Dashboard: Don’t Dismiss Those Side Hustles

[Music] welcome to another 21 hats dashboard I'm here with Victor Wong who is founder and CEO of right to start and advocacy group that works to expand entrepreneurial opportunity welcome back Victor thank you Lauren thanks for having me great to have you here could you remind us uh as I always ask you what exactly does right to start do so right to start is a national nonpartisan nonprofit organization that seeks to lift the voice of Entrepreneurship in American life so we work across the country uh at the Grassroots level in storytelling and media and direct directly working with policy makers across the country to drive Civic chain to lower barriers for entrepreneurship so everyone has access to entrepreneur opportunity uh and so we're Contin we we launched this a little over four years ago and we now have touch points in 30 States across the country and we're actively doing the work to make sure entrepreneurship opportuni is available to everybody got it um I almost hate to ask you about this is going to make me really jealous but I know you just took a really interesting road trip can you tell us about that yeah well uh it was you don't need to be that jealous it's a lot of fun but it was also really hard oh I want to hear about both both both the fun and the really hard it was five weeks driving across the country we had events in 15 cities across 13 states uh I started in California and drove up north uh from so starting in Southern California up through Fresno in Sacramento California did events there uh in uh Portland Oregon Seattle Washington then driving east across the top of the country uh to Boise uh to um Missoula Montana then to Fargo North Dakota Minneapolis Madison Chicago Southbend Detroit uh Cleveland and akan and then Erie Pennsylvania and then landed in Washington DC where we had a big celebration at the end that sounds amazing how did you pick the places you went well one I it this was the summer and so uh it the end of summer so so you stayed North I stayed North where the temperature was about 20 30 degrees cooler than in the in the rest of the country but we were also looking for places where we knew that we wanted to to build some um on the ground uh connections and relationships and start to build start to spread the message of right to start so we've been pretty active in uh building building those relationships every where we go and uh for instance you know on our policymaking work we've had 15 State legislatures introduce over 40 right to start acts in the last uh in the last few years and those are based off of our ideas and recommendations to improve the policy environment for entrepreneurs everywhere uh but give give us an example what kind of things do you advocate in in the right to start acts sure well in uh the first one was in Nevada um and um we've had five states that have uh really picked up the ideas and adopted them two of them by state legislation that got signed into law by Governor so first was in Nevada and second was in Missouri and a good example is the Nevada law uh answers that very fundamental question that uh amazingly very few states have done which is who's in charge of Entrepreneurship in your state and so Nevada has created an office of Entrepreneurship with a director of Entrepreneurship and that person now uh uh is in is in charge of doing an annual report to the legislature and the governor about how to improve the entrepreneural environment in the state they're tracking data on entrepreneurs to make it official and just look at progress they're charged with making recommendations on how to cut red tape and help entrepreneurs navigate the system better and they're providing uh support to improve access to government contracts for entrepreneurs with a goal of 5% of government contracts going to Young businesses in the future as we know government contracts typically go to older businesses that have a history of winning it's hard for newcomers to break in and so Missouri has a version of that that's SL slightly adjusted from Missouri and then we've had three other states that have created heads of Entrepreneurship in different ways by executive action so that's in New Mexico Kansas and Michigan uh based on an inspired by our work and then we've got a number of other states where there are different offices or branches of government that want to take on that mantle as well and so we're working with a whole bunch of States now that are interested in in doing this and so we've learned a lot about how to do it well and uh and I've learned a lot from the road trip about what else we can do too to make it even better well tell me about the road what when you went into these uh towns and cities what was the uh the basic format of what you did while you were there we did a whole range of things from some events where a hundred people with entrepreneurs sharing their stories and their experiences and the issues and the bearers that they faced like live sessions with City officials uh and those were remarkable and then we Al and then we even had public events with like 200 or more people so pretty significant ific size audiences and then we had other events where you know eight people met in the coffee shop and talked about what the issues were in the entrepreneurship landscape within their towns and and everything in between and so spent