The most future-proof job: Entrepreneurship

Millions of entrepreneurs run their businesses on Shopify every day. That gives us one of the most comprehensive real-time datasets on entrepreneurship, and the emerging picture challenges the orthodoxy that a 9-to-5 is the safe bet.

The traditional job market is under well-documented pressure. In the age of AI, entrepreneurship is proving to be the more resilient path.

Three trendlines tell the story.

1. More people are starting businesses

When you make an activity more efficient, you get more of it. Economist William Stanley Jevons documented this in 1865 with coal, and we’re watching the same pattern unfold here:

Entrepreneurship is getting more efficient, and we are getting more entrepreneurs.

2026 started with a record surge in entrepreneurship, and this trend started well before that. Since 2018, the number of Shopify merchants who have made a first sale has increased 7x.*

This growth is happening during a period of contraction in traditional employment. U.S. employers announced 1.2 million job cuts in 2025, the highest since 2020. AI was the single most-cited reason for layoffs in March, accounting for one in four announced cuts.

Of course, this is correlation, not causation. But for anyone weighing their options, the trendlines are hard to ignore: one path is expanding, the other is contracting.

2. Repeat entrepreneurs scale faster

Merchants who have previously launched a business on Shopify and return to build a second one earn more than twice the sales per shop on average, compared to first-time founders.

This pattern is consistent with existing academic research: previous founders outperform first-timers, with the performance gap widening over successive ventures.

This is where the "entrepreneurship is too risky" narrative starts to break down. The first venture is the hardest, but each one after benefits from accumulated knowledge: how to find customers, how to select a market, how to run operations. These are skills, and they compound—especially when founders have better tools at their disposal.

Unlike role-specific expertise, which may depreciate as those roles change, entrepreneurial skills appear to appreciate with practice.

3. Entrepreneurs continue to earn more

As entrepreneurs gain experience on the platform, their businesses generate more revenue—not just because they improve, but because the market around them is expanding too.

Shopify merchants who started their businesses between 2017 and 2020 saw their average sales grow by 25% from 2022 to 2025.

A significant driver: the market itself is getting bigger. Ecommerce continues to capture an increasing share of total retail spending. Online retail grew from 14% of global retail sales in 2019 up to more than 20% in 2025—and Shopify's share has grown with it, now powering more than 14% of U.S. ecommerce.

Entrepreneurs who sell online are positioned to benefit from that shift. Several other factors likely play a role too: Shopify's products, which are designed to lower the barriers to starting a business; AI tools that act as an exoskeleton of support; improved logistics infrastructure; broader digital payments adoption; and greater eagerness from buyers to purchase from independent brands. We can't isolate how much each contributes, but they're all moving in the same direction.

People entering entrepreneurship today are not competing for a fixed share of economic activity. The pie is expanding, and entrepreneurs are eating well.

The risk equation has flipped

What we see in our data is straightforward. More people are starting businesses. The people who do it more than once get measurably better at it. And their businesses are generating more revenue over time.

For decades, the knock on entrepreneurship was risk, the safe move being a classic 9-to-5. But that traditional path is contracting. And entrepreneurship, by every measure, is expanding.

More people are choosing to build, and the data says they're right to.

Methodology

This analysis draws on anonymized, aggregated data from Shopify's platform of millions of merchants across 175 countries. Merchant sales figures represent gross merchandise volume (GMV) processed through Shopify. "Serial merchants" are defined as those operating more than one organization on the platform. "Active merchant" is defined as a merchant with an active Shopify subscription who processed at least one order in the prior week. All comparisons to macroeconomic employment data reference publicly available sources, cited where referenced.

* Cumulative first-time sellers on Shopify, indexed to 2018