Making the Entrepreneurship Case

AOL co-founder Steve Case was reminded of the ups and downs of entrepreneurship this morning as he was being introduced at this morning’s National Small Business Week conference in Washington, D.C.

“How many of you had an AOL account?” asked Karen Mills, head of the Small Business Administration.

Mills, former manager of a private equity firm, raised her hand. But few members of the audience would have raised their hands if Mills had used the present tense. In 1992, AOL was the first Internet company to go public. At its peak, nearly half of all Internet users in the U.S. had AOL accounts. But AOL’s glory faded after it merged with Time Warner in 2001.

Case, however, didn’t just return to his native Hawaii and sit on the beach counting his billions. He got involved in other entrepreneurial efforts through his Revolution investment firm, helping new ventures like Zipcar and Living Social grow.

Now he’s chairman of the Startup America Partnership, the private-sector companion to President Barack Obama’s initiative to help entrepreneurs start and grow new businesses. The partnership has three main goals:

• First, the organization wants to encourage large corporations to help entrepreneurs through training, technology and other resources. It’s done well on that end. Last month, it announced $400 million in commitments from companies ranging from Google to Intuit. That followed $400 million in commitments made by other companies when the initiative was launched in late January.
• Second, the partnership wants to build significant entrepreneurial ecosystems all around the country, not just in hot spots like Silicon Valley. It’s doing so by helping business accelerators and incubators reach more entrepreneurs in their regions. This regional approach is just as important as national efforts to boost entrepreneurship, Case said.
• Third, the organization wants to celebrate entrepreneurship. This country was founded by entrepreneurs, Case said. It was a risky move to get on a boat and sail across the Atlantic to an uncertain future in a new land. From Thomas Edison to Steve Jobs, American entrepreneurs have pioneered new markets and created giant companies and huge new industries, he said.

“This nation is about entrepreneurs, and we need to do things to celebrate their work, and be supportive, and help provide resources where we can,” Case said.

Case, who also chairs the small business subcommittee on Obama’s Jobs and Competitiveness Council, is playing a role in determining what the federal government should do to boost entrepreneurship. The SBA has held eight roundtables around the country to get ideas on how to reduce barriers to entrepreneurship. Case hopes a bipartisan consensus will form around the best ideas for boosting entrepreneurship -- whether it’s access to capital, regulatory policy or immigration reform. Enacting this agenda is going to be hard, he concedes, because Washington is a “partisan, nasty city right now.” But policies and programs to boost entrepreneurship are “fundamental to getting things back on track” as far as the economy and jobs go, he said.

But while government support for entrepreneurship is really important, “we can’t wait for that, nor is that a silver bullet answer,” Case said.

In the end, boosting entrepreneurship in America is going to depend on the private sector, he said.

Case is doing his part. He challenged the small business owners, lenders and corporate executives who attended the SBA’s conference to do their part as well.

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Kent Hoover is the Washington bureau chief for bizjournals.