A funny thing happened on the way to the startup revolution. We built an entire mythology around the entrepreneur, but forgot to fund the human being behind it.
For decades now, the entrepreneur has been hailed as a kind of American folk hero. Gritty, self-reliant, bootstrapped. A doer, not a dreamer. The stories are everywhere: Steve Jobs in a garage, Oprah overcoming poverty, a thousand garage-to-glory parables that have become TED talk gospel. Yet, just below the surface of these stories is a quiet truth we rarely talk about:
America’s innovation economy runs on unpaid labor.
Not volunteerism. Not internships. Not even exploitation in the traditional sense. It is subtler than that. It is the hidden cost of participation in a game rigged by capital and proximity. It is your cousin burning through his savings while prototyping an app. It is the founder skipping rent to pay the developer. It is the mother who handles the books for her son’s landscaping startup while working two jobs.
This is not romantic. It is structural.
We have built an economic system that praises the entrepreneur, but makes no real space for entrepreneurship as labor. As a result, the boldest act of economic participation in our society, building something from scratch, is reserved largely for those who can afford to lose.
That loss is not just money. It is time. It is networks. It is mental bandwidth. Most of all, it is the invisible hours of unpaid labor that precede any headline about success.
There is a path forward, and oddly, it looks a lot like something America already does well: national service.
A new idea is quietly gathering support in Washington: a national service model for entrepreneurship. The concept is simple. Treat entrepreneurial support as a form of national investment. Offer recent college grads a two-year paid service opportunity, not to fight fires or teach in schools, but to work full-time in early-stage startups in distressed communities. Think AmeriCorps, but instead of planting trees or tutoring kids, you are helping a small-town HVAC founder streamline her inventory system or a Black-owned food startup prepare its first capital raise.
The legislation, HR 9880, calls it the Entrepreneurship Corps. The goal is to make entrepreneurship a viable path in the places America left behind. Not just through capital injections or tax breaks, but through what every good business needs: people. Skill. Sweat. Time.
Imagine the multiplier effect. A fellow placed in a struggling startup offers operational help. The startup stabilizes. It grows. It hires local workers. The community wins. The fellow learns, serves, and exits with experience and debt relief. Multiply that across hundreds of towns and thousands of graduates and you get something rare in American economics: a dignity-infused feedback loop.
And here is the deeper truth this idea surfaces: innovation is not inherently elite. It is not coastal. It is not white, male, or technical. It lives everywhere. But like seeds in poor soil, it withers without structure.
We do not currently structure opportunity well in this country. We structure competition. We structure survival. But opportunity, the deliberate seeding of capacity in unlikely places, is still treated as a private burden. That is how unpaid labor becomes the norm.
What if we inverted the equation? What if the act of building a business in a distressed community was seen not just as personal ambition, but as public service?
That is the subversive brilliance of this proposal. It does not preach innovation. It deploys it. It does not idolize founders. It supports them. And it does not just reward those who win the game. It creates new players.
We often ask, “How do we rebuild the middle class?” Maybe the better question is, “How do we build an economy where more people can build?”
The answer may not lie in the stock market or another round of tax incentives. It may lie in something both simpler and more radical: treating entrepreneurship like the public good it has always been.