Getting to the Bag: SBA Puts $20 Million Up for Small Businesses

The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) recently launched its 2026 Critical Suppliers Prize Competition, putting up to $20 million in non-dilutive funding to U.S. small businesses. The initiative targets businesses positioned to strengthen critical supply chains and level up domestic production. With only four to six winners expected to make the cut and individual awards potentially reaching $6 million, the stakes—and the opportunity—are high.

The California Non-Compete Myth: What Startup Founders Should Focus on Instead

California's Longstanding Skepticism of Non-Competes

California has long taken a different approach to employee mobility than many other states. As a general rule, agreements that prevent employees from engaging in a lawful profession, trade, or business after leaving employment are unenforceable. For startup founders, this often comes as a surprise.

What Entrepreneurs Can Learn from the World Cup

Over the past few weeks, I’ve become World Cup obsessed (and, no, it isn’t about ranch dressing like some foreign fans…). As a fan and a former player, everything about this World Cup is interesting, and the splash of certain teams and fans have made it hard to stop engaging. I’ve watched the matches and social media posts. But, what is particularly interesting, is that some of the most talked-about teams are not necessarily the teams that will likely be lifting up the trophy in the championship game. Fans are drawn to teams (and their fans) that play (and root) with heart,

Bitcoin as Property?

Since we’re all just a little over a week from tax day, I thought I’d share some interesting analysis that was recently published by Nicholas Anthony, a research fellow at Cato Institute’s Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives. He claims that the rules for capital gains have made it nearly impossible to use Bitcoin as money in the U.S.

Currently, the IRS treats Bitcoin and other virtual currencies as property, not as currency, for federal tax purposes. According to IRS Notice 2014-21, transactions are taxed under general property principles – meaning selling, exchanging,

MN Cup Applications Are Open!

It’s that time of year again!  No, not eggnog and carols, not leaves falling, not cabin season (quite yet…), but time for aspiring entrepreneurs to apply for entry in the MN Cup.  For those who are not frequent readers of entreVIEW and don’t know about the MN Cup, it is the largest annual business plan competition in the country for emerging entrepreneurs.

Chiefs Touchdown for Kansas?

On Monday, December 22, shockwaves were sent through the City of Kansas City, Missouri, as the City’s beloved Chiefs announced that they were headed to Kansas beginning with the 2031 NFL season. The reaction around the news was split on social media, and for good reason. The Chiefs have been located in Kansas City – and the iconic Arrowhead Stadium – since 1963, when the legendary Lamar Hunt moved the Dallas Texans to Kansas City. Since that time, the Chiefs have been a staple in Kansas City. As someone who grew up in the area (and as a humongous Chiefs fan), I know how much of a stronghold the team has in the area.

Tariffs and Trade Wars, and Taxes, Oh My!

Man your battle stations--it’s time for a trade war! If you’ve been following the news, it’s likely you have been bombarded with near constant updates about escalatory tariffs and the looming threat of trade wars as the new administration has been following up on its promise to impose tariffs of 10-60% of all U.S. imports. Within the first few weeks, we have seen the posturing with Mexico, Canada, and China. The Trump administration has now ordered 25% tariffs on aluminum and steel. But what are tariffs and how do they result in a trade war? And how might trade wars impact consumers, entrepreneurs and the economy?

The Love for the Chiefs, the Love for the City!

Once again, the Kansas City Chiefs are Super Bowl bound! The Chiefs won the AFC Championship by beating the Buffalo Bills on January 26th. They will be facing the Philadelphia Eagles during Superbowl LIX. This is a historic matchup as Super Bowl LIX marks the second time in three years the Chiefs and the Eagles face each other. It is safe to say that Kansas City (and its surrounding areas) are proud of the Chiefs!

This past holiday season, the Chiefs and Kansas City reached a whole new level – being the stars of a Hallmark Christmas movie. There were multiple cameos, many locations throughout Kansas City, and the spirit of Chiefsmas all wrapped into an hour-and-a-half movie. Kansas City has been booming with pride. The city is welcoming visitors at record levels as Visit KC (the region’s primary destination sales and marketing organization) deploys its “From the Heart” campaign to engage and drive more than 28 million visitors.

The Tragic Fall of the Tupperware Brand

Most children of my generation are quite familiar with searching through a cabinet filled with plastic Tupperware containers and lids to find the right match for packing up leftovers. The ubiquity of the Tupperware container defined the experiences of generations of families from the post-World War II era through the Seventies and Eighties and up through the turn of the Century. Spurred to tremendous popularity by a revolutionary marketing strategy that introduced easy-to-use and often unusually colorful products aimed to keep foods and drinks fashionably fresh, Tupperware containers seemed to be in every household in America. Unfortunately, the Tupperware Brand, once it lost its market leader status, was unable to keep up in the modern-day, post-pandemic market. It recently filed for bankruptcy protection in Delaware.

