How determining user age impacts startups
Engine releases Startup Policy Playbook for 2024
Engine released the 2024 Startup Policy Playbook, to help give members of the startup ecosystem—startup founders and employees, investors, and support organizations—an overview of the policy conversations happening this year and how they can get involved in amplifying the startup voice.
Engine releases 2024 Startup Agenda
Engine released the 2024 Startup Policy Agenda, highlighting for policymakers the issues impacting the startup ecosystem, including the startup companies, investors, and support organizations across the country. The Agenda features startup founders discussing in their own words the obstacles they’ve faced as they launch new and innovative businesses and the ways policies have helped and hurt them.
Startup News Digest 2/02/24
Startup News Digest 03/31/23
The Big Story: R&D tax credit changes create tax bill for startups. Startups and other companies are facing higher taxes this year after a provision from a 2017 tax law went into effect recently. The law, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), triggers a change to how the research and development (R&D) tax credit operates. Unless policymakers step in, startups and small businesses will have to weather the blow to their cash flow and may consider limiting future R&D costs. This could ultimately result in an overall reduction in innovation in the U.S., slowed economic growth, and decreased ability for our innovation ecosystem to compete with other countries.
Startup News Digest 03/24/23
The Big Story: New research shows state privacy patchwork costs startups hundreds of thousands. Startups spend hundreds of thousands of their limited resources on privacy compliance, much of which goes to duplicative activities that don't further users' privacy, according to a report Engine is releasing today. The report, Privacy Patchwork Problem, chronicles the steps startups are taking to protect the data of their users and enumerates the costs, burdens, and barriers startups encounter—which reach into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. It underscores the need to give for a federal privacy framework that creates uniformity, promotes clarity, and accounts for the resources of startups, while creating consistent rights for their users located in every state across the country.
Engine releases report on Privacy Patchwork Problem
Data privacy has been top of mind for consumers, policymakers, regulators, companies, and entrepreneurs for the past several years, in the wake of broad privacy rules in the EU, and action in several U.S. states. The U.S., which has long had a sectoral approach to privacy, remains without a comprehensive privacy framework, and many states have reacted by proposing, passing, and implementing their own varying—and potentially conflicting—comprehensive privacy laws.
Engine releases Startup Policy Playbook for 2023
Engine releases 2023 Startup Agenda
Engine's Startup Policy Agenda for 2023 highlights the voices of those startup companies, investors, and support organizations as they discuss in their own words the obstacles they face and the ways policies have helped and hurt them. We hope it serves as a high-level overview of the issues we hear about from startups every day and a jumping off point for policymakers looking to support the technology industry's small businesses.
Engine and CCIA release Tools to Compete Report
The startup ecosystem is an interdependent system of startups, support organizations, investors, service providers, and others working to support startup growth and success through the provision of guidance, capital, and other critical resources. Each of these components is critical to the success of individual startup ecosystems all across the country and the growth of the overall U.S. startup ecosystem.
Engine Releases Report on the Role of Acquisitions in the Startup Ecosystem
The U.S. startup ecosystem is defined by dynamism. Startups are constantly being founded, earning investment, growing, exiting, and—yes—failing in cities and towns all across the country. Startup exits and investment are two intimately related and important drivers of this dynamism critical to economic growth and innovation in the startup ecosystem. Startup exits—both those that are profitable and those that are not—promote the building of knowledge, recycling of talent, and flow of capital through the ecosystem. Each of those components are key to building new startups and stimulating the investment needed to grow them to scale.
Engine Releases Policy Roadmap for Supporting Startups Everywhere
Today, Engine issued a paper focused on the policy insights needed—and the legislative actions required—to adequately support the expanse of the startup ecosystem, and to grow the innovation economy. We hope this paper can serve as a resource for policymakers considering a wide range of policy issues that impact early-stage companies across the country.
Engine Releases 2022 Startup Agenda
Heading into 2022, several technology policy debates are already underway in Washington, D.C. As always, Engine aims to be a resource in those conversations, surfacing the startup perspective and highlighting the voices of startup founders who are running small businesses, creating jobs, and building new and innovative products and services. This agenda is a high-level overview of the issues we hear about from startups every day and a jumping off point for policymakers looking to support the technology industry's small businesses.
