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Venture firm pays student entrepreneurs to take a break |
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As many universities prepare for an academic year largely held online, the venture capital firm Contrary Capital wants to persuade student entrepreneurs to work on a start-up instead. |
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Contrary Capital will offer five teams between $50,000 and $100,000. The only requirements, according to the firm’s founder, Eric Tarczynski, are that a team must commit to a project between September and the spring, and that at least one member must take a year off to work on it. (The program isn’t limited to a particular sector.) |
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• Teams will also work with Contrary Capital investors, including early employees of Tesla, Facebook, Reddit and more, Mr. Tarczynski said. |
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The idea grew from a poll that Contrary conducted a month ago, Mr. Tarczynski told Michael. More than half of the 100 students surveyed said they weren’t sure they would go back to school in the fall. That inspired Contrary to roll out the program. |
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• “We strongly believe that the limiting factor for young people and company formation is bandwidth,” he said. The program is meant to allow students to focus on entrepreneurship, especially at a time when a traditional college experience isn’t widely available. |
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• One potential focus of the gap-year program, he added, is helping international students who might otherwise be barred from staying in the U.S. under revised visa guidelines. |
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It isn’t quite like the Thiel Fellowships, the program founded by the investor Peter Thiel that pays young people $100,000 to drop out of school and pursue their start-up dreams. Participants in Contrary’s program don’t have to forswear higher education, but, unlike the Thiel program, they might have to sell some equity to Mr. Tarczynski’s firm. |
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The scooter company Bird said it never applied for a federal coronavirus loan. Frederic J. Brown/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images |
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The P.P.P. data is a mess |
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When the Treasury Department released the details of participants in the $660 billion Paycheck Protection Program last week, analysts pored over the data. It has since become clear that the data is riddled with errors and inconsistencies, making it hard to draw conclusions about the effectiveness of the small-business rescue program. |
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“This data has already become notorious for its failings,” David Yanofsky writes for Quartz. The most eye-catching errors were the companies, like the scooter start-up Bird, that were listed as loan recipients but said they never applied. Mr. Yanofsky found even more basic errors: |
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• Data entry goofs, like listing ZIP codes in the city field or the industry code in the ZIP code field. And misspellings — “CHICARGO,” “DALAS,” “MAIAMI” — that made for some mirth on Twitter. |
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• Listings where the jobs retained because of a loan is “greater than what other official statistics show to be the total number of workers in that industry.” Also, a few loans were listed with a negative number of “retained” jobs. |
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• More than 190 loans for borrowers listed as a sole proprietorship that said they are retaining 500 jobs each, and more than 60 loans for “self-employed” entities claiming the same. |
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The big picture: Small businesses are suffering, even with federal help, and renewed lockdown orders are putting many out of business permanently, The Times’s Emily Flitter writes. |