time with state legislators with Mayors uh with dozens and dozens if not hundreds of entrepreneurs uh with people investing in entrepreneurs people running entrepreneur support organizations and some were small sessions others were public sessions some were uh in excit spaces and others were in modest places and everything in between you said you uh learned a lot doing this that's somewhat surprising because it's not exactly like you're new to entrepreneurship uh you you've started businesses yourself you've been an investor in businesses you worked at the Kaufman Foundation where I think your title was uh entrepreneur in Residence maybe VI vice president of Entrepreneurship okay uh you know about entrepreneurship what what did you learn yeah well I have I've been doing this work for almost 25 years now so it's I'm at some point you kind of start to become a dinosaur uh if you just stick around long enough I know about that yeah well you're OG is the right way to frame it thank you you know I didn't think I'd learn a lot but I actually learned a ton and one of the things that was so interesting is just where is the country now I think I probably have a better snapshot of what the state of Entre American entrepreneurship is now across all these different communities across the country at working you know talking with entrepreneurs that are building growing tech companies to people doing side hustles in their kitchen and their basement and you know everything in between and I think one of the things is that the the difference between what's happening in the ENT the sentiment and the culture of the entrepreneurial sector compared to the National narrative the national narrative has been for years now one of dysfunction and decline that this country is going to hell and it's you know it's unfixable why can't we make things better what's going wrong with this country and what's amazing and inspiring is when you're out there in these places at the Grassroots with people who've rolled up their sleeves getting dirt under their fingernails building stuff is you just see an entirely different America which is America is rebooting itself it's fixing itself as we speak and I I I can give you tons of examples but one great example is just like in Portland Oregon in downtown Oldtown Portland has been through some pretty tough times you know from covid and some of the issues they deal with homeless homelessness and parts of town have really felt like they've been left behind but if you go behind the facade of these empty buildings that look empty and you see what's happening behind the scenes you see the rebirth happening which is people are building the future right now and entrepreneurs are are leading that way and so in in Oldtown Portland they are building an entire shoe Innovation District so right now if you're trying to if you're entrepreneur trying to build a new type of shoe it's actually really hard to assemble all the different pieces of the supply chain and the ecosystem you need to bring that shoe idea to life and what they're doing is they're bringing it all into one place like a block where uh you can get two to 300 parts suppliers and critical people to know within the ecosystem in one place where you can go from idea to Market you know launch all all in one place and so this sort of leverages the strengths of a place like Portland with the history Nike and Adidas to uh the ability to actually innovate at scale and drive entrepreneurship uh using that strength but to really focus it on the ground level and this is happening in some of the toughest hit parts of Portland but I saw that kind of energy everywhere like in Fargo North Dakota um they are build they have built a it's like a 500 acre farming test facility where they can there's this there's this empty spot in the farming World between small scale testing to large scale farming implementation they've created something right in the middle as you're trying to scale up and test out of a new technology for agriculture can work and they were this has been a missing piece of the American uh agricultural Innovation landscape across the country and they have built it and they are they are just now getting going to to start testing out new technologies in this at scale and I got to visit the facility and it's just mind-blowing what's happening and these communities Across America are there's so much more energy and and positive forward momentum than you see if you just read the uh the Doomsday headlines all the time that is really interesting and I I'm wondering you said you went to Detroit as well and I'm sure you saw the same kind of thing there where I know a lot of the entrepreneurial um you know Green shoots that are happening there have been driven by one particular investor uh Dan Gilbert and uh he's you know had a huge impact in Detroit I'm curious in Portland OR Fargo and other places where you've seen that happen what has kicked it off how has it happened who is driven uh like the shoe thing in in Portland it's it's sort of twofold uh one it's people people with entrepreneurial dreams and energy that see something that's possible and you always need that you need someone that's willing to take the fight and and you know carry the flag forward but then it's the ecosystem that responds to it and that's been what's remarkable is to see the ecosystems the networks of people