Victor W. Hwang wants America to make room for its starters

Harvard admitted Victor W. Hwang. Paying Harvard was another matter. His parents were immigrant educators, and the family could not simply produce the money. They took out a second mortgage and started a business. Before Hwang began developing theories about entrepreneurial economies, he had an example rather close to home: a venture that helped turn an acceptance letter into an education.

That makes a useful introduction to someone whose professional vocabulary includes ecosystems, capital formation, and economic development. Such terms can arrive wearing a very expensive suit. Hwang’s starting point is more domestic: people trying to make something possible for their family. His parents’ business opened a door. Much of his subsequent career has concerned the arrangements that keep other doors shut.

The tuition bill behind the theory

In We Are All Starters, Hwang recounts attending his first economics class at Harvard, leaving, and never returning. He felt the approach failed to account for ordinary people like his parents. It is an unusually pointed origin story for an economic growth adviser: a future spent thinking about prosperity, set in motion by dissatisfaction with its classroom explanation.

He graduated in 1993 with honors in government, alongside additional studies in computer science. A law degree from the University of Chicago followed in 1996. His later work in corporate and technology law placed him among the contracts, financing arrangements, and transactions through which ideas become businesses. The family lesson acquired a legal vocabulary.

There is a pleasing tension here. Hwang has the educational credentials that make an institution comfortable, and a public argument that asks institutions to examine whom they overlook. The biography proceeds through familiar rooms of influence. The question he carries into them concerns people who may have trouble getting an invitation.

“We are all born to be starters, makers, doers, dreamers.”

Victor W. Hwang

A venture firm changes its name

At Larta Institute, where he served as chief operating officer and later president, Hwang worked on bringing research into commerce. At the video-search startup Veatros, he became chief strategy officer and led its acquisition by DivX. These were encounters with the practical distance between having an invention and having a business someone will buy.

He co-founded T2 in 2005 and led it until early 2016. The firm began as T2 Venture Capital and became T2 Venture Creation. That change of name contained a change of emphasis. Investing was part of the work; building companies and helping communities develop the conditions for entrepreneurial growth became part of its identity.

Writing about the transition in 2014, Hwang connected it to his Kauffman Fellowship and his investigation of venture capital. A modest investment boutique had developed into an organization working with companies and governments on innovation. The unit of attention had widened. A startup could succeed or struggle partly because of relationships and habits beyond its own office.

For a venture investor, that opens an awkwardly large assignment. You can study a company’s team and product. Then you discover that the surrounding community belongs in the picture too. The due diligence has escaped the spreadsheet.

Please allow the weeds to grow

In 2012, Hwang and Greg Horowitt published The Rainforest: The Secret to Building the Next Silicon Valley. Its central concern was the human environment in which innovation happens. Talent, money, and ideas need ways to meet. Trust and reciprocity help them move. A collection of valuable ingredients can remain a collection unless people know how to work together.

The rainforest image gives that argument a setting. A cultivated field is designed to produce a selected crop; unwanted growth gets removed. A forest permits a more varied population and less predictable encounters. Applied to an economy, the metaphor invites patience with ideas and people whose usefulness has yet to become obvious.

The book won a ForeWord Reviews gold medal in Business & Economics. Brookings included it among its thirteen favorite books of 2013, highlighting its treatment of trust and relationships. Hwang followed it with The Rainforest Blueprint, a practical design manual. He was trying to give the metaphor something to do after the audience had admired it.

Its civic implication is considerable. A community cannot guarantee the next valuable company by selecting a fashionable industry and assembling a brochure. It can examine whether newcomers can meet experienced people, whether knowledge circulates, and whether cooperation carries a reasonable expectation of fair treatment. These are quieter ambitions than announcing a new Silicon Valley. They also supply an agenda for Monday morning.

The other 997 people

Hwang has another way of widening the cast. In his public talks, he has asked audiences to consider the people around the entrepreneurs. Using a monthly illustration of three starters in a thousand people, he asks what role the other 997 play. The number is a framing device from those talks, rather than a current census of entrepreneurial activity.

