White House-backed Startup America teams up with DEMO

The Startup America Partnership, a nonprofit foundation dedicated to backing entrepreb neurship, announced today that it is teaming up with DEMO, the IDG- and VentureBeat-produced product-launch conference series, to expand opportunities for startups.

DEMO executive producer and VentureBeat editor-in-chief Matt Marshall made the announcement today during an interview with Startup America CEO Scott Case on stage at DEMO Spring 2011, which concludes today in Palm Desert, Calif. (IDG owns DEMO, while VentureBeat is paid a fee to select companies for the event and shares in the event’s profits. Companies pay a fee to DEMO to present at the conference.) Startup America will help send companies to DEMO events to launch their products, starting with the series’ next event in the fall.

The Startup America Partnership, is backed by the Kauffman Foundation of Entrepreneurship and Steve Case’s Case Foundation. (Scott Case, the first CTO of Priceline, isn’t related to Steve Case, the AOL cofounder who’s on the board of both the Case Foundation and Startup America.)

Startup America was created in response to President Barack Obama’s recent call to accelerate entrepreneurship. President Obama recently met in Silicon Valley with tech leaders like Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Apple CEO Steve Jobs as part of this initiative.

“We want to shine a light on the fact that entrepreneurs are heroes,” said Scott Case in his interview. “Entrepreneurs imagine things and invent things that no one could have imagined,” he said, citing examples like Twitter, the microblogging network, which is having a wide-ranging impact on society.