As a startup, we took five issues with us to 19 meetings in 2 ½ days – it was busy! Our five issues included three tax-related items: repealing the medical device tax that went into effect in January 2013 and disproportionately affects small med tech companies; permitting pre-profitability companies to deduct an R&D tax credit against federal payroll taxes, since they don’t have income taxes to count it against; and making permanent the capital gains exclusion for investments held for more than five years.

We also proposed the creation of an Innovation Bank, a new federal effort to provide greater funding to support the innovation sector of the economy, and further suggested that the Bank could be funded by proceeds from a change in tax laws to encourage multinational corporations to repatriate their overseas earnings and put those earnings to use in driving innovation domestically.

And last (but not least!), we took a targeted approach to immigration, advocating for changes in immigration policy to make it easier for skilled STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) talent to come, and stay, here in this country.

All of these issues are currently “live” in the House and Senate in different forms, and the day after we got back from DC, staffers from the offices of two Senators with whom we’d met were in touch to ask for the endorsement of the Startup Act 3.0 – which the Metro Chamber promptly did endorse of behalf of the region’s business community.

What were those 19 meetings in 2 ½ days, you ask? We were in the offices of five Senators, and eleven Congressmen/women. In the House, Congresswoman Doris Matsui and Congressman Ami Bera were especially generous with their time and interest with the Innovation team.

In addition to elected officials, we met with a senior advisor in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) – after which I “explored” the hallways of the Old Executive Office Building until I found an exit that led directly to the West Wing and proved too intimidating for me! We also brought the Executive Director of the Information Technology Innovation Foundation (ITIF) to speak to the entire Cap-to-Cap delegation; and finally we spent some time with the Small Business Administration (SBA), Economic Development Administration (EDA), and the Brookings Institution.

Supporting all of this was a great regional team, including very strong involvement from the City of Davis, as well as a number of Cap-to-Cap “freshmen.” A shout-out to the go-to core of the team: Rochelle Swanson (Councilmember, City of Davis, and honorary Cap-to-Cap co-chair), Tim Gaffaney (innovation policy consultant extraordinaire!), Rob White (Chief Innovation Officer for the City of Davis), Kari Fry (Davis Chamber of Commerce), David Morris (techDavis), Mike Rizzo (Five Star Bank), and Gil Alvarado (Sierra Health Foundation) – both Mike and Gil are also SARTA Board members. Gina Banks and Marj Dickinson (UC Davis), Anna Ballard and Leroy Tripette (Intel), and Ted Gaebler (City of Rancho Cordova) formed the rest of the team, and Jim Alves (SMUD) and Jerry Vorpahl (Power Inn Alliance) jumped in with us for some key meetings.

“Innovation” is one of the main tenets of the region’s Next Economy strategic economic development plan, and the ability to speak directly on this topic to those in DC was itself a great innovation on the part of the Metro Chamber. Join us next year, and let’s see if we can out-number the enormous Transportation team! (Not that we’re competitive or anything…)

* Brief backgrounder: about 300 people travel on Cap-to-Cap each year, a program skillfully organized by the Sacramento Metro Chamber. The point of Cap-to-Cap is to bring Sacramento’s business leaders to DC to speak directly to lawmakers, administration officials, and others, about the region’s priorities. The Cap-to-Cap contingent is divided into team based around specific issues like Transportation, Flood, Healthcare, Clean/Green, and – new this year! – Innovation, among others. Each team develops its own issues to speak about and hold its own meetings with the right lawmakers etc.

At SARTA, we partnered with the UC Davis Child Family Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, the Sacramento Angels and the Sierra Angels as co-sponsors at the ACA summit to promote our region’s tech influence.

The conference included sessions on angel investment best practices, crowd funding, incubators, accelerators, syndications, angels working with universities and exit strategies. Industry specific sessions on mobile technology, life science, education, cloud technology, clean tech and healthcare were also featured.

The first day of the conference, four of our homegrown Sacramento-region companies pitched their companies to investors. Michele Wong, CEO of Sacramento-headquartered Clean World Partners attracted attention with their proprietary organic recycling technologies. Med tech company NexGen Medical Systems represented by SARTA board member Cary Adams and life science company Accelerated Medical Diagnostics’ founder Paul Henderson turned heads towards the Sacramento region’s strength in healthcare innovation. Tim Keller, founder of consumer product company VinPerfect smartly attracted attention to his table by pouring wine bottled with his patented, oxygen-exchange-modulating screw-cap products. Although many angels tend to specialize in one or another tech sector, not surprisingly almost everyone seemed interested in wine.