The question changes the audience’s position. A listener who will never pitch an investor can still make an introduction, become an early customer, offer advice, or give someone a fair hearing. Entrepreneurship emerges as a shared environment, with many participants who never acquire the title of founder.

His commencement advice at Austin Community College makes the social argument personal: “Be uncomfortable.” “Open doors.” “Empathize with strangers.” The instructions give curiosity a practical job. They ask a graduate to move beyond familiar company and do something useful there. Even the person with no business plan has an assignment.

Taking the idea to Kauffman

In 2016, Hwang moved from Silicon Valley to lead entrepreneurship at the Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City. He remained until the end of 2019. The position brought his ecosystem thinking into philanthropy, where the work included research, community support, and the question of how public policy affects people starting businesses.

The ESHIP Summit launched in 2017 to bring ecosystem builders together. Its participants included entrepreneurs, mayors, educators, community advocates, and people running incubators and coworking spaces. The range suited Hwang’s argument. If the conditions surrounding a founder matter, the people shaping those conditions need to compare notes.

Capital was another part of the problem. Hwang co-authored the 2019 report Access to Capital for Entrepreneurs: Removing Barriers with Sameeksha Desai and Ross Baird. In an accompanying article, he emphasized that more than 83 percent of entrepreneurs did not access bank loans or venture capital. That finding challenged the habit of treating those two channels as an adequate account of entrepreneurial finance.

He also took the argument to Congress, testifying before a House Small Business subcommittee in 2017. The recurring concern was the gap between the importance assigned to entrepreneurs in economic life and the attention paid to their obstacles in policy. Praising a starter costs very little. Changing the conditions around one requires decisions.

Five percent, with consequences

Hwang founded Right to Start in 2020. The organization works through grassroots organizing, policy advocacy, and storytelling to expand entrepreneurial opportunity. Its language makes the ambition explicit: the chance to begin should be a civic priority, available across backgrounds and communities.

One proposal offers a particularly concrete expression of that ambition. Under “5% to Start,” Hwang has advocated directing five percent of government procurement, workforce development funds, and economic development funds toward young businesses. The procurement argument asks public buyers to give new entrants a route into a system where established suppliers already know their way around.

He has also proposed help navigating procurement and faster certification. A contract can provide revenue and a credential useful in winning the next customer. The proposal concerns reallocating a portion of existing spending. It puts an ordinary administrative decision at the center of an argument about opportunity.

State-level work supplies another practical question: who is in charge? In his 2024 account of Right to Start’s policy agenda, Hwang emphasized offices and directors of entrepreneurship. Someone needs responsibility for examining barriers, coordinating action, and reporting recommendations. An entrepreneur can reasonably hope that a government’s enthusiasm comes with a person to call.

The road to Washington goes through Fargo

In 2024, Hwang went looking for conversations across America. He traveled from California toward Washington, DC, meeting entrepreneurs and people supporting them. In Fargo, he explained that he wanted to understand their issues, stories, and concerns, then bring that understanding to national leaders.

Fargo offered him an example of the connections he values. He praised Emerging Prairie and the way visitors could get connected across local industry. His next questions concerned neighboring places and people left behind. A functioning network in one city raises the question of how widely its opportunities extend.

Asked about the next five years, he described an ambition to build grassroots coalitions in all fifty states. The aspiration had the same shape as the listening trip: local experience informing wider action. It also made his task harder to reduce to a single speech. Coalitions need people who remain after the visiting speaker has departed.

A starter needs somewhere to start

By September 2025, Hwang was speaking at the Missouri Starters Coalition launch in Kansas City. The effort followed Missouri’s 2024 Right to Start Act, which created an office of entrepreneurship and tracking for government contracts awarded to businesses less than three years old. The language of opportunity had acquired administrative detail.

His public work continued into 2026 through Builders LIVE conversations and an Aspen Ideas session on the infrastructure of commerce. The settings have changed over his career: law firms, venture companies, a foundation, conference stages, local gatherings. The recurring subject is the person trying to get an idea into the world.

His parents had an education bill to pay and a business to build. Their son now asks communities to consider what would help another family make its own beginning. Behind the forest metaphor and the policy proposals sits that familiar, undignified nuisance: wanting to do something, and needing a fair chance to try.