On your first question about how the private investors' rounds work, typically start-ups will raise money for 12 to 24 months but typically around 18 months. Any start-ups start to try to raise money about six months before they're out, because we typically aim for growth and not profitability in the first few years.
This means that the impact on the start-ups will be that they won't be able to start their rounds in the next six months. For anyone trying to close a round right now, it will be really, really tough. Especially in the early-stage companies that we call pre-seed and seed rounds, this will be very difficult. The other problem with all of those programs is that these companies are going to run out of money after the program ends, because the programs are available right now and the problem will come in many months.
The second part of your question was about the BDC. BDC was very helpful with my previous companies; I've worked with it. It has two parts, and one is the banking side. As I said, most of its programs are for companies with two years or more of revenues, companies that are profitable. The other side of its business is BDC Capital. It invests but it mostly invests in funds of investors. It sometimes co-invests with other investors, although keep in mind that 97% of start-ups do not have capital—outside of the moms and pops that have their own private capital—and fewer than 1% receive venture capital, VC.
Putting more money into BDC Capital would help the start-ups that already had some money, but as I said, the ones that are in the first two years of development are all out. They cannot get access to this money. The big problem with the programs is that there's a big delay in getting the programs out, the money in, etc., and all we're doing in the meantime is not working on growth but working on trying to fit in the different programs and figuring out how we're going to make this work.
What we would like to do right now is to work on growth and to have a fair playing space so that the incumbents, the existing companies, number one, would pay the same taxes that we do—if you read the news, you hear that Netflix and others are not necessarily paying all of their taxes here—and, number two, have a level playing field so that our competitors, who might have more than two years, are not subsidized when we are not.