Today, TSheets is the darling of Idaho’s start-up scene. The company was founded in 2006, but two years ago took on its first $15 million in venture capital. Since then the company has grown to 200 people from 60, and is on pace to add 100 more by the end of the year.

TSheets is tiny compared with companies like Micron, which has about 30,000 employees around the world. But according to Mr. Haltiwanger’s research, a relative handful of high-growth companies — most of them youngish companies like TSheets — account for about half of new jobs created. They also play an outsize role in raising wages, because people quit their jobs to join them.

During a recent interview in his office, Mr. Rissell said that one of his main challenges was simply finding enough people. TSheets has about 70 employees on its engineering and product team, and almost all moved there from jobs at local companies.

“The ability to recruit from the local area has been extraordinary for us,” he said.

Two years ago, TSheets hired a pair of engineers from a smaller software company called Zenware. Jody Sedrick, Zenware’s chief executive, was hurt and disappointed. He contacted a lawyer to see if it was possible to prevent his employees from leaving for a rival, but instead of spending money on legal costs, he decided to try something else: He gave each of his remaining employees a raise.

“I said, ‘You know what, we’re going to double down internally,’” he said in a recent interview.

The result for the Idaho economy was that TSheets hired two people — but in doing so got 12 other people a raise. Had Mr. Sedrick decided to sue his two departing employees, something Idaho’s new law made easier, those raises might never have happened.

‘Trust No One’

For a law that would end up riling tech companies, Idaho’s statute began with an unlikely character: Debbie Nolan, a 51-year-old saleswoman who never went to high school.

Ms. Nolan is from the New York City borough of Queens. She left school at 13 but through decades of work experience managed to carve out a middle-class career selling technology-training classes for office workers. She moved from New York to California to Nevada and finally to Idaho, where she worked at a company called LeapFox Learning. Ms. Nolan made $48,000 a year there, based on her extensive work history and little else.