There is a record being broken in America right now, and almost nobody is talking about it.
According to U.S. Census Bureau data, 5.48 million new businesses were formed in 2023 — the highest annual total ever recorded. That number has barely dipped since, running at over 5.1 million annually through 2025, a figure that represents a near-50% increase on the pre-pandemic baseline. February 2026 alone saw a 12% year-over-year jump in new entity formations, according to Registered Agents Inc., which tracks state-level filings in real time.
To some, this looks like a boom. But if we look closer and learn the stories behind those new businesses, it looks a bit different.
Across the same period, the tech sector, once seen as the safe bet for educated young professionals, has been shedding workers at a pace that few predicted and fewer have absorbed. In 2025 alone, nearly 246,000 tech employees lost their jobs. In the first months of 2026, another 95,000 have followed.
Amazon, which reported record revenues of $716.9 billion last year, has already cut around 16,000 roles this year. Meta, spending up to $135 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026, is eyeing reductions that could eliminate up to 20% of its workforce. Oracle conducted its single largest layoff event in recent memory, cutting 30,000 employees in one stroke.
The people standing in the rubble are doing something interesting: they’re not waiting to be rehired. They’re building something of their own. And those who were told to “learn to code” to keep up with yesterday’s job trends are coming out victorious.
The Galloway Thesis, Applied
I discussed this topic on The Spiro Circle this week with Tom Lahat, co-founder and CXO of Tailor Brands. Tailor Brands is an AI-powered platform that helps individuals form LLCs, build brand identities, and launch small businesses in the United States. It started as a logo generator; it has since evolved into what Lahat calls a “business-in-a-box” - handling everything from paperwork and EIN registration to insurance, permits, and legal structure. In its current form, it is effectively the infrastructure layer for a new kind of worker: someone who used to have a job title and now has a company instead.
It reminded me of one of my favorite writers and speakers on the subject. Scott Galloway has been making a version of this argument for years, most explicitly in his book The Algebra of Wealth, which I read last year. His claim, "Don't follow your passion. Instead, follow your talent," was contrarian when he first made it. It is beginning to look prophetic.
Lahat shares data, which he agrees tells a story about professional aspiration that the last decade got badly wrong. “The job that was desired five years ago today is nothing,” he said. “Being a developer was the best thing you could be. You could go into Meta, Amazon, or Google, and basically, you had a safe path. That thing changed.”
His observation relates to the speed of the current disruption felt nowadays, especially in the AI era. The roles that were most reliably insulated from economic downturns, like senior engineering, backend development, or data analysis, are the ones being targeted in the current wave of AI-driven restructuring.
According to research published in 2026, an estimated 44% of recent tech layoffs are directly or indirectly attributable to AI automation.
The Return of the Tradesman
Here’s where Tailor Brands can help this adjusted workforce. One of the less-discussed consequences of this shift is what it is doing to blue-collar labor markets. Skilled trades like plumbing, electrical work, construction, and metalwork spent much of the last 20 years being socially devalued in favor of knowledge-economy careers. Parents who once pushed their children toward law or medicine pivoted to an emphasis on software and high-tech.
The Obama-era cultural message was consistent: work with your mind, not your hands, and “learn to code”.
Well, not anymore. The market has begun to correct this. Lahat describes a user from North Carolina — a man who spent his twenties and thirties resenting the metalwork trade his father had pushed him toward — who has seen his income rise 15% annually for three consecutive years. Demand for skilled trades has increased precisely because AI cannot replicate them.
We reference the South Park episode that directly addresses this: An electrician cannot be outsourced to a large language model. These are the jobs Galloway pointed to when he invoked smelting as a career path. They are no longer a punchline. In fact, the jobs we were told to avoid are becoming the most resilient.
“We see a rise in blue-collar jobs,” Lahat said. “These are the things that AI won’t change. There’s a need for blue-collar jobs, whether it’s plumbing, construction, or electricity, and all of these titles suddenly see an increase in demand, which leads to an increase in the paycheck.”
What Tailor Brands is doing, in part, is giving these workers the business infrastructure to capitalize on that demand. A tradesperson who previously operated cash jobs informally through word of mouth and no formal entity can now formalize their practice and grow a legitimate business. The platform is designed to take the bureaucracy out of the equation entirely, so the gardener or the plumber or the wedding photographer can focus on the work rather than the paperwork.
The Generation Entering Now
The cohort now entering the workforce has had, to put it mildly, a strange preparation. First, they were in high school during the pandemic, learning remotely or socializing through screens. This meant developing an entire set of professional instincts in conditions that bore no resemblance to any labor market that preceded them.
Today, they are entering the workforce in an AI disruption cycle that is accelerating faster than any analyst predicted.
Lahat is direct about the challenge this presents. “Every day you open the news, and you see that Meta lays off 30,000 people and Amazon fires 15,000 people,” he said. “The people they are firing are from all departments: the developers, the back end, the analysts. And every morning you read the new Google or Anthropic update, and you’re like: who’s going to get it now?”
For a 20-year-old choosing a direction, this is not an abstract concern. The career ladders that earlier generations climbed are visibly disintegrating. Job-hopping, which became normalized among us millennials as a form of career acceleration, now looks almost quaint compared to the structural volatility that sits underneath it.
Today, young people are wondering if joining a company, in the traditional sense, is even the right move.
Tailor Brands’ own data reflects this shift. The share of users on their platform who hold four or five separate LLCs has grown from roughly 5-8% four years ago to nearly 30-40% today. These are not serial entrepreneurs in the Silicon Valley but people building portfolio careers out of necessity and pragmatism — they are so-called “weekend warriors” who operate a Monday-to-Friday job alongside a second weekend gig, each with its own entity to hedge against the collapse of any single income source.
The Skills That Survive
This trend is fascinating to me - both as a journalist and as a father. Both Lahat and I have young children, so I asked him, setting aside his role as a founder and industry observer, what he plans to actually teach his kids.
“The best tools I can give my kids, the advice, is how to self-learn,” he said. “That’s 100%. There isn’t a university, there isn’t a course, there isn’t a YouTube yet because version one was yesterday and today version two is already up, and it’s different.”
But Lahat’s definition of curiosity has a second layer that is less obviously teachable, and perhaps more important. He spoke about the ability to talk to another person to generate ideas in conversation, collaborate, and convey trust in a room. It is something I learned when I spoke with founders and presented at a conference. But these are skills that the pandemic disrupted badly in those now entering professional life, and that AI is doing nothing to restore.
The American Dream Is Not Dead. It’s Just Honest Now.
The American record for new business formation has been broken in back-to-back years. February 2026 saw formations running 12% ahead of the same month a year prior, even as hiring slows and layoffs accelerate. The pattern Registered Agents Inc. identifies in its monthly tracking report is a behavioral shift that has been underway for five years and shows no sign of reversing.
“The concept of starting a business and being responsible for my own destiny… It’s extremely rooted in the American culture,” Lahat concluded. The American Dream is not disappearing, but it is being renegotiated. The version that required a degree, a corporate ladder, and 30 years of institutional loyalty is giving way to something arguably more honest about what the economy has always rewarded: people who know what they are good at, who can convey that to another person, and who have the discipline to build something around it.
Galloway told young people to follow their talent. The data from Tailor Brands shows people are doing it. Follow your talent, formalize it, and don’t wait for someone else to permit you to start.
