State Funds Helping America's Seed Fund Go Further

Foreign.

Hello.

That wasn't long. Welcome back to the SBA Innovation Ecosystem Summit. As a reminder, the website is America's CS Seed Fund us, which is your go to resource hub for ecosystem builders like yourself. So make sure you go give that website a visit to take advantage of all the information that's available to you. Our next session features experts discussing how state programs can help companies further improve their technologies or address business development needs that are restricted for federal funds. I'd like to introduce Jason Rittenberg, who's leading the discussion for this panel.

Jason.

Jason is the Policy and development director at SSTI. His work includes coordinating SSTI's policy activities, cultivating partnership and project opportunities, and contributing to the SSTI Weekly digest and research projects. Jason, thank you so much for joining us today. And you might want to turn your mic on.

Absolutely, yeah. Undid the camera meter. One out of two. Anyhow, thank you so much for having me. Thank you to SBA as well and the audience, most importantly for the opportunity to talk with you today. So we're talking about state funds that are helping America's seed fund companies go further. So about half of the states have an SBIR or STTR matching program, and even more have other types of commercialization, funding and support. So today we're going to have a conversation with three state leaders who are responsible for these types of programs. We really want this to be something that is useful for you in the audience, so please not be shy about using the chat to ask questions or to share your your experiences as well. So if you're not familiar with ssti, let me just give a quick intro to us and then we'll introduce the full panel. SSTI strengthens initiatives to create a better future through science, technology, innovation and entrepreneurship. To do this, we track, develop and share information on tech based economic development policies and programs, primarily for an audience of state and local governments, nonprofits, higher education and federal labs. I also want to note that we've launched with the Economic Development Administration, a community of practice focused on tech based economic development. And if that sounds of interest to you, please contact me to learn more. All right, so as I said, I am pleased to be joined by leaders from three states who have really robust approaches to strengthening innovation in general and SBIR companies specifically. So first up, I am joined by Hawaii Tech Development Corporation, Cindy Matsuhi. Cindy, if you want to go ahead and just say a little bit more about you and HDDC and then I'll introduce the next person.

Hi, thanks for having me. I'm Cindy Matsuki. With the Hawaii Tech Development Corporation. I'm the SBIR program manager and I'm looking forward to share more about our program. Thanks.

Thank you very much. Next up, we're also joined today by Charlie Hipwood with Mass Ventures. So Charlie.

All right, thanks Jason. Charlie Hipwood. I'm President and CEO of Mass Ventures. I've been with Mass Ventures for about six years and prior to that I was a three time entrepreneur, mostly in fintech. I've done everything there is to do in a startup and have made a lot of mistakes along the way. So I jumped to the Mass Ventures side so that I could help entrepreneurs avoid those same mistakes. Mass Ventures is a quasi public institution in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. We were established 44 years ago with the express intent to be a catalyst for early stage tech investments. Today we focus mostly on seed stage deep tech and make about four to six investments a year. But we also run a variety of grant programs, one of which is the SBIR matching program that we'll be telling you more about. We're a small team of about five people, but we end up funding about 65 companies a year through investments and grants and happy to talk more about that.

Great. Thank you very much, Charlie. And then last but obviously not least, joined also today by John Hardin with the North Carolina Department of Commerce. So John, would you please tell us a little bit more about your role there?

Hey, good afternoon, I'm John Harden and I am the executive director of an office within the North Carolina Department of Commerce. And that office is the Office of Science, Technology and Innovation. And we have kind of a dual mission. About half of what we do is focused on strategy and policy and we do that through staffing a 25 member board, the Board of Science, Technology and Innovation that works with our governor and our legislature to make sure that North Carolina as a healthy, strong and vibrant innovation ecosystem. The other half of what we do is running programs, primarily grant programs. The most important of which or the longest running of which is this SBIR STTR matching grant program that I'll tell you about later on in the session. Thanks.

Well, thank you everyone. Actually, before jumping into the questions and discussion about the matching program, Cindy, do you mind providing just a little bit more context about HTDC as well?

