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Venture capitalist Kate Mitchell was supposed to speak at Thomson Reuters’ PartnerConnect conference this Thursday, but something suddenly put a wrinkle in her plans. The White House contacted her to see if she could attend a JOBS Act signing ceremony tentatively scheduled for this Thursday.

 

Mitchell, co-founder and managing director of Scale Venture Partners, was chairman of the 17-member IPO Task Force that drafted the recommendations that went into the JOBS Act. The bill passed the House and Senate with strong support from both sides of the aisle and now awaits President Obama’s signature.

 

“The President wanted a tone of bipartisanship and this [JOBS Act] is an example of that working,” Mitchell says.

 

Besides Mitchell, others said to have been invited to attend the signing ceremony include Mark Gorenberg, managing director at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners; Dixon Doll, co-founder and GP of DCM; John Doerr, general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers; Paul Maeder, chairman of the National Venture Capital Association and co-founder and GP of Highland Capital Partners; Ray Rothrock, a partner at Venrock; Barry Silbert, founder and CEO of SecondMarket; Scott Dorsey, CEO and co-founder of newly public ExactTarget; Josh James, co-founder of Omniture and now founder of VC-backed startup Domo; and Scott Cutler, EVP and co-head of of U.S. Listings and Cash Execution at NYSE Euronext.

 

Some aspects of the JOBS Act will be felt as soon as it is signed into law. For example, companies with less than five years old or with less than $1 billion in annual revenue won’t have to do as much paperwork for Sarbanes-Oxley. “It will reduce expenditures related to regulations and allow companies to put that money into engineering and sales,” Mitchell says.

 

The impact on the IPO market is expected to be gradual. “We don’t expect a sea change, but we do expect a gradual increase [in the number of IPOs],” she says.

 

She notes that she has already heard encouraging words from CEOs of some of Scale’s portfolio companies. “In talking to individual CEOs, there is a huge amount of ‘aha,’” she says. Heads of companies in with $25 million to $50 million in revenue “are suddenly saying, ‘It’s possible for me to go public [at $100 million in revenue]. I’m not just an acquisition candidate.”