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>>government's backing >For those of us who aren't Musk, Thiel, or Vitalik, there's only loans and patronage and crowdfunding then :) The US SBIR program provi

>>government's backing >For those of us who aren't Musk, Thiel, or Vitalik, there's only loans and patronage and crowdfunding then :) The US SBIR program provides up to $1.7MM per project over 2.5 years to small businesses or startups. It's a pain in the ass process that takes forever, but hundreds of start ups get funded this way every year, and it costs literally nothing to apply other than you time. sbir.gov

sushshshsh 6y ago
Kindly find me one startup that has gone on to have a successful exit that has publicly stated "We took funding from US SBIR and it really made a difference" Additionally by government's backing, I didn't mean to say loans, I meant to imply "the government are our customers"
- spaetzleesser 6y ago
  “Kindly find me one startup that has gone on to have a successful exit that has publicly stated "We took funding from US SBIR and it really made a difference"“ There are a lot of them in the DC area. You just don’t hear much about them.
  - Melting_Harps 6y ago
    > There are a lot of them in the DC area. You just don’t hear much about them. For those of us entirely and woefully ignorant on where to start, could you provide a few names? I'm entirely apprehensive of this model on principal after having to deal with a project that relied mainly on Departmnt of Ag grants that stifled me in every step despite making them profitable for the first time in its 8 year history. But the truth is that as a former bootstrapping founder I hope funding is actually an issue that UBI can mitigate. The idea of not having to rely on government programs, VC, or banks but rather a system that relies entirely on private funding from members of your family, friends and community with an incentive structure is something that interests me a great deal. One of the more creative things I saw when I worked in Kitchens was this model where the Mexican employees would group their paychecks and give it to one member of the group of 5-7 workers/employees and it would allow them to have substantially more money than their single paycheck to take care of things that they would otherwise would need predatory payday loans for or simply have to do without until they could save enough to do so. And this would continue until every member of the group was served and it would start again, its an interesting system but it ultimately relies on Trust that I think could and should be done away with given that the technology exists to do so. That's not to say Trust isn't a valuable commodity, but is entirely unnecessary concern if well designed. Remittances are another meaningful business model that I think are not only under-served but attract the worst people to them in hopes of keeping people in desperate situations to retain their demographic.
    - sthatipamala 6y ago
      The money pooling scheme that you’re describing sounds very similar to a chit fund in India. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chit_fund https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chit_fund
      - Melting_Harps 6y ago
        > The money pooling scheme that you’re describing sounds very similar to a chit fund in India. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chit_fund https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chit_fund Yeah, that sounds about right from what they'd tell me when I asked. I lived in many rural Ag areas in Europe and in the US and never saw anything like that before. The difference being that in both those regions Ag is heavily subsidized by the State and access to loans are far more accessible. But one of the cooler things we saw with Bitcoin was microfinancing in Africa [1] specifically towards subsistence (often female) farmers, where small investments (sub $1000) would allow a mother to send her children to school