Sure, sorry. We're the state's tech economic development agency. So we're a state agency. We also house the Manufacturing Extension program center here as well. And we're also the Tech Bridge PIA partner. So our goal is to support tech and manufacturing companies in Hawaii with programs including our grant programs. We have manufacturing grant programs and we also have collaborative spaces around the state. We have one on Oahu and one in Maui for co working and startup office space. And yeah, we try and bring together the community around growing tech and manufacturing in Hawaii. Thanks.

Great. Thank you. Okay, so one important thing for people to understand about SBIR matching programs is that there is quite a bit of variability to how these are actually designed. So an SBIR matching program in one state is not necessarily necessarily directly, well, comparable perhaps may be fair, but it's not going to work the same necessarily as the SBIR matching program in other states. So I'd like to start off by just hearing more about how each of yours works. So let's start maybe with John, if you wouldn't mind explaining a bit more about North Carolina's program. You're on mute still, John.

Right. Our program started in 2006, and that's because the first half of the work that we do, as I noted, is policy and strategy focused. And one of the things we do is we study the. We measure empirically the health of our innovation ecosystem. And we saw that one of our weaknesses was in converting phase one matching grants, SBIR grants, to phase two. And we looked around and we saw that several states had some matching programs. And so we basically developed one that works well for North Carolina. And that is that it's only for companies that have received a phase one sbir. And if they have received it within our state fiscal year and we're funded, the programs funded that state fiscal year, we can match them statutorily, we can match them 100% up to $200,000. But often we can't go that high because our biggest rate limiter, I would say, is the amount of money that's actually appropriated to the program. And so if we only have, you know, $2 million, we can't fund everyone at $200,000, you know, per grant. So we kind of ration out the money on a, on a per. Per rata basis. But basically we typically make about 50 or 60 matching awards per year. And it's relatively easy to apply. And the hardest part is winning the phase one. We have an online grants management system where they apply. All of their reporting is done through that online grants management system. And we try to make it as easy as possible for them so that they can focus their resources and their time on their phase one project.

Thank you for that, John. And before I ask Cindy to share about the Hawaii program, curious as well to what extent your program is relatively automatic for companies who have received an award versus being more of a competitive process.

Right. So so far, and we've operated our program since 2006, we've never operated it on a competitive basis. However, we do sometimes have eligibility criteria if the funding is in short supply. So when funding is very plentiful, it's pretty much open at the maximum amount to all companies. But this year, for example, we have a little bit less funding. So what we have done is we have prioritized companies that are younger and smaller. And so companies that have beyond a certain number of employees aren't eligible this round. We also have prioritized companies that are in more economically distressed regions of our state, so they are automatically eligible. Whereas companies in more economically prosperous regions of the state are still eligible, but if they've received more than a couple grants already in the past under the program, they're not eligible under this round. It's only the ones who are coming to the program, maybe for the first time or the second time, that are eligible. So we, we do all of that eligibility based on the expected level of demand and how much money we have.

Yeah, thank you for going into that. Cindy, would you please talk about Hawaii's program?

Sure. It's. It sounds similar to John's program as well. We have a phase zero, phase one, phase two, phase three matching programs. And that also depends on what we receive from the state to fund our matching programs. Our program actually started in 1988, so we're one of the longest running state continuous matching programs. So we've matched phase ones since 1988, which is, I think it's a great program to run off of. And we started our phase two and three match. I think it was 2018 or 2017, but during the pandemic, we kind of lost that funding. But this is the first year that we got our phase two and phase three match back. So I'm excited that's going to. And as John said, we are also limited by the amount that we're given. So the way our program runs is we will match 50% up to a cap dollar amount. But usually our budget doesn't allow it. So our program is actually very competitive because it's a state program and we're tech economic development. We ask the companies to submit their application and they actually come in and present to us and they let us know how much economic impact that their company, their project is going to have to the state. And that's how they kind of get scored. And we do. So like John Said to focus on underrepresented communities and companies as well as first timers. We actually give them extra points in the scoring. And so that's kind of how we give an advantage to those people, I guess, because we're such a small state. I would like to see more companies, but we are limited in the number of companies that we award. So we don't have as many new companies as, as I would like. But yeah, it's been a long running program and I think that's how it runs. And so it's, it's a pretty easy application.

