New businesses can drive job growth and create economic opportunity. Yet the number of startups across the U.S. has declined over the years, partially because of high costs and burdensome paperwork.
Victor Hwang founded Right to Start to turn that trend around.
Right to Start, a nonprofit advocacy organization, does a variety of things. It advocates to governments on behalf of entrepreneurs, runs surveys and shares startup success stories. It focuses these efforts in parts of the country where entrepreneurs struggle the most, in states like Arkansas, Kansas and here in New Mexico.
The nonprofit's efforts helped Missouri enact a Right to Start Act last year, and it's pushing other states to follow suit.
Hwang delivered a keynote speech at the University of New Mexico Business and Economic Summit late last month at the university's Lobo Rainforest Building. The building is named after Hwang's book 'The Rainforest,' which describes an idea central to Right to Start's work — that an entrepreneurial ecosystem should act like a rainforest, inundating entrepreneurs with resources to grow whatever businesses they see fit.
Albuquerque Business First caught up with Hwang after the summit to ask him three questions about startup support, why large companies should care about small businesses and New Mexico's entrepreneurial potential.
The interview was edited for brevity and clarity.
Albuquerque Business First: As someone who has traveled across the country and visited different entrepreneurial places and locations, what do you think makes entrepreneurship in New Mexico unique, and what do you see as the state's potential for entrepreneurship?
Victor Hwang: I think New Mexico starts with some tremendous assets. Everyone knows that between Sandia [National Laboratories] and Los Alamos [National Laboratory] you have tremendous technical resources and some of the leading-edge talent in the world.
There's also the opportunity to capitalize on the creative artistry here. I think the success of Meow Wolf has shone a light on how that is a tremendous growth driver. And the success of the film industry shows that there's a real opportunity to leverage the natural beauty and the environment here.
I think the way that you can find opportunities to stitch those together and leverage enterprises that can maximize those opportunities altogether at the same time is unique.
Why do you think large companies and large established corporations should care about support for small startup entrepreneurs that might be competitors in their same industries? The lessons of Silicon Valley show that big companies thrive when they're heavily engaged with the emerging entrepreneurs. The big companies of the Valley historically have very quick movement between employees that turn into entrepreneurs and become suppliers back into the big companies. They acquire little companies that then embed those products into the big companies and they get spun right back out again into something different. So the ability to move between little and big is powerful when you do it across the entire system.
For big companies you get more innovative products, you get more growth and product lines, you get new innovation and you get more engaged employees because they get to work on cutting-edge products and services.
Whether it's with Right to Start or not, what do you think is the next step in support for entrepreneurs and startup companies? The voices of entrepreneurs are usually not heard within our systems because entrepreneurs have so little time and money to actually engage, unlike larger companies or other people who have influence in our political system. So the very most important thing is that the voice of the entrepreneur, the needs and the challenges they face, are brought up in the system continuously.
Every entrepreneur has a different journey, so [there are] thousands of things one could do to help entrepreneurs. What you need is a process where all those voices get heard all the time and at all different levels of society.
