Yesterday morning was, well, a bit icky. Fog obscured the tops of buildings, it was a little cold, and everything seemed to point towards the fact that fall is coming fast. 

Undaunted by the dreary weather, though, participants in the New England Venture Capital Association‘s Startup Day breakfast showed up armed with questions and concerns for their elected officials about entrepreneurship both nationally and in the Boston area. As Startup Day Across America events took place all over the country (across America, if you will), entrepreneurs got the chance to sit down with local and national policy makers who had made time to engage with them and to hear what matters most to members of the startup community.

We hosted staffers from Senator Warren, Senator Markey, and Mayor Davis’ offices, in addition to entrepreneurs and community members from throughout Boston and Cambridge. Top of mind for our guests were the following issues:

• Do alternative training programs equip entrepreneurs better than traditional college degrees? In a discussion that ranged from concerns about retaining students graduating from Boston’s incredible colleges and universities to the very affordability of higher education, this question seemed to gain the most traction, particularly as a way to empower students from disadvantaged communities.
• How do we address the scarcity and high cost of office space in the Boston area in order to make sure entrepreneurs can do the work they need to do, where they need to do it? As one guest pointed out, “startups inherently need density. They need clusters to start, and can spread out once they’ve scaled.” 
• High-skilled immigrants want to invest their intellectual capital in our innovation ecosystem, but we aren’t making it very easy for them to do so, often to our own detriment.
• What can we do to address the fact that half the workforce has to drop out until their kids reach school age? This was the only question to receive actual applause, a testament to the fact that the difficulty of balancing the demands of family life and a career can be the undoing of the excellent progress a startup might have made.

Of course, none of us were hearing these concerns for the first time. Nor were any of us able to find permanent solutions in our hour-long discussion. Still, we’re glad to have hosted a Startup Day event, and to have helped even a small portion Boston’s entrepreneurs share their concerns with people who could help make a difference. As one guest pointed out, it’s incumbent upon the government “not to choose winners, but to make it easier for winners to win.”