2018 State of Latino Entrepreneurship

Since 2015, the Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative (SLEI) has annually collected data on Latino business owners across the United States to provide timely updates on trends in Latino entrepreneurship.

This report provides academic researchers, policymakers, and business leaders with insights into Latino-owned businesses as a group and as a number of subgroups and profiles. It includes differences in growth and funding experiences by gender, nativity, region, industry, size, and other personal and business characteristics. The 2018 SLEI Survey of U.S. Latino Business Owners has a large overall sample of nearly 5,000 Latino business owners, which allows data cuts on the Latino subgroups that have statistical power.

Often, other third-party surveys on business owners are confined to relatively small samples of Latino-owned businesses and limited reporting on Latinos as a single group. Government data collected on business owners does not dig as deeply into the specific issues facing Latinos and is released on a delayed basis. More recently, research at the government level has shifted to focusing almost exclusively on employer firms, or those with paid employees, which make up only 9 percent of the Latino business ecosystem. The SLEI survey includes Latino-owned businesses of all sizes. Furthermore, our report leverages comparative data from other surveys, when available, in order to compare the experiences of Latinos to other demographic groups.

This report also includes longitudinal data on Latino entrepreneurs who have gone through the Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative-Education Scaling Program (SLEI-Ed). Making up part of the 3 percent of Latino scaled firms, this subset of entrepreneurs provides a top-line comparison group that is highly connected and motivated relative to the average Latino-owned scaled firm. At a few points throughout this report, SLEI-Ed comparisons are used to present the reality of highly successful companies and, in some cases, how their experiences are comparable to those of less successful entrepreneurs.