the communities form around entrepreneurial energy and you know in Detroit for instance um you know what's happened is this explosion of entrepreneur energy and uh Dan Gilbert of course has been a great investor in it but a lot of it is also just from the Grassroots uh from uh the black Tech Saturdays which attracts hundreds and hundreds of entrepreneurs uh on Saturdays to talk and share and learn and build in community with each other uh from the successful entrepreneur Doug song who built a company that sold to Cisco a few years ago and he just got out of his uh contract from Cisco which had acquired his company just a couple years ago and he is out there he's taken people on Innovation road trips from Detroit to all these surrounding entrepreneurial communities to learn best practices and share them and uh this whole energy that you're seeing in places uh that you know 10 10 20 years ago was were kind of thought of as like far behind and so far away from the energy in Silicon Valley or New York or LA and they're leading the way in fact I would say they some of the most exciting entrepreneur places in the world now are these communities that you know not that long ago were thought of as as backwaters they're they're kind of leading in so many ways in how they're thinking about uh Economic Development and and growth give us a taste of that excitement uh what are you referring to well um I'll give you uh another example so when I went to Cleveland and akan Ohio so I actually went to both these cities and in akan they' built uh a great they took uh the old uh I think it's the Goodyear tire plant or the good one of the old Goodyear Tire plants and they turned it into this co-working space and a modern co-working space uh where they host activities there's maker facilities that people want to manufacture stuff um and it's just a beautiful remarkable place and they have full membership and it's active and energetic and then you go to um Erie Pennsylvania and the library in Erie Pennsylvania has turned into essentially an entrepreneural Hub they do entrepren programming they have a maker space they have podcasting recording studios for anyone to use for free in Missoula Montana they have a library that's been ranked as one of the top Innovative libraries in the world where they also do the same thing they turned it into an entrepreneur Hub with maker space they do classes they even do they even do clinical testing on uh educational Innovation uh for the NIH uh at the at the library they all a facility for doing that kind of thing and you can even there's even a vending machine where you can check out laptops for free uh to be able to do the work um and so it's kind it's sort of everywhere like everywhere you go there's something really interesting that's happening that you just wouldn't expect and it it just shows that you don't really know what's going on until you dig under the surface and you get to see the people you get to see the the work they're doing and uh and it's just remarkable well I was right you are making me jealous um but but I'm curious about this uh you know we we have had everybody knows we've had this explosion of startups since the pandemic but I think people don't quite know what to make of it some people dismiss it it's you know it's not re it's about side hustles it's not really about starting businesses uh some of it's based on you know necessity just people who lost jobs just trying to find a way to replace a job as opposed to build uh building a thriving organization has this experience given you uh insight into that well this is a big debate in the way we think about entrepreneurship in America because what's happened and this was the result of the way government and economic development sort of evolved in the last half century which was the focus on big companies and thinking of tech and innovation in kind of its own Silo it kind of like oh there's there's Great Tech and Innovation driven entrepreneurs and then there's everybody else who kind of it's cute we need we need more yoga it's nice to have yoga studios and bakeries and dry cleaners people like use the term lifestyle entrepreneur which drives me crazy yeah which is pretty it's pretty naive because it's not much of a lifestyle if you're thinking it's like sitting on beaches and drinking margaritas it's hard you know it's hard to build a business business no matter what it is and I think that narrative is broken about that there's there's essentially the tech Venture Backle businesses that are worthy of economic attention and government officials should care about them and there's everybody else that's sort of irrelevant because several things one the data shows that's actually not what happens today so there's an INT it study that shows that almost 90% of businesses now are Tech enabled businesses they use tech for sales they use for infrastructure for customer relation management Tech technology is every company today every company is using technology to reach and grow and so that's different from an era past where technology was expensive and only a few companies had access to it that's the narrative from two decades ago that really permeated the world of Economic Development and it's just very different now tech companies are kind of almost every company today the other story is that if you actually look at the in what real companies do that's