Silicon Valley News - July

Many of our staff is still working remotely but our Silicon Valley Office in Redwood City is open with some clients now filtering in.   We have placed sanitizer strategically throughout the building – and once traffic increases we will be cleaning our conference rooms and kitchens/bathrooms twice/day.   Global commerce continues:  we have worked on deals this past month in France, Poland, Nigeria, New Zealand and Mexico.

The US federal government has just introduced a new “P4 Loan”.   Its pretty interesting.   Here’s the skinny: 

·  Eligibility: 

o    Companies with employee strength of 100 or lesser can apply. 

o    Must have suffered a loss of revenue in a quarter of 2020 by 50% or more than that of 2019 (no later than Q1 2020 for new businesses). 

o    The existing funds should be fully exhausted or be on pace to exhaust them to justify that the business needs more funding.

·  Application: 

o    Deadline - Oct 1st, 2020 (can be extended)

o    Can be applied with the existing banks or new borrowers.

o    Maximum amount to be lesser of $2M or 2.5x of the average monthly payroll costs as submitted in the initial PPP application.

o    Minimum fee compensated to the lender would be $2.5K if the second loan is $50K or lesser. The current fee is 5% of the loan amount up to $350K.   

·  Requirements:

o    Mandatory - Must make a good faith certification that the loan request is to support ongoing operations of the business, and also that the funds will be used to retain workers, maintain payroll or cover eligible nonpayroll costs.

o    May / may not be required - Certification that there is no application pending for a PPP loan. And if the client has received a PPP loan between Feb 15th, 2020 and Dec 31st, 2020 for the same purpose and is not duplicative of amounts applied for or received under a PPP loan.

·  Highlights:

o    Prioritized for businesses with employee strength of 10 or lesser.

o    The forgiveness / covered period can be amended to apply for forgiveness any time after eight weeks through Dec 31, 2020, with discretion for the SBA Administrator to extend the deadline beyond the end of the year.

Here are links to source of this info: Article 1 & Article 2.

And some news on WhiteSpace X:   We are launching our Open Platform on September 1st and our WSX Members Platform on October 1st.    We are scheduling 4 webinars held weekly throughout August to explain what WSX is about; how our global IT collaboration platform works; how our IT tools, investor and partner matching works; and finally how our equity exchange fund (the XFund) works.   We will launch with communities in Africa, Latam, EU, Canada and the US.   WSX is designed for the post-pandemic world we now conduct business in: remote, self help and collaboration among select elite member companies, with a laser focus on revenue, capital, critical tech news around the globe, and proven curated connections to new markets.    If you have an interest in what we are doing let us know and we’ll contact you.

As I write this California and many other states in the US are holding off on opening up again.   It’s a roll-coaster and we’re all going a bit batty.  But hang in there.   We’re around to help any way we can.

Stay safe and well - from the White Summers teams in Silicon Valley, Santa Cruz, Portland, Bend and Budapest.