Today, the White House announced the launch of the Startup America Partnership as part of a national strategy to stimulate economic growth and create jobs. The initiative is being chaired by AOL co-founder Steve Case, and will receive funding from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and the Case Foundation. Carl Schramm, CEO of the Kauffman Foundation, will serve as a founding board member.
Partners will contribute funds to "existing proven models or develop new programs and efforts to help entrepreneurs." Partners include Google, Facebook, Intel, HP, and IBM (see full list here).
Facebook will host 12 "Startup Days" this year aimed at providing early-staged companies with engineering and design support on the Facebook platform. These are monthly events for building apps and sites that incorporate social technologies.
"In addition, we plan to stay active within open source communities and are proud of what we’ve contributed in the past," says Facebook’s Doug Purdy. "Open source technologies continue to be important to startups that are scaling and growing quickly. They allow entrepreneurs to spend more time working on their products."
"Over the past few years we’ve been contributing to a wide range of existing projects, from PHP to memcached to Varnish and many others," adds Purdy. "We also open source our own projects, ranging from major pieces of infrastructure (most recently HipHop for PHP) to small tools that make developing all sorts of software faster and easier (such as XHP and Three20)."
Intel is committing $200M of new investment in U.S. companies for the project, and is serving on the board. IBM is investing $150 million to fund programs that promote entrepreneurs. HP is investing $4 million. Google’s contributions have yet to be revealed.
"America’s story has been forged in large part by entrepreneurs who have against great odds created innovative products and services that have changed the world – and created millions of jobs," said Steve Case. "Our nation once again looks to these creative risk-takers to unleash the next wave of American innovation, and I am pleased that President Obama has made supporting and celebrating entrepreneurs a major priority of his economic strategy. I am honored to chair the Startup America Partnership, and look forward to working with the White House to champion the creation of new start-ups, and help accelerate the growth of speed-ups."
The partnership will not target specific entrepreneurs, but will spotlight and connect programs and institutions that directly target entrepreneurs. So says this FAQ page.