Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 5, 1995 TAG: 9503040018
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: G-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JEFF DEBELL
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Among all the sources contacted for today's Peril & Promise stories about venture capital, he alone said there is no shortage of money to help companies get started and grow.
Not in the Roanoke region. Not in the state. Not in the country.
"There is no shortage of venture capital anywhere," Bender said by telephone from his office in North Carolina. "What there is, is a shortage of entrepreneurs" with good ideas.
Bender's view cannot be dismissed just because it contradicts the conventional wisdom. Far from it. He was a principal in one of the great recent Roanoke Valley business success stories: the 1982 founding of FiberCom, a maker of equipment for high-speed computer networks, and last year's sale of the company to Litton Industries Inc.
Bender is president of NetEdge Systems Inc., which was formed in December 1993 as a FiberCom subsidiary and is headquartered in North Carolina's Research Triangle Park to be near that area's concentration of technical talent.
As FiberCom grew, Bender said, "we got multiple rounds of venture capital without any problems at all."
What counts in getting business money, he said, are "good ideas and good people. Venture capital will go to where they are."
Numerous sources for our stories said Virginia is losing technology and jobs to other states because young companies have to leave to get capital. They said capitalists, which tend to gather in centers of population and/or research, aren't interested in investing in other places because there are more than enough opportunities where they are.
Nonsense, said Bender: "Venture capital goes where the entrepreneurs are, and they tend to be where other entrepreneurs are.''
by CNB