The session on syndication of angel deals was moderated by Bob Goff of the Sierra Angels, and included Mark Zetter of the Sacramento Angels, and Jeff Gray, CEO of Glue Networks, which has raised over $6M from nine different angel groups.  The session on angels working with universities included Andy Hargadon from UC Davis, and Cary Adams.

Reflecting on the three days in San Francisco, Cary said, “The Summit is a great place to network with hundreds of angel investors from all over the world and to learn of recent developments. The point of our collective sponsorship was to raise the profile of UC Davis and our region’s tech community among this key group of opinion leaders, and I think everyone was pleased with the experience.”

All attendees were impressed with the networking power provided through participating in the summit. The entire angel investor community benefited from learning best practices and sharing stories of the common challenges in early stage private investing.

Programs like this summit and SARTA’s regularly scheduled tech events create the community for connecting entrepreneurs with capital resources. Stay tuned for what winged wonders grow out of these meet-ups and land at our doorstep.

It may have been Sacramento’s first Startup Weekend but we rocked it for representation! “So far this has been a bomb community – best energy I’ve seen across five Startup Weekends this year.” said Startup Weekend facilitator Lloyed Lobo as he opened up the judging on Sunday night. (and that was before bottle shots….)

Nearly 100 people piled into the Hacker Lab on Friday night and 41 of them made sixty second idea pitches (including me). After we pitched, we had to sell our ideas to fellow attendees who voted for our ideas during 15 minutes of frantic lobbying. The votes were tallied and the top 18 ideas then proceeded to the next step—building a team. My idea made it to the top 10 but I didn’t succeed in finding a key resource – a mobile app developer – so I ended up joining another team (and that turned out fantastic!).

Fourteen teams formed that first night and spent the next two days working on their new startup ideas. You can check out all the ideas here. Working together on a team was the best part! Our team, Farm2Family, created the model for a non-profit that will deliver local farm-fresh fruits and veggies on a mobile produce truck to under-served communities in Sacramento. I met some fantastic new friends and expanded my horizons to include Food Literacy and Sacramento Food Deserts! I also learned about Trello, a project planning tool, from a bonafide startup founder and made quite a few new connections on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter!

Each team conducted interviews with potential customers and defined their Minimum Viable Product (MVP), incorporating the Lean Startup principles discussed by author Brant Cooper on Friday night. Teams were encouraged to complete The Business Model Canvas to help them define, develop and better understand their strategic plan.

After 48 hours of building a startup, we were ready to present our ideas to the judges on Sunday night. Each of the 14 teams made a 5-minute pitch, followed by a couple of minutes of questions from the judges. The seven judges, many of them investors, included five members of SARTA’s Board of directors. I was so impressed by the teams–every presentation was well thought out and oozing with creative business ideas. It must have been difficult for the judges to select the top teams. But four teams were declared winners. The remaining 10 teams were not officially in the winners circle, but everyone left that night feeling like they’d caught the brass ring!

The Winning Teams: Global Casting Pro, a web-based, searchable global talent database for casting, won third place. Appraise Blaze, a commercial property appraisal suite that streamlines an appraiser’s workflow, came in second. And thefirst place team was MICC– Mobile Incident Command & Control–building a better way for Fire Incident Commanders to track and record. Farm2Family, the team I was on, won a special award, Best Community Startup.

I strongly encourage you to participate in a Startup Weekend or Hackathon (Cereal Hack 3 is coming up in May). It’s a transformational experience! You may not create “the next big thing” or launch a startup that lives beyond the weekend but you will learn important lessons and form relationships that will increase the likelihood of success in your future endeavors. Read more about Sacramento’s first ever Startup Weekend in the Sacramento Press.

Want to stay connected with Sacramento’s Startup Community? Here’s three things you can do right now to make that happen:

1. Subscribe to the Sacramento StartupDigest–bringing you the inside scoop on all the best events for tech startups.
2. Sign up for Startgrid Sacramento–connecting entrepreneurs to resources, relationships and community – everything needed to build great companies.
3. Become a SARTA member–join the movement! Accelerating innovation in the Sacramento region.

You don’t have to be a techie to participate in a Startup Weekend (I’m certainly not a coder or developer) – roughly 50% of the attendees have a business background—marketing, biz dev, finance, operations, etc. It takes a myriad of skills to launch a startup—we all bring our unique talents.

