So I think this the article perfectly sums up a thesis I have developed about these economics indicators and the way Economic Growth & Productivity is measured.

All of this is intuitive, and I have no hard data to back up my theory, so I would love for someone with much more econometric experience than I to prove/disprove this thesis.

Thesis: The global economy and US economy in particular is going through a radical productivity growth spurt and shift that is not currently being measured properly.

This article is the perfect example of this. You mean to tell me that during a period where there has been an explosion of independent contractors of many different types, we have seen "Startups Weighing on US Economic Growth"? Surely that can't be true and fully reflective of the reality.

There are two aspects to this. There is direct job growth within startups (so Employee headcount) and there is the issue of what is a 'new company'.

Direct Job Growth.

It is hard to argue that the average startup isn't much more productive today than it was 10 years ago, much less 20 years ago. Particularly tech startups. For tech startups it's most glaring, because you have things like AWS, Heroku & the App Stores that allow you to deploy a relatively easily scalable, product that can reach hundreds of thousands/millions of users/customers as a team of 1 - 5.

No longer do you NEED someone just to manage 1 server, or even add additional server capacity and deal with Colocation-related issues and all of that stuff.

You also no longer need to pay huge licensing fees for development software platforms and developer tools. So the barrier to entry to shipping has dropped to 0, basically.

So whenever a startup raises a nominal amount of money, it can go into much more high-value jobs (like customer acquisition and customer support) for which there isn't always a direct correlation between each incremental dollar in revenue earned with the number of people you hire to support that revenue. In some cases there is, but in many cases there isn't. Or rather, the up scale hiring process is horizontal rather than vertical. Each customer support specialist can handle more support tickets today than they used to 20 years ago, for much cheaper. Aka, the support systems that multi-national companies have always used are now available for much cheaper and often much better to startups at $50/employee in many cases.

When you think about the various aspects within a growing tech startup, you can see this same principle across all disciplines (even including HR and Employee benefits via services like Zenefits and its competitors). So the productivity that can be bought with each marginal dollar invested in a nascent startup is so much greater as a result of these highly, specialized and in many cases very economical services that can be leveraged from third-party providers, than had been the case 20 years ago....yet these articles and current econometric models would have us believe that productivity growth has flatlined. Really?

What is a 'new company'?

While there may be significantly less direct job-growth (as a result of the issues I highlighted above), there has been an explosion in the number (and types) of marketplaces that have sprung up that allow customers/users to be independent contractors. Not just typical web dev/writing/etc. But your excess space (AirBnB and all its clones), your excess vehicle (Uber, Lyft and all clones and derivatives), your excess time (Instacart, TaskRabbit, Mechanical Turk, etc.), and any other service that has sprung up that allows random people to do random gigs from a marketplace of gigs of different kinds.

So yes, the Ubers of the world no longer add significant employees to their payroll to service increasing revenue as a part of operations, but by creating marketplaces where random people can earn a living, doing things they previously never did (or even considered doing), surely has contributed significantly to economic growth in ways that aren't currently being measured properly.

Those people likely haven't registered legal entities, they probably just have a bank account, so they won't show up in "new company" data. But I bet if there was a way to measure those non-registered, independent contractors across all of these problems and you contrast that figure with the same category 20 years ago, you would get a much different picture of the US economy and productivity growth.

I could be wrong with all of this, but every time I read one of these articles....that's what jumps out at me. The disconnect between what is being measured and reported in articles like these, and all the products/services we see being launched on TechCrunch, Product Hunt and HN that significantly improve the average person's earning power by both being able to sell said product/service or sign up to be a participant in that marketplace, has always been jarring.

Let me know if this makes sense to anyone and if I am missing anything.

I would love to crystalize this thesis and ideas some more, to do a full write-up in a blog post so please poke as many holes in this as you can.

Thanks!