Great.

Well, thank you for describing that. And definitely similarities there there. Although again, the evaluation is a pretty significant point of difference, it sounds like, between those two. Charlie, though, Mass Ventures has a very different approach to the structure of your program. So would you please elaborate on that? Sure.

So our program was designed about 13, 14 years ago, similar to John. We're very fortunate in Massachusetts that we have a lot of SBIR STTR winners each year. And so we wanted to structure a program that really leveraged the SBIR funding to commercialize the research and ultimately create new businesses and jobs and new industries. And so our program was designed not to necessarily be a match per se, but really designed with the express intent of providing resources that SBIR recipients need to start a successful company. And so, for example, while SBIR fund used on research and other things, our funds are mostly used for sales and marketing and patent protection and other things like that. We also focus on providing a ton of technical assistance with the award. And so we didn't want to be this, this to be a program where we just provide a grant and hope for the best. And so we designed the program to maximize technical assistance. So first, to be eligible for our program, you have to receive AN SBIR Phase 2. So a little different. We look at this as being a good barometer of tech development and success. So you've already achieved quite a bit with tech development at this point and hopefully you're ready to commercialize that. We run the program once per year. We have about 120 application reviewers and another 30 pitch judges. So it is competitive. We get about 80 to 100 applications per year. So that first, basically it's a two page application, similar to what John said. But our application focuses on tell us about your team, tell us about the market opportunity, tell us about the competitive landscape and your competitive advantage. So a lot of the same things that we look at when we hear a pitch for venture funding. So we usually get about 100 applicants a year, like I said, we invite the top 20 to come in and pitch to a panel of judges. Ten of those 20 win $100,000 each, and then the technical assistance kicks in. So we spend the next year working with those 10 winners, my team providing as much guidance and support as we can. So we go in, help with strategy, help with customer discovery, help with, you know, finding employees and partners and other things. Those 10 companies come back the next year, they pitch to the same panel of judges on what they've achieved and what they could do with another $200,000. And so again, this is all about, hey, we were able to do this customer discovery. We figured out this is our beachhead market. We figured out that this is our sales pitch. And so then five win an additional 200,000. We do the same process again the next year, they come back, those five pitch the same group of judges what they've accomplished, what they would accomplish, and they can win an additional 500,000. So the applicants can win anywhere between 100 and 800,000. They get three years of technical assistance from our team, and then ultimately, we want to get them to a point where they're ready for venture investment.

Yeah, thank you for walking through that. Definitely. Very different approach, but very, very interesting one as well. So I appreciate that each of you explained a little bit about why you created the programs that you did in explaining the way that they work. So would like to understand also what you feel like has actually helped you achieve. And either now or I can follow up separately, just give you a preview, but also like to know how you're measuring it, so you actually know what those impacts are as well, because obviously metrics are really important. So, again, what's the program helped you achieve and how you actually know that that's what it's doing. Who likes to go first on this one?

