Yes, that may indeed be behind part of the spike! The way we treated LLC hubs was by excluding specific ZIP codes that were associated with registered agent addresses or that were particularly anomalous in their sign-up patterns rather than excluding cities as a whole. We excluded several in Wyoming but may not have caught everything. Still, we ran this a bunch of different ways and the pattern of how business formation is migrating holds even if you exclude certain cities (such as Cheyenne) from the analysis.
I’d be curious to see the raw data, for example, Wyoming, Nevada, Delaware, and South Dakota are states with a race to the bottom-esque in corporate governance laws, and disentangling actual economic activity vs. LLC creation and development happening elsewhere.
the Cheyenne/NYC reversal is wild! Curious if the return-to-office wave among incumbents is feeding this -- people quitting office jobs to build something on their own from a cheaper metro -- or if it is the same story as your AI-labs finding: the companies forcing RTO are exactly the density dependent kind that were never going to decentralize to begin with
Cheyenne is due to the advantageous LLC laws in Wyoming.
Yes, that may indeed be behind part of the spike! The way we treated LLC hubs was by excluding specific ZIP codes that were associated with registered agent addresses or that were particularly anomalous in their sign-up patterns rather than excluding cities as a whole. We excluded several in Wyoming but may not have caught everything. Still, we ran this a bunch of different ways and the pattern of how business formation is migrating holds even if you exclude certain cities (such as Cheyenne) from the analysis.
I’d be curious to see the raw data, for example, Wyoming, Nevada, Delaware, and South Dakota are states with a race to the bottom-esque in corporate governance laws, and disentangling actual economic activity vs. LLC creation and development happening elsewhere.
We actually controlled for this and removed sign-ups from locations known for LLC creation :)
the Cheyenne/NYC reversal is wild! Curious if the return-to-office wave among incumbents is feeding this -- people quitting office jobs to build something on their own from a cheaper metro -- or if it is the same story as your AI-labs finding: the companies forcing RTO are exactly the density dependent kind that were never going to decentralize to begin with
It's an interesting question! We aren't able to see this directly in our data but it is possible there is some sort of interaction with RTO.