Wait .... 550K businesses a month = 6.6M businesses a year. There are 300M _people_ in the US (including children, and others not immediately suited for the entreprenurial life). If each business was started by only one person, that would mean that about 1 out of every 45 people started a business in any given year.
That seems high. May I ask the provenance of the 550K/mo number?
"Over the period from 1996 to 2004,
an average of 0.36 percent of the adult
population created a new business each
month, representing approximately 550,000
new businesses per month." from a Kauffman report
Interesting .... thanks for the link. Though, in the context of that report, a 'new business' need consume only 15 or more hours per week to 'count'. Such low-intensity enterprises aren't really what the YC (or VC) crowd is interested in (whatever their other virtues), so I think there's a bit of an apples-and-oranges problem with the 550K/mo number, even assuming there are no deeper statistical problems with the report.
That seems high. May I ask the provenance of the 550K/mo number?