The Big Push: What Finally Made Founders Start

I call it the big push because that is how founders describe it when I ask how they started. Founders rarely say they finished a business plan and felt ready. They say something happened. This article looks at what those moments are, what research and surveys say about them, and why the kind of push you get matters for the decisions that come next.

Wanting to start is common. Starting is not.

A lot of people would like to run their own business, and many more think about it than ever act. The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, the largest ongoing study of entrepreneurship across countries, measured early-stage entrepreneurial activity in the United States at 19% of adults in 2024, the highest level in its history for the US. Even at that record, most adults who say they would like to be their own boss are not starting anything.

What separates the two groups is often not talent, money or even the quality of the idea. It is that something tipped the balance. The motivation was there for years; the trigger arrived on a particular day.

Pushes and pulls

Researchers who study why people start businesses often sort motives into two families. Push factors make your current situation worse or impossible: losing a job, being unable to find one, burnout, a boss you cannot stand. Pull factors make the business look attractive or possible: an idea, an opportunity, a market that has opened, a person who shows you it can be done.

The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor captures both. Since its 2019 to 2020 global report, it has asked new entrepreneurs whether they started to make a difference in the world, to build great wealth or a very high income, to continue a family tradition, or to earn a living because jobs are scarce. The last one is the classic push. In the GEM report for the United States covering 2024, more than two-thirds of entrepreneurs cited job scarcity as a motive, a share that had been rising since 2022, even though many of the same people also cited wealth or purpose.

That overlap is the important part. Most founders have both kinds of reason at once. The pull explains why they wanted to; the push explains why it happened now.

The triggers founders describe

Surveys of new business owners give a sense of how common each kind of trigger is. They ask slightly different questions, so the numbers do not add up across sources, but the same events keep appearing.

Below are the triggers I hear about again and again, with documented examples.

The job that ended

Losing a job is the most obvious push, and sometimes the strongest. Michael Bloomberg was let go as a partner at Salomon Brothers in 1981, when the firm was being acquired, after 15 years there. He left with a $10 million severance package, and according to Fortune he started the company that became Bloomberg the next morning.

Most layoffs do not come with a severance like that, and most founders who start after losing a job do not have the luxury of waiting. That is what makes this push distinctive: it starts a clock. The decisions that follow, especially about runway and how quickly the business has to pay, are shaped by it. The guide on how much money to save before starting a business is worth reading with that clock in mind.

The job that became unbearable

The quieter version of the same push is a job that still exists but has become impossible to stay in. Burnout, a bad manager, a reorganization, or simply the feeling of building someone else’s thing for too long. Gusto’s survey of owners who started businesses in 2022 found that 49% had quit their last job to do it, up from 36% the year before.

This push is real, but it is also the one I would treat with the most care. Hating your job is a reason to leave it. It is not evidence that a particular business will work. The milestone on whether to quit your job to start a business separates those two questions.

The opportunity that would not wait

Some founders start because a window opens. In October 2007, Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia needed to cover a rent increase on their San Francisco apartment. A large design conference was coming to the city and hotel rooms were expected to be scarce and expensive, so they put three air mattresses on their floor and offered them to attendees. Three guests booked, at $80 a night each, according to Leigh Gallagher’s account of the company’s early days. That weekend was the start of Airbnb.

An opportunity push often comes with something the other pushes lack: a first customer. That changes the next milestone. Instead of guessing whether anyone wants the thing, the founder already has a small piece of evidence.

The idea that would not go away

Sara Blakely was selling fax machines door to door when, in 1998, she cut the feet off a pair of pantyhose to wear under white trousers. According to the National Inventors Hall of Fame, she worked on the idea on nights and weekends, put in $5,000 of her own money, and only resigned from her sales job in 2001, after Oprah Winfrey had named Spanx one of her favorite things and the business was clearly working.

An idea is a pull, and it is often slow. Blakely’s story is a reminder that the moment of the idea and the moment of the push can be years apart, and that keeping a job while the idea proves itself is a legitimate path.

The person who made it look possible

Sometimes the push is another founder. Sabyr Nurgaliyev, who runs Reddit Agency, told Indie Hustle that his trigger was watching Marc Lou, a maker who builds and sells small online products, on YouTube. His reaction was simple: if he can do it, I can do it. He joined the build-in-public community on X and started shipping. His agency has been running since early 2025.

A role model does not reduce the risk of starting. What it changes is the belief that starting is something people like you do. That belief is often the last thing standing between wanting and doing.

Why the kind of push matters

The trigger is not just a story founders tell later. It sets the conditions for the first few decisions on the route.

None of these is a better or worse way to start. They are different starting conditions. A founder who knows which one they had can compensate for its weakness: put a timeline on the idea, test the opportunity on strangers, give the escape from a bad job a real business case.

A push is a reason, not a plan

The most useful thing I can say about the big push is that it should lead to a small step, not a large one. The push gives you the energy to start. It does not tell you whether the business will work. That is the job of the next milestones: choosing an idea you can test, and testing it before you bet the savings, the job or the year on it.

If you have felt the push and are not sure what to do with it, start with Why Start a Business?, the first milestone on the route, and then How to Come Up With a Business Idea.

Where this goes next

The reasons people start businesses change over time. A wave of layoffs, a new technology, a shift in how people work: each one changes who starts and why. The free guide The 10 Most Common Reasons to Start a Business collects the reasons founders give today, with the stories behind them. And the book in preparation, The Big Push, goes further into what years of founder interviews show about the moment people finally start.