Entrepreneurship is inherently a risky endeavor, but it is absolutely essential to the American economy. Successful venture-backed companies have had an outsize positive impact on the US economy. According to a 2015 study by Ilya Strebulaev of Stanford University and Will Gornall of the University of British Columbia, 42 percent of all US company IPOs since 1974 were venture backed. Collectively, those venture-backed companies have invested $115 billion in research and development (R&D), accounting for 85 percent of all R&D spending, and created $4.3 trillion in market capitalization, which is 63 percent of the total market capitalization of public companies formed since 1974. Furthermore, specific to the impact on the American workforce, a 2010 study from the Kauffman Foundation found that young startups, most venture backed, were responsible for almost all of the twenty-five million net jobs created since 1977.