Have a startup idea but no team? Pitch it at Startup Weekend and if your idea is selected, a team will be created. Don’t have any startup ideas? No problem! Teams are formed as part of the process of a Startup Weekend. Bring your skill set and you’ll be matched with a team working on a startup idea.

Another reason to participate—this is Sacramento’s very first Startup Weekend! Don’t you want to be a part of that?!! Startup Weekend is powered by the Kauffman Foundation.  Over 45,000 people have participated in a Startup Weekend in hundreds of cities worldwide.  Increase your entrepreneurial cred by participating in a Startup Weekend!

Still not convinced you should go? Need a little more info on what happens at a Startup Weekend?  Here’s how it goes down: Beginning with open mic pitches on Friday, attendees bring their best ideas and inspire others to join their team. Over Saturday and Sunday teams focus on customer development, validating their ideas, practicing LEAN Startup methodologies and building a minimal viable product. On Sunday evening teams demo their prototypes and receive valuable feedback from a panel of experts.  And you get fed…a lot…and often!

What’s holding you back?!! Just do it! Register now at sacramento.startupweekend.org. You’ll thank me later! And I’ve even scored a discount code for you! Enter “sacstartupdigest” in the promotional code field for $20 off the $54 registration fee!

*Classic SpongeBob reference.

The first Sacramento Startup Weekend is organized by Hacker Lab, Capsity Offices, SARTA, UPStart Sacramento and The Urban Hive.

Find out about the best Sacramento tech startup events by signing up for the Sacramento Startup Digest!

There is endless speculation on how equity crowdfunding is going to work and hundreds of websites are waiting to launch to facilitate equity crowdfunding once it’s legal.  Ryan Caldbeck, Founder and CEO at CircleUp, said in his article in Forbes on Saturday, “Equity crowdfunding is the most disruptive thing to happen to the financial services industry in a very long time.”  Disruptive is a great adverb when we’re talking about technology innovation but apparently the SEC isn’t so sure it’s a good one for the financial services industry.

If you attended SXSW Interactive last week, you may have heard equity crowdfunding discussed at one of the panels—this topic was buzzing!  Silicon Valley has a Crowdfund Expo and Conference scheduled for April 4-5. What will they talk about for two days considering equity crowdfunding is still not a legal option? If you attend, let me know!  TechCrunch posted an intriguing article yesterday on how equity crowdfunding will impact Venture Capitalists.  And it’s not a legit topic unless someone has created an infographic for it, so I’ve thrown this one in for you!

There is an opportunity for you to find out more about the status of equity crowdfunding right here in Sacramento at SARTA’s seminar on Wednesday morning, March 20, Funding Choices for Startups – from Bootstrapping to Crowdfunding.  It’s not just about equity crowdfunding – you’ll hear from a variety of experts on everything from bootstrapping to bank financing to SBA loans to angel investment and more.

What’s your take on equity crowdfunding? Let’s get a discussion going right here right now in the comments section below.  Hopefully next year at this time, it will be an available funding option for startups.

What does that mean for Sacramento? It may be easy(ier) to engage with our startup community than it is to engage with those in some of the more startup-famous cities. Just attend a couple of events that promise quality networking and you’re in. Sacramentans, as a rule, are a friendly, helpful folk.

Don’t believe me? Here’s my challenge – go to an event this week; I suggest SARTA’s TechEdge Celebration on March 8 at the Hyatt Regency Sacramento. Connect with some folks (weren’t they friendly?), invite them to join your network on LinkedIn. Before you connect, take a peek at your degrees of separation–I think you’ll find that most are already a second or third degree connection for you on LinkedIn. And if you first connect with me on LinkedIn, I can almost guarantee it! (I’m a bit of an over achiever when it comes to social media platforms).

LinkedIn not your thing? Facebook, Meetup and Twitter are other ways to connect with Sacramento’s startup community. “Like” some pages on Facebook–check out Hacker Lab or SARTA. Join a couple of Meetup Groups like Lean Startup Sacramento or Sacramento Drupal Users Group. Follow a few Sacramento startup enthusiasts on Twitter like Adam Kalsey, Brett Owens or SARTA’s own Meg Arnold. The key to quality connections is engagement–face-to-face as well as continuing (or sometimes starting) the conversation on social platforms.

