The Sunday Send

Mix the emergence of AI, a generation rethinking work, and the cheapest tools to start a company in history — and what do you get? Apparently, a surge in American entrepreneurship unlike anything we've seen before.

In celebration of National Small Business Week, we're unpacking the numbers behind the boom and pulling three lessons from the founders who've done it best.

What’s Inside:

• Urgent Insights: Lessons from the busiest start-up era in U.S. history
• Scale Story: How Poppi’s founders built a $2 billion soda brand
• Join Us: Atlassian Team '26

URGENT INSIGHTS

In July 2020, something fundamentally changed about the U.S. business landscape.

For the decade before Covid, new business applications crept slowly from around 200,000 to 300,000 a month, seasonally adjusted. Then March and April 2020 dropped, June surged, and July shattered every record on the books with over 546,000 applications, according to the Census Bureau's seasonally adjusted data.

Since then, new business applications have hovered between 400,000 and 470,000 until the past six months (excluding April), which has averaged over 500,000 applications — the strongest sustained stretch since the Census started tracking this data.

In other words: more Americans are starting businesses right now than at any point in modern history.

That matters because 99.9 percent of U.S. businesses are small businesses — generally defined as firms with fewer than 500 employees — and together they employ 46 percent of the workforce.

This week, as the country celebrates National Small Business Week (a tradition since 1963), we're returning to three lessons from iconic entrepreneurs on Masters of Scale. They apply to any leader, but they're built for the founders behind those half-million monthly applications.

Ship before you're ready.

If you're not embarrassed by your first release, you waited too long. Reid Hoffman has been making this argument since the first season of Masters of Scale: your assumptions about what users want are never quite right, and the only way to find out is to put something real in front of real customers. A bare-bones product in the wild beats a polished one in your head — every time.

Do things that don't scale.

Airbnb's Brian Chesky built his company by hand. In the early days, he and co-founder Joe Gebbia knocked on hosts' doors, asked relentless questions, and won customers one at a time. "It's really hard to get even 10 people to love anything," Brian told Reid in his original Masters of Scale appearance. "But it's not hard if you spend a ton of time with them." Handcrafted experiences don't scale — but they teach you what's worth scaling.

To beat Goliath, know your slingshot. 

Reid made this point in his episode with Dropbox's Drew Houston: you cannot out-resource an incumbent. You can only out-position them. The fastest path for a young company is to chase an opportunity bigger players have ignored — that's where you buy yourself time to refine the model and win users before anyone notices.

You can hear more from the people who've built at scale on our podcast feed and YouTube channel. And for hands-on guidance — from hiring to AI to financing — check out the free National Small Business Week Virtual Summit. 

SCALE STORY

How Poppi’s founders built a $2 billion soda brand

Allison and Stephen Ellsworth share how they hyperscaled their soda brand Poppi to a truly gigantic exit to Pepsi and changed an entire category. Listen

JOIN US

Atlassian Team '26

Heading to Atlassian Team '26? Masters of Scale is coming to Anaheim, and we're bringing RJ Scaringe, founder and CEO of Rivian, for a live podcast recording with host Jeff Berman on Thursday, May 7 at 12:30 pm PT. We'd love to see you in the room. And if you can't make it, keep an eye out on your Masters of Scale podcast feed so you don't miss the episode when it drops.