“ECONOMIC FREEDOM: ADVOCATE FOR ENTREPRENEURSHIP,
BUSINESS AND COMMERCE”
“The purpose of entrepreneurship and business is to make other people’s lives better,” says Stephen Batman, co-founder of SVB Interests. “Organizations that efficiently deliver better products and services that improve lives will prosper. Those that do not will die.”
One of the most compassionate activities any citizen can undertake for humanity is to become an entrepreneur, or become a technical or management expert in the formation and growth of a business. The benefits of these actions are numerous: create satisfying jobs and careers for employees that lead to personal dignity and financial independence, produce goods and services desirable by others who willingly exchange the value of their hard-earned labor for services and products businesses produce, and create capital
for investment in transformative innovations that improve lives.
It is in our nature to help others improve their lives by providing them access to the goods they desire. It is also in our nature to improve our own lives. Business, entrepreneurship, and commercial enterprise, aka “capitalism,” are the only economic and social activities that simultaneously improve the lives of others and our own lives. In the last fifty years, most nations around the globe have adopted commercial societies and have thus eliminated virtually all extreme poverty on earth.
It is the vision, energy and courage of entrepreneurial men and women to start and grow businesses that have created transformative products and services never imagined a few decades ago. The world is much better for their magnificent endeavors. We must celebrate and embrace businesspersons and entrepreneurs and stop demeaning them. They are vital to the economic and psychological health of the world. And we must encourage the young people of the nation to courageously pursue the life of an entrepreneur not just for the monetary benefits to themselves, but for the good of the creative act itself and the good for others.
SVB Charities makes grants to organizations that fiercely advocate for policies that encourage free and open markets, entrepreneurship, capitalism, and economically free societies.
SVB Ventures, the commercial arm of SVB Interests, invests in entrepreneurial and well-managed companies that it believes will grow in value and contribute to flourishing lives of their shareholders, employees and customers.