So I'll go first because. And one reason I'll go first because right now we are deep in the process of evaluating our program. So our program has been around since 2006. We do keep track of the companies as they have active grants. For example, every six months, they submit an interim status report to us that has both quantitative and qualitative metrics. At the end of their phase one, they also submit a final report to us that has similar metrics. But then once they're done with their phase one, their reporting requirements to us stop. And so what we started about five years into the program was we started doing a survey of all the companies, regardless of whether they got their grant. Last year or five years ago. And that asks a much more detailed set of metrics, but not a burdensome set of metrics. The types of things we measure are how many employees do they have now relative to the number they had when they got the grant from us? How much IP have they generated in various categories? How much revenue has that brought in? How much additional funding from either Phase 2 SBIRS or other private capital or even foreign capital, how much have they received, you know, from those sources? So we have a whole series of metrics that we capture, and we've been fortunate enough to get about an 80% response rate to that survey. The two times that we've done it before, we did it five years after and 10 years after. And we tried not to do it too often because we didn't want to overburden the companies. But what we found now is that we don't want to use 5 year old data. And so we started working it every two years now. But we have fine tuned the survey in a way that if a company's already, you know, answered the survey two times before, they don't have to answer all 20 questions. They might answer only five that are relevant to them, whereas newbies get to answer all 20 questions. And so we've tailored it that way to again, minimize the burden, but to get all the new information that we can. And we've seen very significant impacts from the program, leveraging a lot of additional funding, a lot of IP generated, the growth in the number of employees. It's small to begin with, but then ramps up as, you know, the companies really get a foothold. So it's been a very valuable process.

Thank you, John, Charlie or Sydney.

I'll go next.

I can go next. So, you know, look, Mass ventures was created 44 years ago to help create jobs in the tech sector. The START program, which is our SBIR program, was meant to help create jobs, leveraging SBIR funding and help create industries, not just companies, but industries of the future. And so we measure just a handful of statistics. We measure jobs created, we measure amount of capital raised, because that amount of capital raised is a direct corollary to how many jobs you're going to create. And certainly our $800,000 grant program isn't going to allow you to create too many jobs, but if it gets you to that point where you can raise substantial capital, then it's going to create jobs. And we track that. We actually survey our companies twice per year through a pretty simple online system. But we have 105 companies that we've funded. The ones that we funded seven, eight years ago don't respond anymore. So there's some extrapolation there, but I think Statistically we funded $31.2 million over the last 11 years to 105 companies. They've gone on to raise 4 billion and follow on capital and employ 2,500 people in the Commonwealth. It's probably a much higher number than that. I think what we've seen though, we started this to create businesses and jobs. And what I alluded to is what we've seen is we're actually helping to create industries. And we're trying to assess that now how we can look at that and extrapolate out how many additional jobs it's created by creating these companies that are using advanced research to create the industries of the future. One example of that is we funded a company 12 years ago, 11 years ago called Ginkgo Bioworks. It spin out from MIT, raised a substantial amount of SBIR funding for predominantly from NSF. They came in, won our START grant award. We helped them with their seed fund seed funding. Long story short, they went public last year, but they created a whole industry of synthetic biology here in Massachusetts. And there are people moving from around the world to be located next to Ginkgo Bioworks now. And so we believe that our program really helped to commercialize that research done through SBIR to create a company that in turn created an industry. So we want to figure out how to track that as well.

Yeah, that's always a challenge with these programs that have such long payouts so often. Especially thinking about it relative to traditional economic development incentives. Right. Like it's very easy to say, oh, we've writed 10 million jobs or dollars and they created X number of jobs when you've got those ripple effects years later. Always a mix of anecdote and data there. So appreciate you highlighting that. Charlie and Cindy. What about Hawaii?

We do a similar survey program as well as to John, but I like the idea of going out to 10 years. Right now we just do five years out and we don't survey them every year, but they are required to do the survey. So we do get about 100% response rate because if they don't, then they, they aren't eligible to apply for any of our other grants. And so I think that's a good, good way to do the survey. So we get our responses and we've gotten a lot of good investment. So I think usually just on federal funds alone, we have a 1 to 23. So every dollar the state puts in, we have $23 of federal funds that come in from our SBIR program. And we also, we are supporting a lot of jobs. So we do the survey once a year and we ask the same questions about job creation, job saved, new jobs, new investments, new product development. And so we are, we're also collecting all of that data as well. And it's been a really successful program. And I think because the state keeps funding it, that they realize that too. And so a lot of our job is letting the, our state legislature know the successes of our companies.