actually not what happens so one example from history is Mr Ying Marian Kaufman himself so I ran the entrepreneurship work at the Kaufman Foundation but people don't remember the story of Mr Kaufman and by the 1980s he built a company it was one of the leading most Innovative pharmaceutical companies in America called Marian labs and they were they were valued over $6 billion this is the 80s so this was a very high-flying unicorn company at the time that was the 80s what people don't remember is that he started the company in 1950 selling Health supplements from the trunk of his car he would in the evenings and the weekends would grind up oyster shells by hand and put them into little bags and sell them to hospitals as calcium supplements that is how we started a multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical company wow and so the question is at what point is that a venture Backle business was it 1950 certainly not was it you know in the 80s was it in the 60s what year and the point is it's a sliding scale as someone comes up with a side hustle some idea to kind of build something or sell something and then they just evolve this is the the Real the true entrepreneur journey is one of growth and evolution and learning how to build something uh and a lot of companies don't scale but they're also great Innovative companies too they just find their Niche and but the quest the point is you just don't know and you know for people that might say well that was you know 70 years ago you can't do that today well if you've ever had dots pretzels which are very popular today um that company was started in a small rural town in North Dakota a town of like a thousand or so people uh by a woman named do hanky basically making pretzel mix and seasoning in her home and giving it to her friends and neighbors taking them to dinner parties around her community and people loved it and it grew and grew and that company was bought by Hershey's a couple years ago for over a billion dollars and so it happens today like you just don't know and that unicorn that pretzel company is your next unicorn in your town you just didn't know it so you we have to take a much more new nuanced view of entrepreneurial energy and think of it as Shades of Gray it's a Continuum of growth as opposed to there's there's the cool kids that are that get accelerated classes and everybody else that's condemned to you know a lifetime of being a quote you know Mom and Pop or a lifestyle business or a Main Street business you just never know and our job as society as an economy should be to nurture everyone and every opportunity to its full potential so the the rates of Entrepreneurship were were falling before the pandemic they've been rising since and people have wondered whether that will continue it sounds like you're suggesting you think it's going to continue well the numbers show that people people the co co really pushed people out of their comfort zones I on this road trip I met I lost count of how many people dozens of people who said covid changed their lives like they'd say I moved to this town during covid I decided to launch this business during covid uh we you know I I uh I I I've you know I I quit my job during covid because I saw something else I wanted to do I re-evaluated my life during covid like it really just it was this deep psychological uh jarring moment for so many people and a big part of it was they realized I could actually build this thing I've been dreaming about for a long time and not only that but the means and the tools to do that seem to be accessible now more than ever what hasn't happened though is the the the environment in which that we we support that as a as Civic institutions as policy institutions as government as economic development are still from before they're essentially industrial era systems that are in place and we have not changed those so at right to start we're focused on modernizing that how do we how do we meet people where they are today with all the issues and so entrepreneur policy reform is not just hey can we create another program for an entrepreneur uh which is kind of what happens a lot at at State local levels and the federal levels like more more you know a little more assistance and done but if you think about what entrepreneurs deal with they did they die deaths of a Thousand Cuts uh everything affects the entrepreneur journey and so it whether it's taxes taxes that unfairly uh penalize new emerging businesses to the regulatory system red tape that entrepreneurs have to navigate it's much harder for someone who's new to do it than someone who's a bigger company that can hire expertise to the way Economic Development supports large established companies and hardly supports homegrown businesses to the work Force training system which supports training job skills to place people into existing corporate jobs as opposed to helping people build their own jobs to the educational system where people go through uh 13 years of public education at least and end up without the means of self-sufficiency uh to Capital Access systems where we have over 83% of companies aren't able to access typical traditional banking or Venture Capital because of the way the capital markets are set up uh and on and on there's so many different things two of the issues I heard a lot about were Healthcare and Child Care on this trip