in order to focus and invest in equipment or repairs that would eventually allow the business to grow and become profitable. From what I recall the default rate for that demographic is incredibly low, a guy who was making up-cycled glass bottle homes in Africa in a ted-talk or something similar went through the numbers during his talk and it stuck with me. During my apprenticeship one of the farmer's son in Germany I briefly worked with when I got there had just gotten back from a year abroad in Africa for his Ag degree and he had talked about how critical it would shift the entire landscape if greater access to loan programs had emerged while he was there, this was during the Banking collapse in Cyprus, mind you. He had started to make biochar/pyrolysis device from old oil drums he could source locally at scale and had tried to create a credit system to just get them into people's hands; eventually he gave up because while the demand was there, as were the results in his test fields, the money to achieve a success model was not as many simply couldn't risk defaulting on payment. Also now that you mention it, I had a regular customer who said they were from a car club when I had my car part business during University that had a similar scheme; they would focus and budget for the costs of a member's car, and with the members dues and money they got from various fundraisers and any donations they got that period they pooled all that money and they'd finish a persons car for that term/year. I was introduced to them by a girl I met when I lived in the dorms one night and we I only ever spoke to them via AIM, they often always bought misc things like headlights, used seats and fenders from me in Fall and Spring. I totally forgot about that until I read that wiki entry. Human's have a great ability to adapt to a situation and through effective collaboration it reminds you how amazing we can be at overcoming often insurmountable odds and it also shows that ultimately we are all the same regardless of where we're from as the same means and methods are seen and reflect a collectively held value system. 1: https://bravenewcoin.com/insights/bitbond-and-bitpesa-target-p2p-loans-for-african-businesses https://bravenewcoin.com/insights/bitbond-and-bitpesa-target...
- smeeth 6y ago
  “This funding allowed us to pursue several innovative programs that otherwise would not have been possible” - Irwin Jacobs, founder of Qualcomm in testimony to the US senate. The government is good at a lot of things, it is NOT good at publicizing it’s own success. Just because you don’t know about it doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
  - di4na 6y ago
    Qualcomm is also nowhere near a startup or a fledgling SMB
    - smeeth 6y ago
      They were in 1987 when SBIR gave them their first grant [0]. That's sort of the point, parent comment asked for an example of a company that exited with SBIR help, and I gave him a wildly successful one. [0] https://www.sbir.gov/node/285190 https://www.sbir.gov/node/285190
      - sushshshsh 6y ago
        That is a very interesting example. Thank you for providing it.
- jonwachob91 6y ago
  The SBIR program is not a loan. It's product development contract program. You tell the program manager what you want to build with their money, they give you the money, you figure out how to build it. If you don't meet delivery expectations, you owe them nothing. If you deliver on the end product, they are likely to become your customer. If you look through the list of companies with SBIR funding, and what they are working on, you'd be really impressed. A lot of the ventures funded are a lot more high risk than any sane VC would invest in, but that doesn't make them any less cool.
Alex3917 6y ago
> it costs literally nothing to apply other than you time Which, if you're wondering, is probably around 6 weeks of full time work the first time you go through the process, less for future iterations when you have a better idea of what you're doing.