The 2024 Paralympic Games

“I will not be participating at the Paralympics. I will be competing.”

-Hunter Woodhall, Paralympic Gold Medalist in the Men’s 400M T62 Category

The 2024 Paris Olympics were a highlight of this past summer, with 30.6 million viewers tuning in across all NBC platforms, making it the most-streamed Olympics. Among many other highlights, Noah Lyles (USA) and Letsile Tebogo (Botswana) battled it out for the title of World’s Fastest Man, Katie Ledecky’s (USA) swimming prowess made her the most-decorated female American Olympian across all sports, Yusuf Dikeҫ (Turkey) stunned viewers with his nonchalant silver medal shot, and Cindy Ngamba won the Refugee Olympic Team their first ever medal with a bronze in Women’s Middleweight Boxing. My favorite event this year, by far, was the men’s 1500M. Cole Hocker and Yared Nuguse (USA) pulled off a huge upset and absolutely smoked Josh Kerr and Jakob Ingebrigtsen! Watch it here.

With all the excitement surrounding the Olympics this year, people were understandably disappointed when the Closing Ceremony wrapped up. A common sentiment I heard was, “Well, what do I do now?” I wanted to yell from the rooftops, “It’s not over yet!”

Fall, Football, and Figuring it Out.

I love September. When the calendar flips to September, it means a lot of things to a lot of people - it’s the arrival of Fall (Fall is the best season, by the way), students begrudgingly returning to school to the delight of their parents, and for a lot of Americans, its marks the return of their favorite sport, FOOTBALL.

About 72% of Americans identify as football fans, that’s more than 241 million people. Football is big business. The NFL generated roughly $20 billion of revenue in 2023 and during the Super Bowl, companies paid $7 million per 30-second commercial. College Football TV rights alone accounted for roughly $4 billion in 2023. That doesn’t include College Football’s merchandise, ticket sales, sponsorships, or any NIL deals, including the recent deal with EA Sports to use the Name Image and Likeness of current College Football players in their new videogame, “creatively” named (in a generic way my trademark colleagues would hate) “College Football 25.” Football is America’s favorite sport, but its also becoming the favorite business of many Americans too.

Startups are Booming!

One of the many interesting side effects to the COVID-19 pandemic has been a reported boom in American startups.

On one hand, it makes sense. The world was faced with an almost unimaginable crisis that forced entire facets of society to pivot to new ways of operating. From zoom calls to facemasks, new needs required ingenuity and presented opportunities for entrepreneurs to answer the world’s problems. Many businesses repurposed themselves, adapting to the services they could and could not provide. And, of course, as social safety nets caught large droves of workers forced out, at least temporarily, from the workforce, it provided many people the space to reexamine their relationship with work, their families and the way they spend their time.

Recognizing Athletic Innovation at the Olympics

In just about a month’s time, the Games of the XXXIII Olympiad, also known as the 2024 Summer Olympics, will begin in Paris, France. From July 26th through August 11th, about 10,500 athletes from 206 different countries will compete for medals in 329 events over 32 sports. The Olympics have been of great interest to me since my early childhood, grabbing my attention every four years growing up and now every two years (ever since the Winter Olympics shifted in 1994 to offset the Summer and Winter Games every two years).

Full disclosure, I own a complete set of videotapes of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics that I forced my dad to record for me while I was away working at summer camp, so my love for the Olympics, like a lot of other interests of mine, could easily be labeled an obsession. For me, every event is appointment viewing, from the crowning of the Fastest Man Alive in the 100 Meter Sprint, to the repechage races in the Lightweight Women’s Doubles Sculls, to the Preliminary Round Handball match between Hungary and Denmark (set your calendar for August 2nd).

Last Call for 2024 MN Cup Submissions

The MN Cup, a program of the Holmes Center for Entrepreneurship at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota, is the largest statewide startup competition in the country! Since its founding in 2005, it has served over 0,000 entrepreneurs and awarded over $5 million in cash prizes; in addition, MN Cup alumni have raised over $1 billion in capital.

Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World (Little, Brown and Company, 2023)

Malcolm Harris lured me into this book, a history of the area now encompassing Silicon Valley, with his very first sentences: “Palo Alto is nice. The weather is temperate; the people educated, rich, healthy, innovative.” Check—this matches my initial impressions, formed when I arrived in 1979 to attend law school on the campus of the university Leland Stanford formed in 1891 in memory of his son, a victim of typhoid at the age of 15.

One detail immediately stood out for me. It was difficult for me, a middle-class son of the Midwest, to come to terms with the fact that the undergraduate parking lot was filled with cars newer and more expensive than those I encountered on a daily basis in the suburban Twin Cities neighborhood of my youth. Nonetheless, I came to see Palo Alto as a wonderful place to spend three years, even if throughout that period I had a nagging feeling that there was something not quite “real,” for lack of a better term, about the place. It turns out this is a feeling I share with Harris, who grew up there. “There were signs,” he writes, “that, if Palo Alto was normal, it was too normal, weirdly normal.” Again, right on target.