Thank you. So turning next thing, a bit about the position that your programs play kind of in the broader pipeline of working with and supporting these companies or the broader spectrum, I should say I'd like to talk about the pipeline that you guys have for this program. So. And specifically remembering that a lot of people in the audience might be working with a university or an SBDC or incubator or other type of entrepreneurial support program. So I'm really curious to hear how you would describe your pipeline. Thinking about things like how do companies actually find out about your programs and get to you? How do you feel about where you're kind of both tech and demographic diversity is standing? Or are you guys kind of really heavy on maybe a pipeline from one source that tends to only be interested in like one type of technology or something? So. Yeah, so essentially just wanting to hear about that, that pipeline. Charlie, I don't think we've had you go first yet, so I'll point to you.

Happy to. So what I didn't mention in the intro is we also run the Massachusetts Tech Transfer center, so we Interface with all 34 resources research institutions on a regular basis across the commonwealth. So we're constantly talking about the benefits of SBIR along with our grant programs. We have a person on staff who's an SBIR expert, helped probably more than 40, 50 companies this year alone with their SBIR applications. And so we're trying to help build the funnel at the very top as well. You know, we're fa. We're only funding phase two for our START program. And so we're reaching out to every year to kind of the previous five years winners of Phase 2 SBIR awards, making sure they're aware of the program. With respect to diversity of the pipeline, both technology and demographic. I would say that from a technology standpoint, it's pretty diverse. You know, we get about 40% are life science related, funded by the NIH, but across, you know, medical devices and therapeutics and other things. And then about 60% are more, more real tech, hard tech and come from a variety of different industries. We try to align those industries with the reviewers and the judges as well. We are work, we, we have decent demographic diversity because we do have 34 research institutions in Massachusetts. So about 50% of our awards have gone to winners outside of Boston and Cambridge. We'd like to get that number much higher. About if we look at our stage three winners, those that have won 800,000, I think it's some, it's 40% of the stage three winners are led by women, black and or Latinx founders, which is a good number, admittedly a low bar. So we are looking to increase that as well. We are actively working to educate students at community colleges, four year undergrad programs and grad schools about all the opportunities to work in tech in Massachusetts as well as opportunities to advance, you know, their ideas through things like SBIR and other state grants. And so, you know, I think what we've seen on the venture side is there's a lack of diversity amongst founders quite often that's because you have to come from a, a pretty affluent background in order to start a company. And so we're trying to make sure people understand the resources available to them if they don't come from an affluent background, for example, and the ability to go through a PhD program, get SBIR funding, get our state funding and then we'll help you with raising funds.

Yeah, I appreciate that and I don't have the numbers at my fingertips right now, but I don't believe the pool of SBIR applicants is up to 40%. So it certainly sounds like you're probably over indexing on the diversity there with the group that you guys are funding.

But again, yeah, I think that's, that's also a reflection of the great job that the universities in Massachusetts do to attract diverse candidates as well. So we're a direct benefit of that.

Fair enough. How about Hawaii?

So we work closely with the University of Hawaii and they have an incubator program that just started last year. And so we kind of work with them to build in that SBIR track to help the companies that are going through that incubator program to lead into the SBIR program so that they can get funds to further their research and development. So that is a relatively new program, but we're looking forward to seeing some good results with that. They have been our partner in the past to market SBIR to their companies through workshops as well as some accelerator programs. So that's been successful as far as diversity goes. I have to admit our program is not as diverse as it should be. So that's going to be my focus for the next few years, working with women and our neighbor island companies, as well as underrepresented companies, as well as far as agency diversity. So I learned from One of your SSTI reports that Hawaii has over 70% of our awards come from the DOD, which is a good and a bad thing. But it's understandable. I think all of the services are represented here and more so I think it makes sense that that's the major SBIR funder, and I think it's great that we have the customers right here in. And I think next is USDA because we do have a large AG focus, and then Energy Department of Energy is the next one, and so it would be good to increase the diversity. But I do appreciate the focus of DoD because we have direct access to the customers here. One thing I would like to see improve for our pipeline is that we've had a couple successes within the recent past, like within the past couple years of older companies that have decided to innovate and use SBIR as that vehicle. And it's really, really paid off for them. I think part of the reason is because they are an experienced company already. They've been in business for 30 years. They know how to. They know how to develop product, they know how to focus their resources. And so once they decided to take advantage of sbir, it really took off exponentially for them. So one company they really wanted to start, they wanted to try and get federal funding, federal customers. So they were very successful with commercial and private customers. And so they were looking for a way in. And so they tried sbir. And basically that was, I want to say, two years ago. And right now they're in phase threes. They have 398 million IDIQ within three years, which is a crazy success story, I know. So I think I would like to reach out to more of these large companies, but I'm just not sure what the best way is to get the message across that SBIR could be this potentially great app to start working with in your customer. So thanks.