Looking for more ways to connect with the startup community in Sacramento?  Sign up to receive the Sacramento StartupDigest every Monday to find out about the best events for founders and future founders.  I’m the curator and would love to hear from you!

That connection is not, however, how Tim Westegren came to be speaking in Sacramento at TechEdge in early March. That debt of gratitude is owed to Jon Gregory, at SARTA’s partner, Innovate North State. Jon knows Tim from the days when he was pitching for venture capital funding – for a company named Savage Beast – and came to one of the pitch-fests that Jon organized as part of Golden Capital Network.

Thus a small piece of the long history of working to support entrepreneurship and tech companies in the Sacramento region: Tim Westergren is coming in 2013 because of work that Jon Gregory did in 1999. And he’ll be speaking to an audience many of whom, fourteen years ago, may not have been dreaming of entrepreneurship or building companies from the ground up. And yet there they’ll be, listening avidly to Tim’s story of how he did exactly that.

This goes to further prove Brad Feld’s point, in his book Startup Communities, that the work of creating effective startup communities is a twenty-year commitment that rolls forward and renews with every new day.

Startup communities – those that celebrate founders and leaders, value appropriate risk-taking, and actively learn from the inevitable failures – are created over time as investments in the long-term future of a community. Moreover, startup communities yield value to the communities they’re part of that far exceed the number of jobs or amount of capital investment – they create a dynamic, risk-tolerant culture that the broader business climate can benefit from.

These days it is very tempting– and important – to look for immediate, substantive job creation as the highest purpose of economic development. After all, there remain far too many people, especially in the Sacramento region, who are unemployed. But we mustn’t lose sight of the larger objective: that we are working to build the economic foundations for our region’s next economy, and that foundations don’t get built overnight (or, if they do, one might be wise not to trust in their durability).

Don’t get me wrong. SARTA is having an event on Friday, March 8. It’s called TechEdge. You should go, because it will be inspiring, fun, and a lot of people will be there. And, yes, I definitely know that we’re not going to create a foundation for the next economy in a couple hours over lunch on Friday.

But what we do at TechEdge is important, nonetheless, to that foundation. At TechEdge we celebrate the risk-takers, the founders, the visionaries, the stubborn SOBs who get turned down for VC funding and just keep battering away at their dream nonetheless. We hold up people like Tim Westergren, who has clearly succeeded on the international stage – and we also hold up people like Steve Baker, Jeff Gray, and Lisa Klinkhammer, who are driving their own companies with equally single-minded purpose and great successes.

We invite them to tell their stories, because story-telling is one of the most powerful ways we have of learning (this is the English major in me coming out), and because the stories we tell ourselves define who we think we are.

And Sacramento, we need to be confident that we are founders and builders and creators – of companies, of jobs, and in the eventual end, of our own next economy.

And, don’t forget to come to TechEdge. Click here for full info and registration. Time is short, and getting shorter daily!

Our first PowerUP is this week, on Thursday, February 21 in West Sacramento, from 4:00 – 7:00 p.m. Register Now!   Hosted by Greyrock Energy, Inc., this promises to be the first of three great events around the region where you will be able to:

• Learn what our clean tech companies are doing and tell the crowd what you’re up to. If you have a new product or program, come share it with the community!
• Develop a promotional video pitching a product or company, at no additional cost beyond the registration fee for the event. All the videos will be hosted on-line at the CleanStart Virtual Expo. In addition, tables will be available for a clean tech product showcase.
• Meet investors, entrepreneurs, service providers, researchers and more. 
• Learn how to participate in the Clean Tech Open accelerator and competition.
• Win the four-minute video raffle prize. The first 3 registrants for a 4 minute video of their own get it at the fantastic price of just $600….no, it’s not a mistake. Ingrid@sarta.org can hook you up with more info.

New for 2013, CleanStart will be launching a brand-new Virtual Expo, and clean tech companies who come to PowerUP can be featured on the Virtual Expo for free!  All clean tech companies at PowerUP will work that same evening with our professional videographer to create a one-minute video about their company *at no cost.*  In addition, we’ll host a raffle drawing for a free four-minute video. All clean tech companies are encouraged to participate in one or more of the PowerUP’s, because invitations to the CleanStart Showcase will only be granted to companies that join us at PowerUP.

