we just honored the sbic winner, and i was with him last week in nashville. it's amazing how many small businesses and entrepreneurs are getting their starts with this sbic program. and you probably know some of our brand name successes that started with sbic. that would be apple, fedex, costco, intel, pretty good track record. i know there are some more successes on the way. we also took our sbic program and we launched something called the early stage program because, you know, there's a real valley of death, an absence of capital in the early stages for high-growth entrepreneurs. and we're very pleased we put $200 million a year for the next five years into that program in a competitive process so sbics are applying as we speak. the second "c." federal contracting. i spoke a little bit about it this morning with the administrator for nasa, who has been a great partner, u but $100 billion annually is what the sba monitors across all federal agencies that goes in the hands of small business. and we think of this as a win-win. it's good for the federal govern

sbic-backed funds combined with some of the private funds, there are ways to be creative, but we could spend a day just on the banking side for sure and on the credit side. one more question, and i think that's all we've got time for. >> hi. my name is donovan, and our company is avasor incorporated. i wanted to just make a comment about the emphasis, the issues that i think are affecting us as a small business and i think many others. i know that you're doing a tremendous amount with access to capital, and i just want to share one more perspective about the health care issue. i view my ability to provide health care to my employees as basically the most important issue after access to capital. once you get past that access to capitalish oar or at least think you're past it and you're operating a profitable business, you feel that your growth is really tied to your ability to provide a really nice safety net for your staff. and one of the things that we're finding over the last -- well, since we've been in business is the percentage increases that we're seeing annually, you know, from

so i think this kind of sbic support to get those funds, those venture funds formed so that those 300-plus entrepreneur who are waiting to get the earliest -- and these companies are not asking for a lot of capital. it would fit funds of this size. it's really early is taken, those first few steps out of the womb that need to be finances, really the access to capital, that's the issue in a state like michigan. >> so, karen what are you going to do when you have funded certain number of these early merging growth companies and some of them fail and you're hit with front page stories of the failure of the program? how do you respond to that as a policimaker be? >> we've been doing this a long time, and we know our failure rate. and it's pretty good. and part of it is because we have a public-private partnership. we're not making the decisions. we have experienced investors making the decisions. there's so much opportunity out there with these entrepreneurs that we have, and we are getting more and more of the best investors partnering with us. so we anticipate, you know, we have a recor

at the kinds of things that you have in front of us, what we did is say, what can we do inside the sbic program to put capital into the very early stage companies? where that valley of death got wider over the past few years. and we are announcing today as part of start-up america, we committed to put $1 billion into these early, early stage companies, and the first competition is going out for experienced venture capitalists to apply. we're not going to making decisions. we're going to leave it to kate and her folks to apply, and we will leverage their investments, one to one. so they'll get more money to put out, and we will make it a competitive arena, and it opens today, and we're going to make very quick turnarounds and put the first money out this year. so we believe that we can do things like this with bipartisan support or within the administrative authority that we have, without taking taxpayers' money, and get more of these entrepreneurs going. this is something that the president has supported from day one, and i think we've got a good momentum now behind it. >> let me, getti

we just honored the sbic winner, and i was with him last week in nashville. it's amazing how many small businesses and entrepreneurs are getting their starts with this sbic program. and you probably know some of our brand name successesh