After promising a basketful of tax breaks for small business in his State of the Union address last week, Presdient Obama seems to be standing behind his commitment to entrepreneurship — at least where highly visible initiatives are concerned.
On Monday, the White House announced Startup America, a national campaign to encourage startups. The initiative will be chaired by AOL co-founder Steve Case. The campaign already has an impressive list of partners, including Facebook, Intel, IBM, HP, the Kauffman Foundation, and Google.
These partnerships bring a lot of cash to the table, but not everyone is convinced the new campaign represents a true opportunity for startups. Small business blog Gigaom, for instance, called the program “an opportunity to get a lot of press, with low returns for actual startups.”
While few particulars about the program have been named, most partner commitments fall under three categories: creating workshops for current business owners, bringing classes in entrepreneurship to higher education, and funding new businesses.
Aside from making an effort to “marshal private-sector resources to spur entrepreneurship in the U.S,” the federal government’s largest named commitment to the campaign is $2 billion that it will direct to match private sector investment funding for startups in under-served communities and for early-stage investing in firms with high growth potential. The initiative through which this will be accomplished — the Small Business Investment Company program — has existed since 1958.
But even though the government’s role in the campaign might be more “marshall” and less “game changer,” the campaign might still have an important role to play in the startup landscape.
“It affirms the importance of startups and entreprenuership, and I think every bit helps,” says John Borthwick, the CEO of New York tech incubator Betaworks.
While the West Coast’s culture of entrepreneurship is most clearly flourishing, Borthwick says smaller communities of startups are popping up in just about every major city of the country. Efforts like Facebook’s promised “Startup Days” events might sound fluffy, but they also may help grow and mature entrepreneurship in these cities.
“Having government deeply involved in entrepreneurship is not something that’s a good use of resources,” Borthwick says. “but the process of enabling entrepreneurship is valuable for the country.”
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Timotale
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