Born form an original idea to show where jobs actually cluster by employment sizes, the original YourEconomy team - Mark Lange and Gregg Cole - begin in 2006 assembling establishment level time series data (using the NETS database), that would follow business and job activity for the entire U.S. on a web based platform.
They uniquely discovered and showed it’s not the widely held belief that “startups” drive the U.S. economy but instead it’s businesses that make it through the startup phase and face new growth challenges, or as Mark coined them, “Second Stage” companies.
YourEconomy Central with most of Curious George
In 2022, the YourEconomy team welcomed Kristi Smith. Today, the team continues to focus on outreach, verifying and updating YTS Data, and advancing the YourEconomy Dashboards with enhanced data, analytics, and visualizations.
YourEconomy has significantly expanded its customer outreach, doubling its reach over FY 2025 and quadrupling it since 2024, with more than 700 people now actively following YourEconomy. This growing audience includes academic researchers, government agencies, economic development organizations, consultants, and industry associations across 21 U.S. states and internationally in Canada, Australia, Taiwan, England, and Hong Kong.
Gregg Cole - Research & Technology
Gregg designs and develops national initiatives to assemble and apply large economic data sets. The YourEconomy data set (YTS) provides time-series data to researchers, academics, policyholders, and economic developers in both raw data and visual formats.
Gregg presented the U.S. economy using the YourEconomy.org dashboards to select House and Senate staffers and the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Development in Washington D.C. and participated in NASDAQ closing-bell ceremonies in New York, highlighting a research partnership with NASDAQ OMX Educational Foundation.
Prior to launching YourEconomy, Gregg founded Beanstalk Internet in 1999, a successful ISP focusing on supplying broadband wireless Internet access to rural areas. Previous to his entrepreneurial ventures, Gregg worked in Silicon Valley specializing in the IC CAD (integrated circuit computer aided design) industry.
Kristi Smith - Technical Marketing & Sales
Kristi helps YourEconomy’s customers to explore the answers to their questions through data. She jokes that she “speaks fluent Geek” and enjoys answering real world questions with easy-to-understand graphs and charts, or raw data files from custom queries.
Helping others understand and utilize data is a common theme throughout Kristi’s career. In 2002 she founded her first company, providing database design, consulting and training services for small businesses and sales teams. After the sale of this business in 2017, Kristi continued helping entrepreneurs at the Wisconsin Small Business Development Center (SBDC). She also created, managed and sold a retail candy store with a separate fundraising brand.
Kristi earned a Master of Arts in Government from New Mexico State University. Her research paper “Training, Credit and Cooperatives: Suggestions for Developing Sustainable Enterprise in Chiapas, Mexico” was presented at the Fourth International Conference of the International Society for Third Sector Research.
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