1M/1M: A Policy Suggestion To President Obama

Now that President Obama has used his State of The Union address to turn the spotlight on innovation and entrepreneurship, and his CTO, Aneesh Chopra, just wrote a post on TechCrunch with some concrete steps, I’d like to reiterate the call for a tax policy that would really help bootstrapping entrepreneurs:

As I keep on saying, 99% of the entrepreneurs who seek funding get rejected for a set of specific reasons, mostly because they are too early for even angel financing or SBA loans. They need to bootstrap. >>>

An Interview With Ankur Jain, Founder And President, Kairos Society (Part 1)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Today I am talking to Ankur Jain, a 20-year-old student at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and founder and president of the Kairos Society. (Kairos, in Greek, means “the right moment.”)

Ankur’s vision is to shift students’ perception about the business world – to not depend on others for employment but to shape their destiny and the destiny of others through sustainable entrepreneurship.

Kairos Society members are students from all disciplines who are creating entrepreneurial and sustainable solutions to the world’s most pressing problems in healthcare, education, nutrition, and energy. >>>

An Interview With Joe Migliaccio, Manager Of Innovative Programs, Maine Technology Institute (Part 6)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Joe: A lot of our population in Maine is pretty concentrated. The benefit of that is you can really power networking within the state, access capital sources, which we help folks with. We’ll make introductions. We’ll do mentoring. We’ll support mentor programs. In the state of Maine, you can also, if you need to, access policy makers. In Maine, you can get to who you need to get to pretty easily. >>>

An Interview With Joe Migliaccio, Manager Of Innovative Programs, Maine Technology Institute (Part 5)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: What are the fees for the peer technical reviews?

Joe: There is no application fee to apply to MTI. We will pay the thousands of dollars to go out and get those peer reviews done out of our budget. The internal state folks from industries and universities in Maine, those are volunteers. They’ll dedicate significant amounts of time each year to review each proposal.

There’s some paid review that has to happen, and the rest are volunteers – you know, business leaders, venture capital folks, financiers, and scientists. We try to have a broad spectrum of folks who help with internal review, but that’s all [on a] volunteer [basis]. >>>

An Interview With Joe Migliaccio, Manager Of Innovative Programs, Maine Technology Institute (Part 4)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Joe: Many times when investors are approached by companies that just have too high a risk profile for them, but there may be opportunity for them to work further on their technology or grow their businesses, we’ll get leads from private sector individuals who say, “As a venture opportunity, you’re too high risk for us, but the state of Maine has a great resource in the Maine Technology Institute. Why don’t you go work with them to try to get funding to take this a little further along the product development or business cycle?” >>>

An Interview With Joe Migliaccio, Manager Of Innovative Programs, Maine Technology Institute (Part 3)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Joe: From time to time, the state of Maine may issue bond funds for a program that helps research institutions and companies to secure necessary R&D infrastructure and capital equipment.

That program is closed right now, but we have been going through a process of awarding that money over a couple of years. That was called the Maine Asset Technology Fund. >>>

1M/1M: Alternative Financing For Startups Using A Sales Channel Partner

In this post, I want to discuss today’s news: 1M/1M Announces Partnership With Persistent; CrowdEngineering First Beneficiary, and explain the thought process behind it. It is a creative sales channel strategy that acts as alternative financing to mitigate some of the severe limitations of early stage startups.

In my experience, building a marketing channel/sales channel is one of the most expensive pieces of a startup P&L, and a notorious contributor to small companies running out of cash and going out of business. Typically, this happens for a number of reasons: >>>

An Interview With Joe Migliaccio, Manager Of Innovative Programs, Maine Technology Institute (Part 2)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: Could you give me a quick overview of your funding initiatives?

Joe: The core programs that I oversee are primarily direct business investments for products and  services, process innovation, and research and development. >>>