Yeah, that's. That's definitely interesting. That's something might want to follow up with you offline, because I could see a lot of times ideally, like Map, which I know you guys are responsible for in Hawaii, might be a door in depending on what technology area those companies are coming from. But that's. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that, John, what about the North Carolina pipeline? All right.

So every time we issue a new solicitation, we send out a press release from the Department of Commerce and that goes to all the media outlets across the state. That's one way. The second way is we reach out to all the universities with tech transfer offices, even those that don't have tech transfer offices, and spread the word that way. And we also push out information to probably about 20 different, I'd say, partner organization, whether it's the North Carolina Biotechnology center, the small business center in the state, just to make sure that the whole network that's relevant really knows about this opportunity. And three, I think that the program's been around long enough now that word of mouth and just general knowledge of the program in general between all those methods, I think it's rare that somebody who could take advantage of the program is not aware of it. Every once in a while a company will knock on our door and say, hey, we just learned about this program. But usually we meet, do a good job of meeting the market demand. As far as the demographics of the company of the program. We track the same demographic characteristics that the, that the federal government does. And our numbers are virtually the same as the, the national statistics on that. So we're not really much better or much worse. We pretty much track the national averages when it comes to that. Geographically, a good number of the, the grants go to companies in what's known as our Research Triangle region, which is the area surrounded by Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill where there are major universities. And it's really the research and innovation hub of the state. So probably 70% of the awards are in that region. But then slowly but surely the number is increasing outside of that region. And then in terms of agencies, the largest agency for us is the Department of Health and Human Services because we're so strong in life sciences. The second largest is DoD, but we're taking active steps to try to make it a larger share of what it is than what it is now. It's large, but we think through some specific actions we can make it larger. Excellent.

Well, appreciate those thoughts. I know we're starting to wind down on time. My goodness. Just cannot talk today. So kind of continuing this conversation about where the program fits into the spectrum. And I'm not sure how many investors may be participating in the audience, though perhaps some venture development organizations similar to groups like Mass Ventures. But kind of regardless of who's in the audience, just curious what you kind of are expecting or hoping a company is going to be doing as its next steps once it's coming out of your program. Is this a kind of ideally speaking, they're directly into sales and looking at operations, Is it into venture capital? So both kind of where do you hope they'll end up? And then particularly as part of that, I'm curious to what extent your programs are helping to provide any sort of facilitation or connections to, you know, those people who might be involved in the next steps for that company. So Cindy, I don't think I've gone to you first in a while. So go with Hawaii.

So we do wraparound services with our program as well. So we bring in different vendors to do business development support. And the goal is like we want to provide that bridge funding. So the match matching grant is the funding to go from phase one to two to three, but the services are to provide that business development services commercialization and like you said, we work with, we're the MEP center. So if they need help with manufacturing or scaling up to get to the commercialization stage, that's what we can help with. I think what an important role is for us too is to play that connector. So we just recently hosted a conference focused on SBIR and tech companies, but we invited a lot of the customers. So we brought in a lot of contract officers, tech scouts, OTAs and a lot of the new programs for the DoD as well as our SBIR program managers. And we brought them together for three days in Hawaii to do an in person conference, which was nice. And so I think that's one of the things that we do is to connect our companies with customers as well as partners and different funding opportunities. We don't do any direct investments. We just recently became the state's SSPCI agency. So we do have that state small business investment fund, but that's an indirect fund. We do have a fund of funds and a loan program. And so I think there's multiple avenues where we try and help companies get to that commercialization stage. Great.

