long hours to meet payrolls on tight deadlines and scraping by with limited resources . While others can advocate for the merits of entrepreneurship , and will hopefully do so , our job creators are strangely left out . Innovators from Oregon to Tennessee are the ones who will generate new jobs . Commerce Department data show that small companies represent 99.1 percent of all employer firms -LRB- a firm is an aggregation of all establishments owned by a parent company , even in multiple locations . -RRB- . They pay nearly 45 percent of U.S. private payroll and have generated 60 to 80 percent of net new jobs annually over the past decade . A few start-ups from the last century may be familiar : Disney , Burger King , Fed-Ex , CNN and Microsoft all started during a period of economic downturn . Today , each of these companies employs thousands of people in the U.S. and abroad . Recent research shows that more than half of the 2009 Fortune 500 companies were launched during a recession or bear market . In 2002 , when the tech bubble burst , I graduated from business school just a few
Washington -LRB- CNN -RRB- -- It 's the oldest trick in the political playbook : Call together a `` summit '' of fancy people so you 'll appear to be focused on work that must get done . Thursday , the White House convened CEOs from companies such as Boeing , AT&T , Comcast and Dow Corning , top leaders of the United Steelworkers , United Food and Commercial Workers , American Federation of Teachers unions , Ivy League academics and a few small-business representatives to brainstorm how the country might generate much-needed jobs . A schmooze-fest is nice , but the hard work of putting America back to work will be done by entrepreneurs , not the leaders of the biggest companies in the nation and the heads of big unions . The mom-and-pop shops , garage start-ups and small businesses across the country will put Americans back on the payroll . According to the Census Bureau , nearly all net job creation in the U.S. since 1980 has been generated by firms operating less than five years . This means that our job generators are likely not on the White House guest list . They are home working