National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship Members

I am concerned that Ray Leach has made his way to advise this group on entrepreneurship and innovation. If you do a fact check on Ray's claims that he is a serial entrepreneur, you will see that he has never founded any private startup of any magnitude (in the form of job creation, wealth creation for investors/employees, or revenue).

Ray is the CEO of Jumpstart which is a government funded "non profit" that was formed to invest in and advise early stage companies/startups. Jumpstart is a great example of failures in government trying to create startups. Jumpstart has burned through $60m since its founding and has very little to show for it. Out of the $60m only $16m has actually been invested in companies. The rest has gone to pay their high salaries and overhead. ($8m out of their $11m budget goes to fund overhead and salaries. A private fund would never tolerate this but since it is gov funded, no one seems to notice and/or care).

Ray just gave himself a $30k raise to bring his total comp to $428k and the top ten people bring in over $2.3m. Despite these high salaries and enormous head count and overhead, there is hardly anyone on the staff with any startup success. After investing in close to 50 companies since 2004, there are few positive results and the RIO on the state money has been nonexistent.

There are groups like Jumpstart all over the country. They have produces results 10x that Jumpstart has on 10% of their budget. The reason you don't hear about them is they use their budgets wisely and don't have a 5 person marketing staff (Almost every other group like Jumpstart doesn't have 1 marketing person as they don't sell anything).

When Jumpstart was formed in 2004, its goal was that positive returns on their investments would make them self sufficient. This hasn't happened as they haven't had one positive exit after close to 50 companies.

No private fund in the world would accept no returns after 6 years and $60 burned though and they would never tolerate that 75% of the fund went to fund overhead vs. 25% of the funds invested in companies.

If you do your research, you will realize that Jumpstart is a huge failure for the tax payers of Ohio. I am not against using gov money for economic development however, in Ohio, it isn't getting to the companies that need it, it is tied up in the many government groups who admin the money while paying themselves salaries. Despite the fact that Jumpstart has 35 employees where the vast majorities are making tremendously more than they have ever made in the private sector, almost no who works there has had any success founding a startup.

I don't mind that Ohio spends so much toward spurring startups; I mind that it is wasted. I hope the true and proven entrepreneurs' voices on this panel drowned out Ray's.

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