WIPO Global Awards reward small and medium-sized enterprises making a global impact

In 2022, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) launched a new initiative to recognize the innovative efforts of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) from around the world. WIPO’s new Global Awards are designed to identify new inventions and creative commercial solutions that impact economic, social, and cultural progress, and in turn, encourage innovation and the commercialization of IP assets.

WIPO is a self-funding agency of the United Nations (comprising 193 member states) that provides a global forum for IP services, policy, information, and cooperation. WIPO’s mission is to ensure a world where innovation and creativity from anywhere in the world is supported by IP rights for the good of everyone. An aim of the Global Awards is to recognize and support enterprises and individuals striving to make a positive impact through innovation both at home and beyond borders.

Minnesota Cup Finals: A Clean Sweep for the Student Division

As frequent readers of entreVIEW will know from many prior posts since the early days of our blog, the our Entrepreneurial Services Group at Lathrop GPM has been a supporter and sponsor of the Minnesota Cup since its early days.

In case you aren’t familiar with the program fostered by the Holmes Center for Entrepreneurship at the Carlson School of Management, the Minnesota Cup is a business plan competition (purportedly the largest in the country) to help identify promising Minnesota-based start-up businesses. Over the years, over 16,000 businesses have participated in the competition, which has awarded prize money of about $3 million dollars. It isn’t just about prize money because the competition also helps entrepreneurs hone their business plans and pitch deck and also access mentorship and other valuable connections. The competition reports that Minnesota Cup alumni companies have raised nearly $400 million in capital! 

There are currently nine divisions in the competition and members of Lathrop GPM serve as judges in the general, high tech, and impact ventures divisions. Yours truly also has been serving as a judge in the student division for the last several years. It is always impressive to see great ideas from undergraduates and graduate students, many of whom have made considerable progress on their plans. This year’s crop of competitors in the student division was especially strong, making the judging that much more difficult.

Fortnite and In-App Purchases, Continued

Last year, I posted about Epic Games’ lawsuit against Apple, which claimed that Apple’s tight control over apps for iOs devices, particularly Apple’s in-app purchase system, violated antitrust and unfair competition laws. Now, a bit over a year later and after extensive coverage in technology and gaming circles, a judge in the Northern District of California has ruled on the merits of the case. The opinion is a mixed bag, as the court found in favor of Apple on most points but in favor of Epic on one claim; the court declined to find that Apple has an unlawful monopoly, but did find that Apple’s conduct in prohibiting app developers from providing information to consumers about payment alternatives was anticompetitive. While the ruling is narrow, it does open the door for mobile gaming developers to potentially avoid Apple’s commission on in-app purchases.

Taking the good news (at least for independent app developers) first, the court issued a nationwide injunction preventing Apple from prohibiting developers from including information in their apps and consumer communications regarding alternative purchasing mechanisms in addition to Apple’s proprietary in-app purchase system. This is potentially a very financially significant step, as Apple was previously requiring that developers of apps in its App Store only use Apple’s payment system for in-app purchases and was taking a commission of up to 30% on all such purchases. Now, developers will be able to inform customers about alternative channels to make these purchases, avoiding Apple’s commission, without being prevented from offering their app for download on the App Store. Consumers spend a massive amount of money on in-app purchases; one source estimates that consumers spent $32 billion on in-app purchases via the App Store and Google Play just in the first quarter of 2021. Many apps rely on in-app purchases for their profitability, and doubtless many developers will be very interested in avoiding Apple’s 30% commission, if possible.

As for Epic’s unsuccessful antitrust claim, a large part of the arguments turned on defining the “market” within which Apple was allegedly a monopolist. While somewhat technical, this fundamental struggle to define the relevant market goes to show how emerging technology does not necessarily fit easily within the boundaries of traditional legal or commercial analysis. Apple argued that the relevant market was the entire digital gaming market (featuring some interesting conceptual discussion of what, exactly, is a “video game”), whereas Epic argued that the relevant market was the market of all mobile apps running in the iOs ecosystem. The court disagreed with both, finding that the relevant market was that of “mobile gaming transactions.”

While this market may seem to be very narrow, the court noted that the “mobile gaming market itself is a $100 billion industry.” In fact, 70% of Apple’s App Store revenue was estimated to come from gaming apps as compared to other types of apps. The court ultimately found that Apple had about a 55% market share in digital mobile gaming transactions, with “extraordinarily high profit margins,” but that Epic had not produced enough evidence to show that Apple was a monopolist. The door appears to be cracked open for future monopoly claims against Apple, though, as the judge noted “the evidence does suggest that Apple is near the precipice of substantial market power, or monopoly power, with its considerable market share.”

