What's up everyone this is Alex Lieberman co founder and executive chairman of morning brew welcome back to founders journal my personal audio diary where i give you the business builder the tools you need to think better in order to build better whether that's building a business a team or new product today i'm talking about the golden age of entrepreneurship we're living in it simply there has never been a better time in history to start a company

and it's so freaking exciting let's hop into it

last week we had a special guest journal with Harley Finkelstein the president of Shopify

Harley talked about his entrepreneurial story how he got started at Shopify and why it's such a great time to be an entrepreneur

the episode left me inspired to go deeper into the state of entrepreneurship and why it is that there has never been a better time in the history of humankind to start a business

so what i'm going to do is lay out each trends that i believe have thrust entrepreneurship into prosperity reason number one

the cost of failure is as close to zero as it's ever been this is the one that Harley focused on in our guest journal he used the example of his grandpa emigrating from Eastern Europe to illustrate what the cost of entrepreneurship used to be

Harley's grandpa immigrated from Hungary to Canada in 1956 he didn't speak a lick of English and he didn't have any money

he needed money to put food on the table so he decided to sell eggs at a local farmers market in Montreal that egg stand is still there today and it's run by Harley's uncle

but to start that egg stand Harley's grandpa basically had to mortgage his life he had to take out a bunch of high interest debt he had to re-mortgage his home a lot of things had to be done to afford the simple egg stand business

and if it failed he lost everything his house his credit his way of providing for his family today that looks completely different of your starting a business

take morning brew for example in 2015 my co-founder Austin and I started morning brew for less than the thousand dollars we had a fifty dollar filing fee in Michigan for starting an LLC a hundred dollars for the domain morning brew daily dot com

ten dollars a month for website hosting and a hundred dollars a month for Mailchimp what we used to send our emails that is it

and with tools like Shopify sub stack Mailchimp Etsy Patreon Kickstarter and all of these different creator platforms the cost of failure in business today is really really low

reason number two there are more sources of capital for entrepreneurs than ever before you have venture capital which is raising money from professional institutions that focus on early stage companies

you have angel investors where you're raising money from professional individuals that focus on early stage companies you have crowdfunding a newer phenomenon where you go on Kickstarter or start engine or seat invest and you raise from tons of individuals

you've grant and low interest loan programs like the SBA program by the federal government you have accelerators and incubators like why combinator which invest a hundred fifty thousand dollars into your business in exchange for seven percent or things like tech stars

and then you also have secondary market selling where you can sell equity in the mid or later stages of your company on top of all these avenues for capital you also have regulation that is recently occurred

that's opening up more investment dollars from traditional retail investors not just the ultra wealthy so for example you have something like reg a which is a law that allows non accredited investors to invest up to ten percent of their net worth or annual income in startups

and then you have reg CF which is the crowdfunding law that allows companies to raise up to five million dollars from all Americans not just accredited investors

more capital sources means more options for entrepreneurs to fund their businesses which creates more flexibility in when you can start your business and who you decide to take money from that's reason number two

reason number three the cost to test an idea has never been lower

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