Building bridges for small businesses: Highlights from the inaugural Strive USA Summit in New York
New technologies and historic opportunity — but also an urgent need to come together and collaborate at a greater scale to prevent millions of small businesses from failing.
These were the dominant themes at last week’s inaugural Strive USA Summit in New York, which brought together leaders from government, philanthropy, the private sector, and others with the goal of spotlighting and scaling initiatives that can strengthen small business ecosystems both in New York and across the country.
Discussions spanned a broad range of topics, from how best to access new federal funding for small businesses to the unique challenges of entrepreneurship in rural communities. Additionally, there was a strong emphasis on exploring new technologies, partnerships, and actions that stakeholders both in the room and beyond could leverage in their own work.
“If you couple the enormous capacity of entrepreneurs with the generational New Deal funding now available via federal programs, we can do better — and must do better,” said Salah Goss, Senior Vice President for Social Impact at the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth in her opening remarks. Expanding on the “why” behind these convenings, “We launched these Summits in part because there is a coordination and curation challenge in the small business ecosystem. So today is really about coming together, hearing from organizations who are doing excellent work on the ground, and building bridges. It may sound cliché, but we really are stronger together.”
Seizing the moment: Recognizing the opportunities and challenges
Across panels, participants spoke about how to access and leverage the once-in-a-generation investments being made by the federal government — from building new infrastructure, to accelerating the clean energy transition, to investing directly in small businesses. Despite these opportunities, participants acknowledged that a “business-as-usual” approach and indexing on traditional support mechanisms was insufficient to meet the needs of the unprecedented number of new small businesses that have launched in recent years and preventing unnecessary business closures.
Rafael Salaberrios, Senior Vice President at Empire State Development, shared his challenges allocating $282 million in loan capital from the State Small Business Credit Initiative (out of more than $500 million available in total) to qualifying small businesses across New York state, comparing it to feeling like, “an ant with a piano on my back.”
Salaberrios passionately described his all-hands-on-deck approach, emphasizing collaboration with new partners, creating more small business-friendly loan products, and even giving out his cell phone number to stakeholders in the room.
Another discussion centered on the diversity of small business sector ecosystems themselves — which means there can be no one-size-fits-all solution.
Dani Delaini, the Entrepreneurial Program Director for the Adirondack North Country Association (ANCA) — an organization that supports small businesses in fourteen counties in upper New York state — spoke to how this challenge manifests among various rural communities where she works.
“Small businesses in rural communities face many of the same challenges that urban businesses do, such as lack of access to capital, but even where we work, each county is incredibly different from one another,” she said. “As the saying goes, if you have been to one rural community, then you have [only] been to one rural community.”
Nadia Villagrán, Vice President of Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), added that “macroeconomic challenges hit rural communities first and last the longest,” citing examples such as supply chain disruptions, which in turn require different types of interventions compared to urban communities.
Participants stressed the need for increasing and sharpening technical assistance to help small businesses grow and strengthen their resilience. Newer entrepreneurs, for example, need better legal and accounting support, sometimes over several years. And given our increasingly digital economy, many entrepreneurs need help to build an effective online presence, while simultaneously safeguarding themselves against risks such as cyberattacks. An essential success factor highlighted for implementing such programs involves facilitating connections among small business owners, enabling them to actively participate in peer learning.
Emerging insights and solutions, urging swift action
There may be no one-size-fits-all solution, but the panelists did share real-world learnings, approaches, and emerging technologies that have assisted thousands of small businesses and have the potential to help millions more.
Matt Roth, President and CEO of Community Reinvestment Fund, USA (CRF), spoke about CRF bringing over 150 Community Financial Institutions (CFIs) and Business Support Organizations (BSOs) together on a single platform to streamline the process of providing capital and technical assistance to small businesses, simplifying an otherwise cumbersome process for small business owners. Roth also discussed the critical role CFIs play in attracting private sector investment.
“There is a big difference between perceived risk and actual risk,” he said. “Many traditional banks have challenges assessing actual risk for a small business given the lack of data compared to bigger businesses. Community financial institutions, via their closer proximity and lending histories to small businesses, are better positioned to show that actual risk can be a lot lower than many people think.”
Bigger and better public-private partnerships were deemed indispensable, with Patrick Davis, Senior Vice President of Platforms and Technology Services at CRF, emphasizing the mutual dependence of the public and private sectors, especially when it comes to building and scaling new technology and data infrastructure that would benefit all stakeholders. “The public sector can’t do it alone, and the private sector can’t do it alone — we need each other.”
Building on this theme, Kevin Kim, the Commissioner for the NYC Department of Small Business Services, shared insights into a public-private partnership model that’s had a notable impact in New York over the pst year: The NYC Small Business Opportunity Fund.
The fund brought together eight CFIs with private sector supporters like Mastercard and Goldman Sachs to provide complementary financing and technical support. There was also a shared technology infrastructure managed by CRF that made it easier to approve and deploy capital as well as align and coordinate the various stakeholders. The Fund has deployed more than $75 million in capital to date.
“The Opportunity Fund is a really good blueprint, even if it was not perfect,” he said. “The private sector was able to help us streamline [how the fund operated] and provide funding that complemented other sources of financing so we could offer different types of products. On our side in government, after setting up the fund, we focused a lot on getting the word out and were very effective — we had almost 11,000 entrepreneurs apply for a loan in the first two weeks alone.”
In the end, the fund supported over 1,000 small businesses and the City is looking to launch a second fund in the near future.
Commissioner Kim also pointed to the NYC Funds Finder, which is a one-stop-shop for small businesses seeking information about financing, technical assistance, and how to find and access city services. The platform was developed by Strive USA grantee Next Street, which hopes to expand the service to other regions. Kamran Qamar, Chief Technology Officer of Next Street, expanded on the rationale and utility of NYC Funds Finders in a subsequent panel discussion.
“There are many different paths to the top of the mountain for a small business, and as outsiders we are not always well-equipped to know which path they should take,” Qamar said. “So our role is to create technology that can be a kind of sherpa for small businesses — helping them find the right path up the mountain and supporting them as they climb to the top.”
What’s next: The call to action
At the beginning of the Summit, Goss assigned everyone the “homework” of getting to know other organizations in the room to strengthen collaboration within the ecosystem. By the summit’s conclusion, it was clear what the potential of these strengthened collaborations could look like in practice — more significant and effective public-private partnerships, shared technology standards and platforms, and a unified message for organizations both within and beyond the sector to get involved and help more small businesses succeed.
As Salaberrios expressed, “There is a huge opportunity in front of us as an industry to provide more and more innovative financing to small businesses as well as real technical assistance. The scale of the federal programs [that support this work] is a huge challenge — but we are really happy, and ready, to engage with any partner that wants to get involved.”
