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Week of February 9 - 13, 2004Welcome to the National Dialogue on Entrepreneurship and E-News, an electronic newsletter sponsored by the Kauffman Foundation of Kansas City for followers of the entrepreneurial economy. Through E-News, we bring you short summaries and analyses of various trends driving the innovation economy. Please feel free to share this with friends and colleagues. To subscribe, visit www.publicforuminstitute.org/nde/join/ A Fresh Look at Venture Capital: NDE E-News regularly covers happenings in the world of venture capital. This week’s issue looks at the venture capital world from another perspective—what’s happening among VC firms and other investors who focus on minorities, women, or alternative types of businesses. |
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Capitol Hill Luncheon Focuses on Minorities and Venture Capital Later this week, the Kauffman Foundation of Kansas City will host a Capitol Hill luncheon on the issues around minority access to venture capital. The event will focus on a recent Kauffman Foundation report, Minorities and Venture Capital: A New Wave in American Business, which was released in July. That report, by Timothy Bates and William Bradford, found that minority-owned venture capital funds are quite profitable. Moreover, the field is growing rapidly. In the early 1990s, only a few million dollars was invested into minority business enterprises. Today, the minority venture capital (VC) sector has more than $1 billion in capital under management. Participants in this week’s
luncheon will discuss these findings and also present their thoughts on the future of the industry. Featured
speakers include Congressman Gregory Meeks; Carl Schramm, President
& CEO, Kauffman Foundation of Kansas City; Reta J. Lewis, Vice President, U.S. Chamber of Commerce; and, H. Patrick Swygert, J.D., President, Howard University. To access the report, Minorities and Venture Capital, visit http://www.kauffman.org/pages/371.cfm |
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New Markets Tax Credits: An Update The New Markets Tax Credit program is one of the very few new federal initiatives designed to help steer new business investment toward America’s distressed areas. The New Markets Tax Credit
(NMTC) provides credits to investors who place funds with a “community development entity”
(CDE) which then invests funds to support businesses in distressed or underserved communities. While the program is still very new, it is gaining a lot of attention. A new General Accounting Office (GAO) study reviews the program’s status and key issues affecting it. GAO finds that the NMTC effort has started slowly, but it is now starting to gain momentum. More than 1000 organizations have received CDE status, but only 66 (out of 345 applicants) received NMTC allocations in the program’s first round. These organizations are located in 20 different states and serve a diverse mix of local urban and rural markets. They plan to offer a host of services, but a large majority will focus on real estate development and financial counseling and other business development advice. While the program is moving ahead, several potential challenges remain. GAO auditors are concerned that the NMTC program managers set up clear performance measures and a system for evaluating both compliance and performance by individual
CDEs. A shortage of funds may prove to be equally worrisome. The 66 approved CDEs requested more than $5.1 billion in equity, yet the program was capped at $2.5 billion. As a result, the selected CDEs saw their funding requests cut by an average of 58 percent. Nonetheless, while the program is grappling with these issues, it is certain to become an important source of new investment in traditionally underserved markets. Targeting Immigrant Entrepreneurs America’s open immigration policies are one of the country’s “secret weapons” for supporting entrepreneurship. New immigrants start businesses at very high rates, and many of the US’ most successful businesses are headed by those born outside of the US. For example, immigrant entrepreneurs lead roughly a quarter of Silicon Valley’s technology businesses. Now, one venture capital firm, McLean, Virginia’s Blue Water Capital, is trying to capitalize on the entrepreneurial energy and resources of local immigrant communities. According to a recent Washington Post article, Blue Water Capital is now in the process of raising up to $100 million for a new Prosperity Fund to invest in East Coast companies run by immigrants. The fund is not yet established, but it’s creating a buzz in many circles, especially among new immigrant-owned firms seeking new sources of growth capital. Clearing the Hurdles: Women and the Venture Capital Industry This newsletter regularly examines how women entrepreneurs are faring in their quest to obtain venture capital. While women entrepreneurs are doing better, progress has been relatively slow. That’s one message from a recent Harvard Business School
(HBS) Working Knowledge interview with Myra Hart, HBS professor and co-author of the forthcoming book,
Clearing the Hurdles, a study of women entrepreneurs. Hart and her colleagues took a close look at the management teams of leading venture capital
(VC) firms between 1995 and 2000. They found that the number of women in the industry grew rapidly, but that their percentages within the industry did not grow. In other words, many women are entering the VC business, but they are also departing the industry at a rapid rate. What explains these high attrition levels? Hart and her colleagues are still studying this issue, but they speculate that one factor may be that the typical VC industry workplace is not particularly family-friendly and thus discourages management candidates seeking more work-life balance. Clearing the Hurdles, by Myra Hart, Candida Brush, Nancy Carter, Elizabeth Gatewood, and Patricia Greene, is slated for publication this Spring by Prentice-Hall. |
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Community Developments Newsletter |
The Latest on Community Development Finance |
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