What happened with SBA loans that forced everyone into needing VC funding? Didn't people used to just get SBA loans to fund inventions and small businesses? Now it seems like everyone defaults to VC funding.
The issue imo is that SBA is still too narrowly focused on the first 25% or less of commercialization. Perhaps that works for some, I'm not sure. I agree, getting innovation to market is way too dependant upon VC. Worth noting that the traditional banking sector entirely abandoned the innovation economy despite their willingness to fund breweries, coffee shops, restaurants ad nauseum and other business that have huge failure rates but have more collateral and hard assets they can grab on failure.
The issue is that SBA loans require founders to put their house up as collateral or have sufficient real property or capital equipment to collateralize the loan. VC does not.