Where the Jobs Are: Entrepreneurship and the Soul of the American Economy

Acknowledgments

This project began as a very simple if admittedly ambitious idea: contribute something new and significant to the increasingly urgent effort to put tens of millions of Americans left unemployed by the Great Recession back to work. Between original conception of the project and the completion of this book, we relied on the interest, guidance, and contributions of literally hundreds of people.

For their intellectual assistance and generosity, critical guidance, and hospitality we are enormously grateful to Carl Schramm, former President and CEO of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, now a professor at Syracuse University and the Carlyse Ciocca Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of California at Davis; Bob Litan, previously Vice President for Research and Policy at Kauffman and now Director of Research at Bloomberg Government; and Cameron Cushman, who remains at the Kauffman Foundation as Senior Advisor. We are also grateful to Bob for his contribution to our poll of more than 800 entrepreneurs, as well as his review of Chapter 2 of this book.

From our first conversations about our hope to develop new policy alternatives to accelerate job creation, Rob Nichols, President and CEO of the Financial Services Forum, understood the importance of what we had proposed. He was enthusiastic and generous in his encouragement throughout our summer project, and enormously accommodating of our ambition to write a book about what we had heard and learned ...