What A Spike In Founders Data Reveals About Worker Mobility

Our data on founders is showing something strange.

The share of job transitions where someone moves into the occupation of Owner/Founder jumped 43% from 2022 to 2025—while the overall number of job transitions went down. That’s a big change. But to add to the intrigue, this is a historical anomaly. 

One narrative would be that AI is making it easier to start a company and iterate faster—but that’s not what we’re seeing in the data. The share of founder moves is rising while the number is falling. That suggests that the bigger shift isn’t the rise of founders but a slowdown in job changes, which makes this pattern different from what we’ve seen in the past.  These transitions can help us understand how workers are feeling about the labor market, and it’s telling us that we’re in uncharted territory. 

During the recessions of 2008 and 2020, Lightcast data also shows a sharp increase in the share of moves that ended with someone as an Owner/Founder. That makes intuitive sense: those were recession years, and when traditional employment opportunities become harder to find, starting a business can become an alternative.

When the economy is uncertain, workers change their behavior, and one place that shows up is entrepreneurship. Part of making better workforce decisions is understanding the economic context, so when new patterns appear, they unlock a new level of understanding in the labor market.

What We’re Looking At

Lightcast profiles data tells us what career moves that workers make by analyzing (anonymized, privacy-compliant) online resumes and similar sources. When someone who was an “Account Executive” becomes a “Director of Sales,” for example, our tools pick that up. One common use case is to identify career pathways and skill gaps for better workforce planning. (If you want to recruit for a certain job, it’s helpful to know what occupations often feed into it—that becomes your talent pool.)

Worker profiles can also provide insight into broader labor market trends. Here, we’re looking primarily at the number of moves into the occupation of Founder/Owner in the United States, which might be an entrepreneur who left their old job entirely and started a new company, but it might also be someone who started a side hustle and listed it as part of their work online. Anyone who previously had one job and then had a Founder/Owner job qualifies. 

What We Saw In The Past

During times of economic recession in 2008 and 2020, the share of career moves into the role of Owner/Founder spikes. (This is the orange line in the chart below.) Overall, we see fewer career moves during these periods of uncertainty, but a larger share of them were into the Owner/Founder role. 

The logic is easy to understand: someone might have been inclined to join an existing company, but since nobody’s hiring, they start their own instead. (This is sometimes referred to as “necessity entrepreneurship,” as opposed to “opportunity entrepreneurship,” the more traditional model, where someone chooses to start a business because they identified a market opportunity, regardless of the economic climate.) Starting a business during a recession can actually be really fruitful—assuming it lasts. 

The 2020 spike, we should note,  probably reflects both a combination of necessity entrepreneurship and opportunity entrepreneurship. Traditional employment opportunities weakened at the onset of the pandemic, but government stimulus soon afterward in the form of direct payments and initiatives like the Paycheck Protection Program may have provided the capital for new entrepreneurial opportunities. 

A high share of Owner/Founder job changes is correlated to a lower number of overall changes. That’s true across all three spikes—2008, 2020, and 2025. But these spikes are also notable because they are exceptions to the rule. For those three specific years, the share of Owner/Founder changes and the number of job changes are the opposite their normal trend. In 2008 and 2020, they ultimately returned to their previous trends,, but it’s too early to say what will happen for this current spike.

The reason that the share of founder job changes went down is because the overall number of job changes went up. They rose steadily from 2005 to 2022. One takeaway from this data is that job hopping has increased over the past 20 years—in many cases, because changing jobs offers higher salaries than staying put, as previous Lightcast research has shown.  According to workers’ online profiles, the median length of tenure at a given job has declined dramatically over the past decade, going from five years down to two.

What We’re Seeing Now

Since 2022, the labor market has cooled (lower demand for workers) but without a major increase in layoffs or unemployment. This is often referred to as the “No Hire, No Fire” economy, in which employers generally just hold onto the workers they have. People with jobs are keeping them, while those without often can’t find them. With that in mind, the decline in the number of changes overall, the purple bar, makes sense.

But the founder data follows a more nuanced pattern. The absolute number of moves into Owner/Founder roles is declining, just like the number of overall changes, but the share is increasing—leading to the third spike in the orange line. So even though fewer workers are changing jobs, a larger proportion of those who do change are becoming Owner/Founders.  

Why Is This Happening?

One possible explanation for this would be the split between the haves and have-nots of the current job market. For jobseekers over the past several years (since 2022), work is hard to find. This would create conditions that feel like a recession, even though the actual economic indicators don’t say so. That lays the foundation for necessity entrepreneurship: if nobody is ready to give you a job, it’s time to make one for yourself.

On the other side of the equation are those who are currently employed. In most cases, they’re going to want to keep those jobs, rather than search for a new one somewhere else (because, again, hiring is relatively slow). If you were thinking about changing jobs in 2022, your risk tolerance might have been relatively high, because if your new job didn’t work out, there were plenty more openings to fall back on. If you were thinking about a change in 2026, the stakes are higher. If leaving your current job presents more risk than it did four years ago, then you would need a compelling reason to do so. And that’s what opportunity entrepreneurship provides.

But the Lightcast profiles data can’t tell us workers’ motivations, so we should be careful not to overinterpret those possibilities. What it can tell us is that the current founder spike is fundamentally different from what we’ve seen in the past. The share of career moves into Owner/Founder roles is rising, but the number of those moves is not. Instead, ordinary job transitions are falling even faster. 

In 2008 and 2020, rising founder shares accompanied major economic disruptions. Today, we’re seeing another unusual movement without a recession or a surge in unemployment. Instead, it is happening alongside a labor market characterized by low hiring, low firing, and workers staying put. The apparent rise of the founder isn’t evidence of an entrepreneurship boom, but a sign that fewer workers are trying to leave their jobs.

That’s why labor market trends are worth looking at from multiple angles. Headline indicators can tell us whether unemployment is rising or hiring is slowing, but how people actually move through the labor market can reveal changes underneath those numbers. In this case, the rise in founders tells us less about entrepreneurship than it does about the broader labor market, where workers are increasingly staying put.

Thanks for reading On The Job. Be sure to catch up on our past issues, including "Oil, Energy Independence, and the Workforce Gap” "Tracking The Agentic Explosion" and "The Next Great Resignation." You can also subscribe here. We’ll see you next time.