Vets starting tech businesses rely on each other for support
RepayVets in the News. via Washington Post:
Lt. Commander Marlon Terrell is a Navy reservist, but in his freetime has started a tech business to support veteran entrepreneurship. He uses a Kickstarter-like crowdfunding model — veterans can post their projects on RepayVets and request pledges. The Maryland-based company started last year but had its soft-launch last month—so far, it has already funded one successful venture (a jump-rope adapted to the Crossfit workout.)
Terrell started RepayVets out of concern for the returning service members , a couple hundred thousand of which he estimates will be looking for enterprise opportunities.
Many veterans find, upon coming back to their families, that they “don’t have a lot of capital when they return,” Terrell said.
Read the article here
In addition to all they do for their country overseas, service members are also a markedly entrepreneurial group: although veterans represent only 6% of the U.S. population, they account for an impressive 13.5% of all U.S. small business owners. This entrepreneurial spirit is contributing to business growth around the country, and last week we decided to head down to San Diego to see how Google for Entrepreneurs and Startup Weekend could help.
On August 9, Google for Entrepreneurs, along with the Syracuse University Institute for Veterans and Military Families and Startup Weekend, hosted a series of events focused on giving business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs from the military community the training and tools they need to take advantage of the web to build and grow businesses. More than 200 service members learned about free tools to create a web site, track and measure their web presence and market their product or service.
(Source: googleblog.blogspot.com)
How to Start Crowd Funding Your Way to Success
Marine combat veteran James Dean is our latest poster raising funds for his project “Under the Lights”, a company with the mission of standardizing the way amateur sporting events are organized. To learn more about his project and to see how you can help, visit his project page here.
Friday Link Bytes: June 15 Edition
Detroit’s Cobo Center will host three major U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs-sponsored events- The VA for Vets Hiring Fair, the Veteran Open House, and the National Veterans Small Business Conference and Expo will be held from June 26-29.
Big Franchise Chains looking to recruit veterans as owners.
With approximately 900,000 veterans currently unemployed, public and private sectors are joining together to lower that number.
The Department of Defense has a new program called Hero 2 Hired (H2H) - H2H is on a mission to simplify the job search for veterans, while reducing the number of unemployed Reserve Component service members. This program also allows military-friendly companies to access members of the military, post job openings, search for candidates and invite them to apply, all free of charge.
Army veteran Daniel Smith is educating the public on service dogs.
Friday Link Bytes is a weekly collection of stories relating to veterans & entrepreneurship.
According to the U.S. Small Business Administration 2007 Survey of Business Owners 97,114 of U.S. Firms were owned by female veterans taking in a total of
$15.8 billion.
Army Veteran Chelsea Fernandez, Navy veteran Alicia Harris and Air Force Reservist Noe Foster each own and operate their own business in the state of Hawaii helping to employ other veterans and promote available resources to other aspiring veteran entrepreneurs.
To learn more about their companies and available resources for military veterans, click here.
3 Rules for Successful Crowdfunding
Crowdfunding is a way to raise money by getting small donations from a large number of people, and sometimes the end result is big.
Wondering if your business idea would be backed by a crowd of investors? Consider these three traits of successful crowdfunders, according to by Brian Meece, the CEO and co-founder of RocketHub.com, a New York City-based crowdfunding platform.
Veterans like Robert Dyer put their field skills to work to create entrepreneurial opportunities.
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