STIFLING OUR STARTUPS
ERIKA KULLBERG did everything right.
In 2015, during her third year at Georgetown Law, she and classmate Jimmy McNamara founded ReferU, which added a social dimension to the referral of new tenants for apartment buildings. The partners made their way around a conference for the apartment-management industry, memorizing the names and faces of big players they wanted to approach. There, they scored meetings that produced verbal commitments from three property-management businesses.
Wanting a mentor, they reached celebrity VC Chris Sacca by trying multiple permutations of his Gmail address, and landed a Skype session. Interns came on board. Angels began to circle.
In February 2016, Kullberg assessed her situation, weighing the potential of ReferU against a lucrative offer from international law firm Morrison & Foerster. The deciding factor in favor of the legal job: her $200,000 in student-loan debt. In April, a month shy of graduation, she and her similarly indebted co-founder reluctantly shuttered their fledgling business.
“I really wanted to pursue the startup,” says Kullberg. “But student loans are handcuffs.”
After the pandemic knocked the wind out of our economy, recovery plans focused mainly on saving existing small businesses rather than breathing life into new ones. Yet entrepreneurship is critical to emerging from the Covidinduced recession. Startups drive almost all