For those interested in software, and particularly the mobile app market, the first part of the 185-page opinion is worth a read as it includes many interesting figures regarding consumer behavior and the app market. The Verge also has comprehensive discussion of this case for busy entrepreneurs who don’t have the time to (or interest in) reading legal opinions—especially if they aren’t suffering badly enough from insomnia to otherwise have a need to do so…

Epic has already appealed the court’s judgment to the Ninth Circuit, so this case is not over yet. It will be interesting to see whether the Ninth Circuit takes a broader view of the potential monopoly issues raised in this case and whether it agrees with the lower court that the relevant market is “digital mobile gaming transactions.” The universe of mobile apps has grown very quickly over the last decade and the legal system’s analysis will have to catch up. The fact that Epic succeeded in its challenge of Apple’s rule against developers informing consumers of alternate payment methods, however, suggests that app developers in other spheres might also start challenging the restrictions placed on them by Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store. And should Apple’s control over the market grow in the future, it’s possible that a new antitrust claim would succeed. 

What Can an Entrepreneur Learn from the Olympics?

There’s been a lot written about how nobody is watching the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. (Yes, I know they are happening now in 2021 because of the COVID pandemic, but they are still calling them the 2020 games.) Well, that hasn’t been the case in my household. We’ve enjoyed watching all sorts of competition so far, especially volleyball (a family favorite), swimming, and, of course, St. Paul’s own, Suni Lee, the first Hmong-American Olympian, who won the gold medal in the Olympic women’s gymnastics all-around!

In any event, seeing a blog post on my “to do” list for this week in the middle of my Olympic binging led me to search for interesting Olympic entrepreneurial tidbits. What I found was quite a bit of content, including this article about Olympic athletes who are thriving as entrepreneurs. While many of the individuals listed had later success in sports-related businesses, their successes also included perfume, coffee, and the well-known George Foreman grill. 

There are also many articles about lessons that entrepreneurs can learn from the habits of Olympic athletes (in articles like this one, this one, and, more recently, this one or this one).  Let me summarize some of the common (and relatively obvious) takeaways, since you may not have time to read them all:

• It takes a team to be successful—don’t try and do it all yourself.
• Follow your passion—trying to build a business is a challenge in itself, but growing a business in something you are not passionate about is even more difficult!
• It takes hard work to be successful and you should be preparing to succeed from the very start.
• Stay focused on the long goal—ye
  ars of training lead to Olympic success; it doesn’t happen overnight. Of course, you can always take the advice of Mark Spitz, the most successful American Olympic swimmer of all time—with 7 gold medals, all in world record time, at the 1972 Munich Olympics—until a guy named Michael Phelps hit the pool. Spitz’s take? “I’m not concerned with tomorrow, but with what goes on today.”
• Flexibility is key—learn to roll with the punches because nothing goes as planned (remember all those hours training to culminate in Tokyo in the summer of 2020?).

NCAA Athletes May Get an Entrepreneurial Boon

For more than a century, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) has sought to protect amateurism in college sports by preventing student athletes from being compensated for or otherwise profiting from their collegiate sports participation. Student athletes have been largely prohibited from receiving any compensation or benefits for playing college sports except for the direct educational benefits associated with the cost of attendance — scholarships, books, room and board, and, more recently, limited stipends for living expenses that could include travel costs. The ability of the NCAA to enforce these rules changed on Monday, June 21, when the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that restrictions under consideration in the case constituted an unlawful restraint of trade (Alston vs. NCAA). 

The Alston decision addressed only the NCAA rules limiting the benefits schools can provide to student athletes. What specifically will change as a result of this decision is as yet unknown, but we will likely see some creativity among schools scrambling to enhance offerings to attract top athletes. Examples of previously prohibited benefits that may now be available include paid internships and graduate school scholarships, broader definition of what constitutes living expenses for stipends, and the removal of caps on disability insurance for injured athletes. NCAA rules that were not at issue in this case, but which are the subject of a separate antitrust lawsuit (House vs. NCAA), are the rules prohibiting student athletes from the commercial exploitation of their name, image, and likeness (NIL) rights. 

Every person has NIL rights under legal theories of the “right of privacy” and the “right of publicity.” It is the right of each individual to prevent others from using his/her name, image, or likeness for commercial purposes, and at the same time to profit from his/her own exploitation of such rights. While it seems that every other aspect of the multi-billion dollar college sports industry has been exploited for commercial purposes, the NCAA has adhered to a strict prohibition of the rights of student athletes, even entrepreneurial ones, to profit from their own identities. Years of public pressure on the NCAA to relax its rules on this issue have been unsuccessful in bringing about any meaningful change by the NCAA, and now it may have lost its ability to control the issue.