From the Advocate

By Tara Lynn Gray 

June 2025

The Global Power of Entrepreneurship

When your heart is full of small business love, what do you do on vacation?

You find an opportunity to spread that love to small businesses and the people who support them!

On my vacation earlier this month, I enjoyed a week of activities in Indianapolis at the Global Entrepreneurship Congress 2025 (GEC).

GEC is a gathering of global leaders, policymakers, and ecosystem builders connecting to explore innovative models that fuel inclusive economic growth.

I was excited to get the opportunity to discuss my recently completed doctoral research on entrepreneurship ecosystems and their global impact. GEC also allowed me to connect to colleagues and old friends from past work as well as other ecosystem builders, policymakers, and entrepreneurs from countries around the world.  And although I was invited as a “private citizen” known for small business advocacy, the event still reminded me of California’s leadership in this space and how many others look to us to continue to set the pace for growth
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Dr. Tara Lynn Gray with Victor Hwang, Founder & CEO of Right to Start, Entrepreneur, Author, Investor, Economic Growth at GEC

Oli Barrett, a serial co-founder who created Tenner, the UK’s largest schools enterprise challenge. Over 250,000 students have undertaken projects that made money and made a difference!

At a time when policies and economic conditions are shifting dramatically –and too frequently in unpredictable ways in the United States and around the globe — GEC also showed me (again) that small business development is a bipartisan issue, largely immune to geopolitical considerations. What I heard was the whole world acknowledging the link between the health of our small business ecosystems and economic growth as well as advances in economic mobility.

In my research, which I presented, I note the importance of ecosystems having targeted and specific goals and connected my doctoral ecosystem work to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), specifically SDG8, which promotes “inclusive, and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment, and decent, safe work for all people.”

Over the past 30 years, I have observed small businesses from nearly every angle: as a small business owner for more than two decades, a counselor and coach for two small business development centers, the chief executive officer of a chamber of commerce and nonprofit foundation, a board member for statewide business advocacy organizations, and now as the 5^th director of the Office of the Small Business Advocate.

So even in the context of an international summit, it’s very clear to me why California’s leadership in this area is so important.

We all know that small businesses create jobs; specifically in California, nearly 50% of all private sector jobs and 2/3 of net new jobs in California. We all know that California dominates the innovation economy in terms of startups, creation of intellectual property, and access to venture capital. Plus there’s the less-known fact that we have the second lowest first-year business failure rate in the nation.

But it’s not just the mythology of the worldwide company launched in a garage that explains our successes.

More than half of our small businesses are owned by diverse business-owners, according to the most recent U.S. California State Profile. The report that my own office commissioned, The State of Diverse Businesses in California, found that these diverse-owned businesses contribute$198.2 billion in financial impact annually.

And there’s the $158 million investment that Governor Newsom’s administration has made in our small business support network since 2018. With an additional $25 million investment in that ecosystem from U.S. Treasury, we took another leap forward in 2024 to expand access, close equity gaps, and place entrepreneurs at the center of a more connected and inclusive support ecosystem.

There is much to be proud of…and much to protect; threats to the equitable success of small businesses are real and palpable from tariffs to inflation to a retracting workforce.

So upon my return to California, I reflect on what I have in common with the bold and beautiful changemakers I met at the GEC from Detroit, Tulsa, and Nevada, but also Nigeria, Uganda, South Africa, and Columbia.

All of us believe – no, we know in our hearts – that this work we share is one of the few policy areas that bridges the gap from left to right and continent to continent because the promise of entrepreneurship – the opportunity to write your own economic destiny with dignity — rings the bell of freedom, all over the world.

Tara Lynn Gray was sworn in on April 26, 2021 as the fifth Director of the California Office of the Small Business Advocate. She serves in the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development as the voice for California’s 4.2 million small businesses. Closing opportunity gaps, the role of women and diverse business leaders, and expanding procurement opportunities are recurrent themes in her advocacy work.