sushshshsh 6y ago

Kindly find me one startup that has gone on to have a successful exit that has publicly stated "We took funding from US SBIR and it really made a difference" Additionally by government's backing, I didn't mean to say loans, I meant to imply "the government are our customers"

spaetzleesser 6y ago
“Kindly find me one startup that has gone on to have a successful exit that has publicly stated "We took funding from US SBIR and it really made a difference"“ There are a lot of them in the DC area. You just don’t hear much about them.
- Melting_Harps 6y ago
  > There are a lot of them in the DC area. You just don’t hear much about them. For those of us entirely and woefully ignorant on where to start, could you provide a few names? I'm entirely apprehensive of this model on principal after having to deal with a project that relied mainly on Departmnt of Ag grants that stifled me in every step despite making them profitable for the first time in its 8 year history. But the truth is that as a former bootstrapping founder I hope funding is actually an issue that UBI can mitigate. The idea of not having to rely on government programs, VC, or banks but rather a system that relies entirely on private funding from members of your family, friends and community with an incentive structure is something that interests me a great deal. One of the more creative things I saw when I worked in Kitchens was this model where the Mexican employees would group their paychecks and give it to one member of the group of 5-7 workers/employees and it would allow them to have substantially more money than their single paycheck to take care of things that they would otherwise would need predatory payday loans for or simply have to do without until they could save enough to do so. And this would continue until every member of the group was served and it would start again, its an interesting system but it ultimately relies on Trust that I think could and should be done away with given that the technology exists to do so. That's not to say Trust isn't a valuable commodity, but is entirely unnecessary concern if well designed. Remittances are another meaningful business model that I think are not only under-served but attract the worst people to them in hopes of keeping people in desperate situations to retain their demographic.
  - sthatipamala 6y ago
    The money pooling scheme that you’re describing sounds very similar to a chit fund in India. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chit_fund https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chit_fund
    - Melting_Harps 6y ago
      > The money pooling scheme that you’re describing sounds very similar to a chit fund in India. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chit_fund https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chit_fund Yeah, that sounds about right from what they'd tell me when I asked. I lived in many rural Ag areas in Europe and in the US and never saw anything like that before. The difference being that in both those regions Ag is heavily subsidized by the State and access to loans are far more accessible. But one of the cooler things we saw with Bitcoin was microfinancing in Africa [1] specifically towards subsistence (often female) farmers, where small investments (sub $1000) would allow a mother to send her children to school in order to focus and invest in equipment or repairs that would eventually allow the business to grow and become profitable. From what I recall the default rate for that demographic is incredibly low, a guy who was making up-cycled glass bottle homes in Africa in a ted-talk or something similar went through the numbers during his talk and it stuck with me. During my apprenticeship one of the farmer's son in Germany I briefly worked with when I got there had just gotten back from a year abroad in Africa for his Ag degree and he had talked about how critical it would shift the entire landscape if greater access to loan programs had emerged while he was there, this was during the Banking collapse in Cyprus, mind you. He had started to make biochar/pyrolysis device from old oil drums he could source locally at scale and had tried to create a credit system to just get them into people's hands; eventually he gave up because while the demand was there, as were the results in his test fields, the money to achieve a success model was not as many simply couldn't risk defaulting on payment. Also now that you mention it, I had a regular customer who said they were from a car club when I had my car part business during University that had a similar scheme; they would focus and budget for the costs of a member's car, and with the members dues and money they got from various fundraisers and any donations they got that period they pooled all that money and they'd finish a persons car for that term/year. I was introduced to them by a girl I met when I lived in the dorms one night and we I only ever spoke to them via AIM, they often always bought misc things like headlights, used seats and fenders from me in Fall and Spring. I totally forgot about that until I read that wiki entry. Human's have a great ability to adapt to a situation and through effective collaboration it reminds you how amazing we can be at overcoming often insurmountable odds and it also shows that ultimately we are all the same regardless of where we're from as the same means and methods are seen and reflect a collectively held value system. 1: https://bravenewcoin.com/insights/bitbond-and-bitpesa-target-p2p-loans-for-african-businesses https://bravenewcoin.com/insights/bitbond-and-bitpesa-target...
smeeth 6y ago
“This funding allowed us to pursue several innovative programs that otherwise would not have been possible” - Irwin Jacobs, founder of Qualcomm in testimony to the US senate. The government is good at a lot of things, it is NOT good at publicizing it’s own success. Just because you don’t know about it doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
- di4na 6y ago
  Qualcomm is also nowhere near a startup or a fledgling SMB
  - smeeth 6y ago
    They were in 1987 when SBIR gave them their first grant [0]. That's sort of the point, parent comment asked for an example of a company that exited with SBIR help, and I gave him a wildly successful one. [0] https://www.sbir.gov/node/285190 https://www.sbir.gov/node/285190
    - sushshshsh 6y ago
      That is a very interesting example. Thank you for providing it.
jonwachob91 6y ago
The SBIR program is not a loan. It's product development contract program. You tell the program manager what you want to build with their money, they give you the money, you figure out how to build it. If you don't meet delivery expectations, you owe them nothing. If you deliver on the end product, they are likely to become your customer. If you look through the list of companies with SBIR funding, and what they are working on, you'd be really impressed. A lot of the ventures funded are a lot more high risk than any sane VC would invest in, but that doesn't make them any less cool.

Alex3917 6y ago

> it costs literally nothing to apply other than you time Which, if you're wondering, is probably around 6 weeks of full time work the first time you go through the process, less for future iterations when you have a better idea of what you're doing.