Startups, Content Moderation, and Section 230
Debates about the intermediary liability framework provided by Section 230 have animated policy conversations as lawmakers grapple with harmful online content, including around election integrity, health information, and children’s safety. But those debates are almost exclusively focused on the largest Internet companies. Section 230, however, applies to all services of all sizes that host all types of user-generated content, including startups.
Engine Releases Report On the State of the Startup Ecosystem
Today, Engine, along with the Charles Koch Institute and Startup Genome, issued a report looking at the overall health of the startup ecosystem. We hope this report can serve as a resource for policymakers considering a wide range of policy issues that impact early-stage companies across the country.
Report: Nuts & Bolts of Encryption
This report examines several recent developments in the policy debate over encryption, including the debate over building backdoors to encrypted content for law enforcement, as well as reports about law enforcement’s current capabilities and impediments to accessing data in criminal investigations, and growing concerns on how encryption may affect efforts to combat the spread of child exploitation material on the Internet.
Report: Nuts & Bolts of Content Moderation
In this report, and through a series of events in Washington, D.C. in the summer of 2019, Engine and the Charles Koch Institute sought to unpack the nuts and bolts of content moderation. We examined what everyday content moderation looks like for Internet platforms and the legal framework that makes that moderation possible, debunked myths about content moderation, and asked attendees to put themselves in the shoes of content moderators.
Report: Nuts & Bolts of User Privacy
Momentum in Miami: Lessons from an Emerging Startup Ecosystem
Across the country and far beyond Silicon Valley, new centers of startup activity are on the rise. Among them, Miami, Florida is one of the more exciting and dynamic cities emerging as a hub for startups. Not only are more entrepreneurs calling Miami home, but a real ecosystem is forming, complete with a new co-working and events space in the heart of Miami’s Wynwood district, investor groups with a renewed commitment to South Florida entrepreneurs, and a slew of meet-ups, conferences, and hackathons attracting students, programmers, entrepreneurs, and investors eager to be part of this transformation.
So You Want to Hack the Patent System
Are you a startup or inventor wondering what to do about our broken patent system? Want to know what your options are? Check out Hacking the Patent System, an updated white paper published in partnership with EFF and students from the Juelsgaard Intellectual Property Clinic at Stanford Law School.
This paper includes important and timely advice for technology entrepreneurs attempting to navigate a dysfunctional and unfair system because, unfortunately, patent trolls remain a grave threat to startups and innovators. This is despite multiple attempts to pass reform legislation through Congress and an active Supreme Court working hard to fix a broken system. Not only does the threat of extortionary patent trolls still exist, but it’s actually getting worse. Lawsuits filed by patent trolls are up and significantly more than half of those cases are filed in the notorious Eastern District of Texas.
Despite these problems, startups often find themselves filing for patents, either because their investors tell them it’s a good idea or they plan to later use them defensively against lawsuit threats. This has led to a dangerous culture of “patenting up”—getting as many patents as possible in as short a time as possible.
To really fix the problem, a handful of things need to happen:
Congress must pass patent reform legislation that addresses fundamental inequities in the patent system that favor large patent holders and litigation plaintiffs.
Patent quality must be improved. Removing low-quality patents from the system will also remove the trolls’ deadliest weapon.
We must change the culture of “patenting up.” Big companies, investors, startups, and inventors need to come together to take a stand and return the system to its roots, which—as the Constitution provides—is meant to promote the progress of science and useful arts.
That all might take awhile. In the meantime, there are things that startups can do to navigate a broken patent system without hiring an expensive patent lawyer or even filing for a patent itself. We lay out some of those options here in an updated version of our Hacking the Patent System white paper, originally released in 2014. The paper takes a deep dive into alternative patent licenses: specifically, patent aggregators, patent pledges, and (new this year!) patent insurance.
Thanks to partners EFF and the Juelsgaard Intellectual Property Clinic at Stanford Law School—especially former students Marta Belcher and John Casey—for all their hard work.
