Every Day is Startup Day

by Matt Gardner, CEO, California Technology Council

For the last few years members of Congress and organizations have together celebrated a National Startup Day in August. This year, Representatives Darrell Issa from California and Jared Polis from Colorado will lead the effort to bring people into closer contact with life inside startups today, August 19th.

Millions of people make their living in technology – over 2 million in California alone, according to the Cyberstates 2015 report by CompTIA. Their collected works and deeds have shaped the entertainment, productivity, transportation, health, and lifestyle of almost every American, let alone their global impact.

And there’s the rub.

The works of those immersed in the startup life cannot possibly be distilled to one day. We celebrate National Startup Day, and yet trying to explain how life has changed thanks to all this effort, investment, and innovation would do a disservice to those entrepreneurs and risk-takers.

Their effort, energy, and sense of risk warrants attention every day. Most of us know this to be true from the improvement in our daily lives. We telecommute thanks to computing and broadband improvements. We exercise to Fitbits and iPods. We get home on Saturday night with Uber.  We consume news through Flipboard and peruse annual reports in PDF. We laugh with Pixar. We adjust our household climate with Nest.  We cross new bridges thanks to AutoDesk. We see the real possibility of American energy independence with home batteries and electric cars. 

Innovations from companies like these improve every job in every industry. Most of those innovations have come from companies that are younger than anyone from the Baby Boom or Generation X.

Rather than tell this story through anecdotes, let’s explore the story told by the numbers.

  1. According to the PWC MoneyTree, there was almost $31 billion in venture capital invested in 2,237 deals the first six months of 2015. This means that the average day between January and June saw 12 deals and $170 million in venture investment.
  2. Again from MoneyTree, there were 207 software deals receiving $1.5 billion in venture investment in the first half of 2015. That’s more than one deal each day taking in more than $8 million in the software industry alone.
  3. Based on the 2015 State of Innovation Report by Thomson Reuters, there were on average 5,753 patents granted per day worldwide during 2014 in the 12 most innovative industries they analyzed.
  4. From the Kauffman Startup Index for 2015, there are on average 530,000 new business owners per month in the United States, equating to more than 17,600 new business owners per day. While those might not all represent the startups we consider traditional in the tech economy, they do represent a similar spirit of risk and entrepreneurship.
  5. In CyberStates 2015, CompTIA summarizes total U.S. tech wages to the tune of a daily average of $1,791,576,110 in wages pumped into the economy.

That’s an average day of 5,753 patents granted, 17,600 new business owners, 12 deals, $170 million in venture investment, and millions of Americans working and playing faster, easier, better, and smarter.

This might be a startup day, but with numbers like these, it simply can’t be THE startup day.

For all those taking the risk, and for all those who benefit from their creativity, innovation, and new products, every day is startup day.

If every day is Startup Day to you, we invite you to join the CTC. For more information and to get started, click HERE.