It’s been a busy three months for AOL co-founder Steve Case since taking the catbird seat as chair of President Obama’s Startup America, a public-private initiative aimed at helping high-growth entrepreneurship across the country.
On Tuesday morning, the coalition announced that the private sector – more than a dozen companies including American Express, Google, HP, Intuit, and Microsoft – will donate $400 million in core services to businesses taking part in the program.
This comes after an aggressive few months of initiatives aimed at helping these companies succeed, focusing on things like reducing taxes, streamlining and eliminating burdensome regulations, increasing access to capital, expanding opportunities for high-quality mentorship and entrepreneurial education and speeding up the commercialization of federally funded research.
Here’s the long list of accomplishments courtesy of Austan Goolsbee, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. A group of entrepreneurs will also be livestreaming a panel on the project (about 7:30 p.m. eastern time) following President Obama’s Facebook address this afternoon:
- We have eliminated capital gains taxes on qualified small business investments made in 2011 and the President has called to make this incentive permanent.
- We’re focused on removing barriers to entrepreneurship, especially federal regulations or rules that do more harm than good. We’re in the middle of a national tour to listen to entrepreneurs, and identify where we can cut red tape to make it easier to start and grow a business. And we urge you to submit your own ideas for reducing barriers.
- The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) has made an open call for investment managers and limited partners to take advantage of its new Impact Investment Initiative, which will deploy $1 billion in capital to match private sector investments in small companies focused on emerging sectors or underserved markets.
- As part of the Joining Forces initiative launched by First Lady Michelle Obama and Dr. Jill Biden to mobilize support for military families, SCORE has created the new Veteran Fast Launch Initiativethat will accelerate high-growth startups founded by veterans and their families. The new program leverages SCORE’s national network of 13,500 volunteer mentors and trainers, the SBA’s Veterans Business Outreach Centers(VBOC), and a package of services, scholarships and free software provided by major corporate partners. Veteran Fast Launch will support 16,000 military veterans and their families and help launch 3,000 new businesses during the first year.
- In an effort to ensure the best return on our nation’s $148 billion annual investment in federal R&D, the Department of Energy just launched an initiative called “America’s Next Top Energy Innovator” that cuts upfront patent licensing costs and challenges entrepreneurs to commercialize technologies from our national laboratories.
- We’re identifying more ways to ensure that entrepreneurs can access the capital they need to grow and create jobs. Led by Secretary Geithner, the Treasury Department recently convened an Access to Capital Conferencebringing together policymakers, entrepreneurs, investors, and academics to figure out how both the public and private sectors can unlock access to capital at each stage of growth for a small company.
- Senior Administration officials are expanding outreach to entrepreneurs and investors on how the President’s policies and priorities are unleashing new market opportunities for entrepreneurs, including in education technology.
Video update from Case:
