Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto, California, and Massachusetts’ Route 128 corridor are the undisputed centers of U.S. venture capital, dispensing about half of all the money invested in start-ups. But they shouldn’t lord it over the rest of the industry, says Joe Aragona, a founder and general partner at Austin Ventures who last month was elected chairman of the National Venture Capital Association.
“The industry is recognizing that it’s not just Silicon Valley and the East Coast venture communities,” says Aragona, 47. “We are truly national in scope and need the perspective of all regional markets.”
The NVCA lobbies for the interests of 470 member firms that collectively control nearly 90 percent of the venture capital under management in the U.S. Austin, Texasbased Aragona is the group’s first chairman in eight years who has not hailed from a coastal city.
The association’s political agenda has no regional bias. Its approximately $600,000 annual lobbying budget is devoted primarily to winning regulatory relief for venture-backed start-ups. That’s an especially hot issue now, with small companies that want to go public confronting the high cost of complying with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which was passed in response to corporate accounting scandals such as those at Enron and WorldCom. A new federal rule requiring companies to count stock option grants as an expense in financial statements is also problematic for private start-ups, because the lack of publicly traded shares makes it difficult to value employee options.
“We’re trying to say that private and small public firms should be treated differently,” says Aragona.
Of course, with Republicans controlling the White House and Congress, it doesn’t hurt for the NVCA to turn away from California and Massachusetts and let a red-stater lead the charge.
