Boston Herald - Scott Brown Leads Forum on Crowd-funding, Venture Capital

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By Brendan Lynch

Sen. Scott Brown called yesterday for the passage of his "crowd-funding" bill at a City Hall forum, saying it can help bring investors and small businesspeople seeking funding together.

"We're finding there's a disconnect between people that want to get financing and lend and people who have great ideas, but they can't draw that connection," Brown said after moderating a panel on access to capital for small businesses. "The crowd-funding bill we talked about is a great bill. It's ready to go and they won't bring it up. It's shocking to me and many Democrats. We need to get our country moving. We're Americans first. We can work together on this issue."

The panel included Jim Maynard, a Boston-based manager for Silicon Valley Bank; Bilal Zuberi, a venture capitalist at General Catalyst; Marcie Lancome, president of Lynnfield's Coast & Harbor Construction Management; Colin Angle, CEO of Bedford's iRobot; and

Tim Rowe, CEO of the Cambridge Innovation Center.

Zuberi said investment funds are getting larger and there are fewer of them, so it can be harder for small business people to get funding, especially in relatively smaller amounts.

"There's a sense out there that these are very high-tech companies, or you need to know multi-billionaires to start these multi-billion-dollar companies," he said. "No, some of them start as very simple ideas. My wife is starting a business that is going to sell food for kids who have allergies."

Rowe said there's a gap between the public sector and the startup world, though he said the U.S. is performing well when it comes to innovation industries.

"We're totally killing it," he said. "Eighty percent of the venture capital in the world is in the United States. We're doing great. This is a country with a tremendous amount of innovation."

Rowe held aloft a laptop showing a chart with information from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Kauffman Foundation saying that over the past 30 years, startups have created three jobs for every job lost at an existing company.

"This is where the jobs are coming from," he said. "This is the important stuff."

Angle spoke about the importance of government funding in the form of Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants, which helped the capital-intensive iRobot get off the ground.

"It allows a small company that does not have a sufficiently scalable idea to go write a decent, fundable business plan, and to go get funding," he said. "For us, some of our early SBIRs had to do with mine-hunting. There's not a great market despite the great need in the world."

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