Earlier this month, President Obama quietly fingered Winslow Sargeant, another venture capitalist, to head up the SBA Office of Advocacy. If confirmed, Sargeant will be moving into the position from Venture Investors LLC, a Madison, WI-based venture firm specializing in health and IT investments. He has been with Venture Investors for four years. Prior to that, Sargeant served as a program manager for the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) for the National Science Foundation. On the surface, this would appear to be another mystery appointment from Team Obama. All we really know is that the two most visible leaders at the agency are refugees from the venture capital arena. We won’t even be able to guess at what that will mean for the direction of the agency until we’ve had a chance to watch what the new leadership does with it.

As Chief Counsel of the SBA Office of Advocacy, Sargeant will be responsible for two sets of activities that are of critical importance to microbusiness owners: enforcement of the Regulatory Flexibility Act and funding small business research projects. Specifically, if confirmed, it will be Sargeant’s responsibility to continue with implementation of Executive Order 13272, with which former Chief Counsel Tom Sullivan had so much success. As for the research piece, it is to be hoped that Mr. Sargeant is not so very enamored of those entrepreneurial gazelles that he favors researching them at the expense of the rest of the small business space. s was the case with SBA Administrator Mills, I am willing to take a wait-and-see attitude and give Sargeant the benefit of the doubt. If his performance warrants it, there will still be plenty of time to complain about him later. As of Friday afternoon, Sargeant’s confirmation had not yet been scheduled before the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship.