America Has an Entrepreneurship Gap. It Isn’t an Information Gap.

In April 2026, Right to Start, a national nonpartisan nonprofit working on entrepreneurial opportunity, surveyed 3,527 US adults for its first American Entrepreneurship Survey. One finding travelled quickly: 69% of Americans who are not currently entrepreneurs say they have thought about starting a business. Among Black respondents the figure is 80%. Among Hispanic respondents, 76%.

The second finding travelled less far. Of the people who have thought about it, 42% say they are likely to start something within the next two years.

That distance, between 69% and 42%, is not a motivation problem. The report puts it plainly: "America is not facing a shortage of entrepreneurial ambition."

So what sits in the gap?

The gap is not new, and it is not small

Six years earlier, Zapier commissioned The Harris Poll to ask a different version of the same question. In December 2020, they surveyed 2,001 US adults, 1,228 of whom had come up with a business idea. The findings were stark: 61% of Americans have had an idea for starting a business, and 92% of them never pursued it.

Two surveys, six years apart, different questions, same shape. The idea is common. Acting on it is not.

What makes the Zapier data useful is that it asked people why. The reasons they gave, in order:

• 63% lack of funding
• 39% unsure how to get started
• 33% fear of failure
• 29% no access to business tools
• 26% uncertainty about technology
• 25% insufficient time
• 23% lack of social support
• 22% no access to group benefits

Funding leads, as it usually does. Look at what sits directly beneath it. Not knowing how to begin. Fear of getting it wrong. Having nobody around you who is in it with you. Those are second, third and seventh on the list, and none of them is a money problem.

They are also the reasons least likely to appear in a policy debate, because they are not line items. Nobody legislates a way out of not knowing where to start.

The usual answer, and the more interesting one

The usual answer is money and conditions, and the survey backs that up. 39% of Americans say conditions for starting and growing a business right now are bad. Among 18 to 34 year olds, the people with the most working years ahead of them, it is 37%. Only 27% say the cost of registering a business with the government is affordable. Only 28% say funding is readily available. Only 23% say affordable health insurance is available to someone starting a business, and only 19% say the same about childcare.

Those numbers are real, and most of them are policy questions. Right to Start exists to work on exactly that.

But there is a quieter table in the report, and it points somewhere else entirely.

The availability ladder

The survey asked Americans how available five different kinds of help are to someone starting a business. Ordered by how many agreed each one was accessible:

• 53% reliable internet access and digital tools
• 47% educational content and learning resources
• 40% networks of other business owners or professionals
• 36% organizations and programs that help people start
• 36% experienced people who can advise someone starting out

Read that list from top to bottom. The more a form of help depends on another human being, the less available Americans say it is.

Roughly half the country can reach the information. Roughly a third can reach a person.

AI widened the top of that ladder, not the bottom

The survey also asked what artificial intelligence actually does for someone starting a business. The answers form the same shape.

Half of Americans, 50%, agree that AI makes it easier to find information and advice on how to start a business. That is by far the highest scoring statement in the set.

Then it falls away. 36% say AI makes it faster to turn an idea into reality. 32% say it helps people with fewer resources compete against bigger, established businesses. 28% say it makes it easier for people like them to start a business. And 18%, the lowest number in the entire report, say AI lowers the cost of starting.

The most capable information technology in a generation arrived, and half the country noticed that looking things up got easier. Fewer than three in ten felt it made starting more possible for someone like them.

That is not a failure of the technology. It is a description of which problem the technology has mostly been pointed at.

Information was never the binding constraint

It is worth being precise about why this matters, because "people need more support" is easy to say and hard to prove.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks every private sector establishment born in the United States. Of the businesses that opened in March 2015, 79.6% were still operating a year later. At five years, 55.4%. At ten years, 34.7%.

Those businesses did not close for lack of available reading material. Most of them had the same internet everyone else had. What separates the ones still trading at year ten is a long sequence of decisions made under uncertainty, usually with incomplete information, and very often alone: what to charge, when to hire, which customer to turn down, whether this month's dip is noise or a signal.

Those are judgment calls. Judgment is the thing that transfers from someone who has made the call before to someone facing it for the first time. It is the one input on that availability ladder a search result cannot stand in for, and it is the input Americans say is hardest to get.

And the human layer is thinning

In April 2025, the Federal Reserve surveyed 143 small business resource organizations: the chambers of commerce, industry associations and Small Business Development Centers that make up much of the country's guidance infrastructure. Demand for their services was up. Their capacity was not. Organizations reported that it had become harder to support small businesses, citing reduced government funding, program cuts, and difficulty hiring qualified staff against private sector competition.

Demand rising while supply tightens. That gap does not close on its own.

Who pays for it

The cost is not spread evenly.

Black and Hispanic respondents are both the most likely to have considered starting a business and the most likely to say they will act on it. 65% of Black respondents who have thought about it say they are likely to start within two years, and 55% of Hispanic respondents, against 37% of White respondents.

At the same time, people in small towns and rural areas are the least likely to say they will act: 38%, against 47% in large cities and suburbs.

Put those two facts next to each other and the shape of the problem sharpens. The people carrying the most intent are often the furthest from the informal networks that quietly supply guidance to everyone else. When information is the only layer that scales, the people who already have a room full of experienced contacts keep their advantage, and everyone else gets a better library.

What we think follows from this

SideKix was built on a fairly plain reading of these numbers. Content and tools are abundant now, close to solved, and getting cheaper every quarter. What stayed scarce is a person who has done this before, available at the moment a decision is actually in front of you.

So the SideKix approach puts the two together rather than choosing between them. AI handles structure, sequencing, and the things that genuinely are information problems. Human advisors exist for the parts that are not. The AI carries what AI carries well, and the advisor is there for the judgment calls, which is where the survey says the shortage actually sits.

Set the Zapier barriers next to what that has to cover, and the shape of the work becomes fairly concrete:

• Planning, for the 39% who said they were unsure how to get started. Not a longer checklist. A sequence, with the next thing made obvious.
• Support, for the 33% who named fear of failure. Fear tends to shrink when someone who has been through it tells you which parts are normal.
• Community and connection, for the 23% with nobody around them who is building something too, and for the 60% of Americans the 2026 survey says cannot reach a network of other business owners.
• Learning, aimed at the decisions in front of someone rather than at the top of a search page.
• Opportunity, because the people with the most intent are frequently the furthest from the rooms where introductions happen.

Funding at 63% stays the largest barrier on that list, and it is the one SideKix does not pretend to remove. What the rest of the list has in common is that a person, available at the right moment, changes the answer.

That is a bet, not a proof. The survey does not say this is the answer. It says that 69% of Americans who are not running a business have thought about starting one, that only about a third of people can reach someone experienced, and that the most widely felt effect of AI on starting a business was making it easier to search.

Those seem like the right facts to build against.

Suggested action: the full 2026 American Entrepreneurship Survey covers state level and policy findings this piece did not touch, and it is worth reading in full. It is available from Right to Start.

Sources

• Right to Start, 2026 American Entrepreneurship Survey, national sample of 3,527 US adults, April 2026.
• US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Business Employment Dynamics, establishment survival by age.
• Zapier and The Harris Poll, The Potential Entrepreneurs Report, 2,001 US adults surveyed December 2020.
• Federal Reserve Banks, Findings from a Survey of Small Business Resource Organizations, April 2025.