Impact
What a first check does after it lands.
Jobs, counties, and the person who took the risk. Published research, each figure carrying its source.
Jobs
New companies are where the jobs come from.
Not the large employers, and not in most years the existing ones.
jobs added by firms in their first year. Net job growth comes through new firms, because existing firms are net job destroyers in most years
of net new jobs come from firms one to five years old
net jobs added by Georgia small businesses in the year to March 2024. All Georgia establishments combined added 39,195, so larger firms shed more than they created
of everyone who works in Georgia works for one of its 1.4 million small businesses
Kane, Kauffman Foundation, Census Business Dynamics Statistics 1977 to 2005. United States figure. Stangler and Litan, Kauffman Foundation. United States figure. SBA Office of Advocacy, citing BLS Business Employment Dynamics. Georgia figure. SBA Office of Advocacy, Georgia 2025 State Profile.
Counties
Who owns the employer decides how the county does.
A company owned in Georgia keeps its payroll, its suppliers and its decisions here.
income growth per head in counties with more small, locally owned employers. Where the employers are large and owned somewhere else, it grows slower
additional jobs lost in the surrounding economy for every job lost directly in a large plant closure. Rural regions are hit harder and take longer to recover than urban ones
Georgia counties where more people died than were born in 2024, out of 159. Two decades ago the number was under 20
of rural bank branches closed between 2012 and 2017, against 9 percent in urban counties. More than 2,100 places in the country are more than ten miles from a branch, and over 1,500 of them are rural
The Cedar Springs mill in Early County opened in 1962 and closed in 2025, taking $182M jobs at once. A county does not get a second mill. What it can keep is the grocery, the clinic, and the employer with forty people on the payroll.
Fleming and Goetz, Economic Development Quarterly 25(3), 2011. United States figure. Journal of Economic Geography, Oxford, 2018. United States figure. The Current, September 2025, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Georgia figure. Federal Reserve, Perspectives from Main Street, November 2019. United States figure. Economic impact report to the Early County commissioners, September 2025, reported by Georgia Public Broadcasting and the Albany Herald. Several outlets reporting one analysis.
What a state gets back
Georgia has already done a version of this.
Two programs measured by outsiders, and one portfolio already at work here.
in state funds to MassVentures since 1978. The annual average since: $1.9B in state GDP, $3.3B in economic activity, $119M in state and local tax, 4,346 jobs, 186 companies, and $4.6B in private capital attracted
is the ratio the Georgia Research Alliance reports: about $661M of state investment since 1990 against about $7.8B leveraged
Invest Georgia’s portfolio employs 4,870 Georgia residents across 115 Georgia companies today.
UMass Donahue Institute, IMPLAN, May 2025. Georgia Research Alliance 30-year reporting. Invest Georgia 2025 Annual Report. Massachusetts figure.
The person
Keeping the founder is the part nobody funds.
Health coverage decides who can start at all, and what happens after a failure decides whether the state keeps the experience.
Business ownership jumps in the month a person turns 65 and Medicare begins. Economists call the effect entrepreneurship lock
fall in entry into self-employment for every one percent rise in benchmark exchange premiums
of founders who start again after a failure succeed, against 18% of first-time founders. The ones whose last company worked reach 30%
more likely that a market’s most successful companies had taken mentorship, investment or a job from a founder who had already done it
That last pair is the argument for keeping people in Georgia. A founder who is carried through the end of one company starts another, hires here, and backs somebody else here. A founder who is not takes the experience with them.
Fairlie, Kapur and Gates, RAND and Kauffman Foundation. United States figure. Fossen et al., Small Business Economics, 2025. United States figure. Gompers, Kovner, Lerner and Scharfstein, Journal of Financial Economics 96(1), 2010. United States figure. Endeavor Insight, mapping more than 50 entrepreneurial markets. International figure. Venture-backed companies from 1986 to 2003, with success defined as an IPO or a filing to go public. Growth ventures only. An association observed across ecosystems. No controlled comparison was made.
Founder Security and the Founder Resilience FundWhat we will publish
What we will publish.
Named now, before there is anything to report and before we know whether the numbers will flatter us.
- Companies backed, by county and by industry, with the ones that failed listed.
- Jobs at those companies, counted the same way every year.
- How much of what came back went to investors, to the next company, and to founder cover.
- Founders who took Founder Security, and founders the Resilience Fund carried.
- Founders who started something again afterwards.
Published annually, whether the year was good or bad.
Invest. Mentor. Open doors.
We’re early. If you want in, say so.