which were people said well uh it's so you know uh when you're starting out a business even you know if you're just self-employed or whatever you can't get a full deduction on your Healthcare premiums but big companies can why is that uh or the costs of doing so are so prohibitive when you're solo and buying stuff on the marketplace but bigger companies can get scale and they can negotiate cheaper prices or on Child Care big companies can run uh you know child Child Care on site and that's fully tax deductible if you're self-employed you can't deduct your child care at all why is this so there's a lot of these things that are essentially unfair they they're sort of tilted we don't even see them now we just they become part of the air that we breathe and we don't even realize that the system is fundamentally biased and tilted against the newcomer trying to build something that's a very impressive list of things that could be done better now that your road trip's over what are you going to be focusing on going forward well we uh we ended the road trip with a great celebration in DC so we had uh one of we had a great event in front of the capital building it's one of those things that I always dreamed of doing where you have the blue skies and the capital with flag waving in the background we had two key members of Congress that were there Congressman Bill Foster and french hill who are co-chairs of the house entrepreneurship caucus uh and they helped us celebrate they came out and were very generous with their time and sharing comments about the importance of Entrepreneurship for everybody and they're bipartisan uh Bill Foster is a Democrat and french hill is a Republican and uh and so the nature of the bipartisanship of this issue came through and then we did a private gathering with uh the administrator of the small business administration Isabelle Casas Gusman and she was very generous with her time we spent a lot of time with her we actually I invited people I met on the road trip to join me for that event and so we had about 10 people that flew in or traveled in to town to join us for that meeting with um administ Goose as well as the event on Capitol Hill and then we had a happy hour at the end to celebrate we had like 50 people join us for drinks to celebrate this end of the road trip and the importance of Entrepreneurship and so what's next is we're continuing to expand this work we are uh seeking to get a presence in all 50 states now we've got people involved in uh 40 States now in some way or other that are associated with right to start and the idea is that this should be something that we have a voice for so people that want to get active in right to start they can they can sign up they can uh either be someone that signs our statement of principles we have a a simple statement of values that we put up on the site and people can sign it it's like um it basically says Americans care about entrepreneur opportunity and access and we want our leaders to help us uh do this as well help us do a better job so uh and so people can sign if you go to the right to start website there's a take action button that's how you sign up and then we're looking at building out our our presence and building out our voice at every level of American Life uh and so moving into 2025 after the election uh entrepreneurial opportunity has become part of the national discussion now we've seen it being raised at the political level at the national level and the state level and the local level and right to start has been continuing to support that with our work and so we just continue to see this grow we'd love to be in all 50 states we'd love to be in every city in America uh with some kind of presence and so this is the goal the idea is that entrepreneural access and the barriers that uh make entrepreneurship available for people should be widely available and fair to everybody are you going to take another road trip at some point at this point I'm just catching my breath and uh breathing a bit it was uh it was quite a road trip it was kind of Epic in the scale of it uh uh at some point though I will I mean I I maybe the the greatest sort of most beautiful takeaway is that seeing America like this caused me to fall back in love with America all over again it it is truly a remarkable place um from the people to the vistas to the sites to the energy uh to the and the differences like the uniqueness the unique cultural qualities of every place um and how they tie us all together it is a beautiful beautiful country and it's full of so much uh energy it's kind of the great it's the great startup nation of the world and as we rebuild and reboot ourselves I think the world will look to us uh for inspiration and I I certainly found it uh on this trip well I know it's a lot to ask but when you do if there happens to be room in the car just uh just keep me in mind I'm just saying we may end up getting a Giant RV for a future road trip and just like inviting inviting all our friends like a rock band along the way that'd be a blast I love it Victor Wong is founder and CEO of right to start Victor thanks so much for taking the time I really appreciate it well thank you Lauren thank you for what you do 21 hats is a really important and remarkable publication so thanks for doing that oh I appreciate that from you thank you and have a great week everybody [Music]