Yeah, thank you. Charlie, do you want to go next?

Yeah, I mean, you know, throughout the three years that companies are in our program, we're providing a ton of technical assistance, really trying to help them figure out their go to market strategy more than anything, really trying to find, you know, the right team members. Oftentimes we're spending, we have a program called Mass VX where we try to find co founders for a lot of these technical founders who can be helpful, help take that company the next level as well. We do this even for the companies that don't make it through the various gates of our, of our program. So we've certainly helped companies that only made it through stage one for many years. But our ultimate goal is to get them to a place where they're ready to go and raise venture capital if that's what they want to do. We then provide net connections through our network introductions. Oftentimes we're leading term sheets. So we've, we've actually funded 9 of our START program which were in the last two years leading term sheets, bringing in a syndicate of, of early stage deep tech investors which there are not many of. And so it is challenging and then ultimately taking a board seat, helping guide them to where they can get growth capital and then we kind of step away. So you know, our, our intention is fully to get them to a place where they are a venture fundable company and then try to get them venture funded.

Thank you, John.

All right, so we don't have the bandwidth to have much in the way of formal ongoing technical assistance that we provide, but we provide it on an as needed basis, you know, on a regular basis. So the companies always have questions. We know all the VC firms, we know pretty much everyone in the innovation ecosystem and we're constantly making referrals and connections of our companies and making them aware of resources that they may not otherwise be aware of. One thing I should note is that we are considering developing a phase two matching program and some members of our team have spoken with Charlie and I think Hawaii as well to learn about how they do it and we're working on that and we hope to make that pipeline a little bit longer.

Excellent, great. Well, we just have a couple of minutes left, so some concluding thoughts at least on SSTI Zen. I mean, as I think you've hopefully all heard from the description of the programs here, definitely a lot of different approaches, but the support that at least a commercialization matching program, if not an SBIR explicitly matching program can fill a really important need for these companies because it does take so much. I mean, you heard a lot of the successes that people touched on. They had multiple sources of funding, whether it was SBIR awards, the state plus the federal money or investment coming alongside. So just having those resources to be able to help a company really do what it needs. You know, during the intro Jamila mentioned that you know this, a lot of these programs can help fund those costs that can't be addressed by the tech development and research funding that comes from the SBIR program. Certainly we've seen a big transition to now where you see an awful lot of the recommended practice is usually around developing your tech alongside the business. And so, you know, from our perspective, those state matching funds really help companies actually achieve that in a way that just the SBIR funding alone might not be able to. So but it is certainly a complicated process. Lots that can happen on the front end to get a company ready obviously to be prepared for this. And then on the back end, you know, a company might not, as you've heard, leave and be ready to be completely self sustaining. I do want to highlight for people that if you're interested in learning more about these programs, there's a report on sbir.gov that highlights, at least as of last year, all of the state programs that existed and made some comparisons to eligibility, funding levels and notes like that. So hopefully that's a useful resource. Thank you so much to Cindy, Charlie and John for joining us today. Again, just can't emphasize enough that we think you guys are doing great work in your states to really strengthen your ecosystems and so glad you're able to take the time out to talk about these interesting program models that you all have. So thank you.

Thank you, thank you, Jason, Cindy, Charlie and John. Let's give them an emoji or GIPHY round of applause if you've just joined. Welcome to the second annual SBA Innovation Ecosystem Summit. There are multiple ways to participate in the conversation. You can click on a stage check to share your thoughts with us and other audience members. You can also post on social media using the hashtag ESO summit22 we're going to take a quick break. We want you to use this time to grab another cup of coffee or refill your water cup. And when we come back, we'll hear how private foundations, venture capital firms and angel investors are bridging the gap between underrepresented entrepreneurs and equitable economic growth via impact funding initiatives, curated programming, collaborations, direct investment and other strategies. We'll be back quicker than you could say super califragilistic espialidocious 10 times.

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