

Funding is so essential to the process of innovation that Steve Blank, professor of entrepreneurship at Stanford University said in his Secret History of Silicon Valley, “Silicon Valley would still be a bunch of engineers working in their garages without a culture of risk capital.”

There is no “culture of risk capital” in Black America. But this month, President Obama signed into law a bill that could change that.

The JOBS Act (Jumpstart Our Business Startups), signed into law on April 5, 2012 allows entrepreneurs to raise money — through a process called “crowdfunding” — from people previously ineligible to participate in certain types of investments. For communities and entrepreneurs that have historically been disconnected from investing in private companies, the law is a boon. (Cont… Dominion of New York)