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If you’re unemployed right now, don’t worry: in 2011, 5.5 percent of self-employed people were out of a job the previous year. Steve Jobs, you’ll be happy to know, was a college dropout living with his parents when he, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne started Apple.

Since 1990, large companies have eliminated 4 million jobs—but small businesses have added 8 million new ones. Way to go, small business owners!

If the 77 million small business employees in the U.S. were a country, it would be the 17th most populous country in the world, just behind Iran. We’d all secede except for the fact that we’d never decide which entrepreneur would run our new country.

It costs six times as much to start a small business in India as it does in the U.S. There is a reason people from around the world still believe in the American dream!

On a related note, 12.5 percent of small businesses are made up of immigrants from other countries. As this Forbes study reveals: diversity is essential for innovation in the workplace.

Small businesses inspire innovative ideas twice as much as big businesses, and tend to produce environmentally-friendly products. Like reusable chopsticks.

Small businesses generate 13 times more patents per employee than large patenting companies. Innovators are far less likely to want to patent an idea that is going to belong to their big-name employer than to hold that patent themselves.