Over the next decade, 1.2 billion young people will reach working age. According to the World Bank, the world is on track to create 420 million jobs. That gap means that hundreds of millions of people will be compelled to make jobs for themselves. They will open a shop, take up a trade, sell online, farm a plot, drive a route. Most of them will do it alone, and most of them will do it because there is no alternative to create livelihoods for themselves and their families. This is necessity entrepreneurship, and it is now the dominant form of entrepreneurship on earth.

The current support system does not consider entrepreneurship by necessity. It assumes the aspirational entrepreneur: the person with a plan, a network, a runway, and somebody to call. Someone who can apply for programs and participate in cohorts. For that person, for decades, billions of dollars have been spent building two things, capital and training. While both are important, they do not stand up to the same metrics of success as the under-utilized third lever - mentoring. The evidence shows that mentorship, the one we fund least, is the one that most reliably changes outcomes. It is also the only one we have never built as infrastructure. Micromentor exists to proliferate that.