I can tell you that my fund has invested in about 35 businesses, and we've seen too many of them, many of them female-led, go out of business because they could not access funding. You have to ask yourself how effective the program is if these businesses that are starting to get traction have done all the hard work and heavy lifting of innovation and creating a product or a service and have taken it to market and found product-market fit. They have been able to scrape their way through by using their credit cards or however they've gotten to a place where they finally get some traction, and they can't get funding. They're either too small or don't have the right strategy. They're measured by the wrong metrics, so they don't get funding.
We are seeing in the market today many companies that are going out of business because they cannot find funding, yet at the same time we know there are billions of dollars available for funding. How is that possible? We do not have that big a population; we have that many in need, but we don't have that many getting money. Where is the capital going? Where is the accountability on the capital, and where is the accountability to the results on the capital?
I believe that, again, we have too many of the wrong measures and too many of the wrong people looking at whether these programs are successful or not. There doesn't seem to be reporting on the success. The success metrics are not printed that I'm aware of.
It's a problem. We have a serious problem in this country. Businesses are going out of business because they can't raise capital, and they can't get it from the financial institutions that the government has established to provide capital. That doesn't make sense to me.