Center for American Entrepreneurship

CAE’s policy agenda to revitalize American entrepreneurship

Innovation

Commercializing new ideas is the basic craft and contribution of entrepreneurs. Innovation can come from entrepreneurs’ imagination, through experimentation, or as the result of scientific inquiry and discovery.

Whether developing a new product, or developing, marketing, distributing, or delivering existing products in a new way, commercializing new ideas are the essence of innovation, which drives productivity gains and economic growth, and creates jobs, wealth, and opportunity.

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Talent

World-class talent is essential to turn great new ideas into viable products and services, identify and cultivate new markets, and build great businesses.

Entrepreneurs create new jobs but are often unable to find candidates with the required skills. The U.S. education system is failing to meet the skill needs of 21st-century businesses, and America’s immigration policies fail to recognize that the competition for innovative talent is global.

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Capital

Capital is the lifeblood of any new business.

Entrepreneurs need capital to further develop their product or service idea, research the marketplace, hire employees, and develop and implement a strategy for identifying and targeting customers.

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Regulation

Regulation is essential to healthy market economies, but it isn’t free or without consequence.

The stifling effect of regulatory burden, complexity, and uncertainty is particularly challenging for fragile startups, which lack the resources and scale of larger firms over which to absorb and amortize the costs of compliance.

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Taxes

The U.S. tax code presents a number of obstacles for startups – obstacles that can be the difference between survival and failure.

The current tax code penalizes businesses with early-stage losses, discourages investors from backing new ventures, and impedes the growth of promising young companies.

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Looking for Non-dilutive Funding for Your Startup?

OpenGrants empowers startups, nonprofits, grant writers, foundations, and government agencies to participate in a new paradigm of funding. The OpenGrantsplatform –a search engine and expert marketplace –unlocks non-dilutive government funding for organizations around the world.

February 2019

The ascent of women-founded venture-backed startups in the United States

The U.S. venture capital industry, and the high-tech startups supported by it, have a well-known gender gap. In 2017, 16 percent of the nearly $83 billion invested in U.S. venture-backed startups went to companies with at least one female founder, and just 2.5 percent went to startups with all-female founders. Meanwhile, an estimated 9 percent of general partners (the people making investment decisions) at leading U.S. venture capital firms are women.

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October 2018

Rise of the Global Startup City

The United States is the birthplace of modern, high-tech startups, and the funding model that helps support them. What we think of today as venture capital originated in Boston in the mid-1940s, and later came of age alongside Silicon Valley’s young high-tech companies in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.

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July 2018

America’s Rising Startup Communities

The “Rise of the Rest” has become a common phrase used to describe the emergence of high-value entrepreneurship clusters in areas outside of the well-known coastal startup hubs such as San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Boston, and New York. The concept has been championed by famed entrepreneur and investor Steve Case, who has been instrumental in elevating entrepreneurship in communities throughout the United States.

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