On Monday, I had the opportunity to visit with Dr. Winslow Sargeant (left, photo from startupweekend.org), the Small Business Administration‘s chief counsel for advocacy, on behalf of Silicon Prairie News and the Des Moines Startup Foundation. Sargeant, who was in town for outreach on behalf of the SBA’s Office of Advocacy, spent the day in Des Moines meeting various entrepreneurs and others stakeholders in the city’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Sargeant describes the role of his office as being an “advocate” on behalf of small business – those of 500 employees or less – both within the executive branch and to Congress. I was able to join a discussion group with Sargeant and his team over dinner and also a separate group later that evening at Foundry Coworking.
Topics discussed included H1B visas, new patent legislation, the effect of healthcare and student loan debt on entrepreneurs, SBA-backed loans to small business and more.
Sargeant himself has an interesting and applicable background to our audience here on the Silicon Prairie. He’s both a former Iowan and a “startup guy” himself, having earned his master’s degree in electrical engineering at Iowa State University and his PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (where he later launched a startup that was acquired in 2000 for $900 million). Prior to joining the SBA, he was also the managing director of Madison-based Venture Investors, LLC, a venture fund specializing in funding university technology transfer startups.
It was a late evening but Sargeant did indulge me in a bit of Iowa State basketball talk on the way out the door. In addition to his excitement about heading to Kansas City today for a similar set of meetings, he was excited that “the Mayor’s back!” in Ames, in reference to Iowa State’s second-year men’s basketball coach, Fred Hoiberg.
Sargeant’s visit to Des Moines was facilitated by Rebecca Greenwald, the regional advocate inside Office of Advocacy that works on behalf of small business in Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri and Kansas. To contact Greenwald, visit sba.gov.
