About once a year there is a headline like this one from Forbes “The Surprising Truth About Where New Jobs Come From” that points to a study showing that most job creation is in startups. Now the only thing that is in fact surprising is that this would be considered a surprise. Why? Because this should be our baseline statistical expectation in any economy that has been around for a while.

Any collection of “things” that has a cycle of starting small, then growing and eventually declining and disappearing will have most of its growth in the currently young cohort (once it has been around for a while). For instance, most of the weight gain in a group of humans would be expected among the young (children start at a few pounds and grow to be 100 pound or more as adults).

It is useful to think about what would have to be the case for this not to be true. I am pretty sure you will find that only extremely unlikely situations give you a different outcome (e.g. companies growing ever faster and then imploding instantly). If you can come up with a likely scenario in which we would not expect the bulk of the job creation to be among startups I would love to hear it.