Economic Development and Emerging Technologies
Committee
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October 26th, 2005 One of the reasons why we need a Jobs Creation Commission is so that people like me, who are experts in small business, can help the Committee on Economic Development and Emerging Technologies. I have watched your work and heard about the listening tour, and we need that and we need more and more of it and I want to be a part of that. I want to give you praise where praise is due but I want you to know that somebody like me, and I have many friends statewide, who have not actually been interviewed, who could be a part of a Jobs Creation Commission. For those of you who do not know me, I will tell you a little about my background and expertise. My name is Andrea Silbert and I am the co-founder and former CEO for the Center for Women and Enterprise. I started that organization in 1995 with one office in Roxbury. Its mission is to help women start and grow their own businesses. I opened a second office in Worcester and another office in Providence, RI. Since 1995, that organization has helped entrepreneurs and small business owners, ten thousand of them over the last ten years, those business owners, many of whom are self-employed, I think that is an important piece of this whole small business puzzle, those business owners, in turn, have created fourteen thousand jobs and $400 million in new wages. Just to give you a few examples of the variety of businesses that we have in the state and that I have had the privilege of serving: Precious Cargo, based in Worcester. A woman on welfare started a business transporting children to and from daycare and after school programs. She got off of welfare and bought her first car. She has a fleet now of five vehicles. Not only is she providing a valuable service and product but she is employing other people and herself and supporting her family. Another example is the business, Zip Car. Zip Car came to my organization to raise venture capital. Without that venture capital, Zip Car would not exist today. Zip Car is a car sharing service which is now expanding to Washington, D.C. and New York. Again, without the ground-up efforts, Zip Car would not have the two million dollars and would not be here today. Another great example on the other end of the spectrum that just filed to go public, is a company in Burlington called I Robot that needed to raise fourteen million dollars in venture capital. Again, came into the Center for Women In Enterprise to go through a training to pitch to venture capitalists in order to raise fourteen million dollars. Robot manufactures the Rumba vacuum cleaner and also has a $50 million contract from the Department of Defense and is selling another version of its robot to be used for mine sweeping in Afghanistan and Iraq So, that is $50 million from Washington coming into our state. They employ two hundred people. They are engineers. They have thirty open jobs. So these are the type of companies that we have and it gets back to the innovation that we are talking about and that we, in Massachusetts, are famous for. So, for us to be 48 out of 50, and you know what I am talking about and I know I am preaching to the choir, but for us to be 48 out of 50 states in job creation last year, is completely unacceptable. We have to all be on the same page and doing everything we can. We know that all the new net job growth does come from small business, companies like EMC and Teradyne were small businesses once upon a time, and of course we are down now about one hundred and sixty thousand jobs. |