Alexandra Rosen, Senior Director of Venture Forward at GoDaddy, opened this year’s TENWEST Innovation Day with a talk on the force of entrepreneurship, covering the rise, path, and influence of the neighborhood microbusiness owner in Tucson and the surrounding Arizona. She discussed the enormous significance of these companies and how to better support them in her lecture, “The Macro Impact of Microbusinesses: How Digital Entrepreneurs Power Our Local Economies.”

Tucson Quick Facts on Microbusiness

• In Tucson, there are currently over 50,000 active microbusinesses.

• Every 100 adults in Tuscon has an average of seven or more microbusinesses.

• In Arizona, there are more than 630,000 online microbusinesses.

• The top three obstacles facing owners of microbusinesses? obtaining funding, building a website, and conducting internet marketing.

• Women currently own around half of all microbusinesses, and this percentage is rising.

• The annual family median income in a county increases by $489 for every extra microbusiness per 100 residents.

• Approximately seven new employment are created by each microbusiness owner (directly, indirectly, or through increased local spending).

• TENWEST used an illustrator at the conference to add life to each session.

Regarding Venture Forward

More than 20 million internet companies with a digital presence are examined by GoDaddy’s Venture Forward research project (measured by a unique domain and an active website). The majority of these companies are classified as microbusinesses as they each employ less than ten people. Even though these microbusinesses are typically too small or too recent to be included in official government statistics, their impact on economies is significant despite their modest size.