After February 21, the remaining two PowerUP meet-ups are:

• April 23rd at Folsom Lake College
• June 26th in partnership with Sierra Commons and the Nevada County Economic Resource Council in Nevada City

It’s Not About the Idea
Andrew Hargadon, Founder and Director, UC Davis Child Family Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship
New, radical, disruptive ideas are the foundation of innovation—at least that’s the common assumption. But what if that’s wrong?

How the Entrepreneurial Mindset Can Change You
Henrik Scheel, Founder and CEO, Startup Experience ApS
What if we stopped coming up with excuses and started doing something to solve the big problems around us?

Quieting the Mind in Five Minutes a Day
Sifu Harinder Singh, SEAL TEAM 6 trainer
Sifu Harinder Singh is a martial arts and functional fitness master who previously spent seven years at a Fortune 100 company applying battlefield strategy for the boardroom.

Do you have a favorite TED talk that fires up your entrepreneurial engine? Take a moment to share it with us in the comments section below.

Looking to connect with the startup community in Sacramento?  Sign up to receive the Sacramento StartupDigest every Monday to find out about the best events for founders and future founders.  I’m the curator and would love to hear from you!

*”Ideas worth spreading” is the official TED slogan.

StartupDigest was founded in 2009 around the belief that life is too short to work at a boring company and that it should be easy for anyone to join the tech startup world. StartupDigest now publishes hundreds of newsletters that help thousands of people get more involved in startup communities across hundreds of cities all over the world. Curators come from each community and handpick the best events, news and reading lists for startups in their region.

Yours truly is the curator for the Sacramento edition. If you have ideas for events or startup information I should share in the digest, please give me a holler. You can also add your event directly to the StartupDigest site.  Once it’s approved, it will show up on the calendar.

Here’s a preview of the Febuary 4^th edition:

Welcome to the first edition of the Sacramento StartupDigest!

Wait. There’s a startup community in Sacramento? Yeah, I hear that a lot.  Do you?  So let’s make some NOISE and put Sacramento on the Startup Map! I mean that both figuratively and literally – have you added your startup to the Startup Genome map yet?

Each week I’ll share interesting stories about Sacramento startups and dive a little deeper into startup events happening around town, like Sac Techweek. I’ll also include a list of the best events for Sacramento startups.  Got something going on or heard a mindblowing startup story? Please share it with me –  you might see it in an upcoming digest!

Speaking of sharing, please share the Sacramento StartupDigest with your startup friends and recommend they signup – it’s delivered to your inbox every Monday!

Ripped from the headlines

Social Network: How crowdfunding connects strangers with money — and your business
Comstock’s Magazine
Three Sacramento region entrepreneurs—ioSafe, Glide Cruisers and Small Market, Big Heart — share their experience with crowdfunding on Kickstarter and Indiegogo. We’re still waiting for the SEC to finish the rule-making on equity crowdfunding, but these stories are full of lessons learned!

Spotlight on Jack Crawford Jr., general partner, Velocity Venture Capital
Sacramento Business Journal
A leader in Sacramento’s startup community, Jack Crawford Jr. shares insights on capital investments, the importance of entrepreneurs making time for networking activities, and more. And be sure to check out the events list for information on Jack’s weekly Breakfast and Big Ideas meetup!

Sacramento’s iSnap making an international push
The Sacramento Bee
iSnap, producer of a super cool social photo kiosk (have you snapped your pic at the iSnap Kiosk at Esquire IMAX yet and then tweeted or Facebooked it to your 1000 closest friends right from the iSnap Kiosk?), is expanding its borders internationally. We love it when Sacramento home-grown ideas are successful around the world!

Standout Events: You gotta be there…

Sacramento Techweek – May 10-18 –Mark Your Calendar Now!
This grassroots-organized week of all-things-tech, is a first for Sacramento! The brainchild of Hacker Lab, SacStarts and UpStart Sacramento, Sac Techweek is a week of independent events about technology, design, and innovation. See what’s going on or plan an event of your own. You can even pitch in to help.  Follow them on Twitter at @sactechweek to stay up-to-date on Sac TechWeek!

Sacramento Startup Weekend March 29-April 1
Watch this space—more details coming soon….You don’t want to miss out on Sacramento’s very first Startup Weekend at the Hacker Lab!  Startup Weekend is a global grassroots movement of active and empowered entrepreneurs who are learning the basics of founding startups and launching successful ventures. It is the largest community of passionate entrepreneurs with over 400 past events in 100 countries around the world in 2011

Click here to view a list of more startup events in Sacramento.