Startup America Rounds Out Board With Big Names

Steve Case won't be the lone celebrity entrepreneur pushing the Startup America Partnership, as he's joined by a host of celebrity entrepreneurs on the organization's board.

Image: New York Forum

The Startup America Partnership today named an all-star cast of entrepreneurs, including Michael Dell, Magic Johnson, and LinkedIn founder and angel investor Reid Hoffman, to its board of directors.

The organization, a creation of the Obama White House that's being led by AOL founder Steve Case, was launched early this year to encourage the development of startups as a path to growth during what has been a dismal, jobless economic recovery in which the unemployment rate has hovered near 9 percent.

Now Case is surrounded by a well-heeled board, many entrepreneurs who started small and built their companies into major corporations. Among the names in Tuesday’s announcement:

• Tory Burch, CEO and CCO, Tory Burch LLC
• Pamela Reilly Contag, CEO, Cygnet Biofuels
• Michael Dell, chairman and CEO, Dell, Inc.
• Raul Fernandez, chairman, ObjectVideo, Inc.
• Reed Hastings, chairman, president, and CEO, Netflix, Inc.
• Reid Hoffman, executive chairman and cofounder, LinkedIn
• Magic Johnson, founder and CEO, Magic Johnson Enterprises
• Lynn Jurich, president and cofounder, SunRun, Inc.
• Kevin Plank, chairman, president, and CEO, Under Armour, Inc.
• Fred Smith, chairman, president, and CEO, FedEx Corporation
• Nina Vaca-Humrichouse, CEO, Pinnacle Technical Resources, Inc.

“This world-class group of entrepreneurs understands the critical role that new and young businesses play in getting the American economy back on track,” said Case in a release. “Their proven ability to conceptualize and scale companies, including the collective creation of hundreds of thousands of jobs, will be invaluable to the Startup America Partnership and the young firms we’re trying to help.”

In addition to naming a board full of big-name entrepreneurs, the partnership—previously supported by the Kauffman and Case foundations—landed four major corporations as sponsors: American Express OPEN, Dell Inc., Intuit Inc., and Microsoft Corp.

The group is aimed at helping startup companies, traditionally the engine of job growth in the United States, and actually getting those new companies to hire workers. That second piece isn’t something startups have been doing in the past few years, according to research released in July from the Kauffman Foundation

“From 1980 to 2005, firms less than five years old were responsible for all net job creation in the U.S.,” said Carl J. Schramm, president and CEO of the Kauffman Foundation. “However, new Kauffman research indicates that in recent years, young companies are starting smaller and staying smaller. This underscores how important this board’s job is. These successful entrepreneurs and the Partnership’s new sponsors are getting behind what I believe is the most important cause of our time—reinvigorating the entrepreneurial energy that has grown our economy, expanded human welfare, and served as an example to economies around the world.”

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