Q: What do you look for in a founding team?

A: There have been dozens of amazing blog posts and Quora answers about evaluating founding teams. And, of course, I look for the typical stuff (intelligence, drive, credibility, integrity, market understanding, learning curve, etc). There are also a few things I look for that I haven't seen many people write about, and I thought I'd share a few:

Paul Graham, one of Silicon Valley's best-known investors and a cofounder of the startup accelerator program Y Combinator, doesn't seem to be a fan of ABC's hit show "Shark Tank." Graham believes startups should focus on building great products, not on marketing, and for that reason he thinks shows like "Shark Tank" are a distracting waste of time for entrepreneurs.

Image: Mark Cuban on ABC's "Shark Tank."

With apologies to Silicon Valley’s animal of the moment — the unicorn — zebras are still a powerful symbol for some business gurus of how to stand out, how to be unique and how to differentiate a company or brand from the crowd. Zebra stripes are typically thought of as wild, daring and nonconformist — just ask any fashionista.

In the global economy, innovation is a public good. When one country creates and markets new technologies, products, services or ways of doing business, the whole world tends to.

Similarly, when it comes to the kinds of public policies that help shape innovation, no country is an island. The decisions that one makes can affect all the others, for good or ill.

Union Minister of Urban Development has announced the list of 20 cities that will be developed into smart cities to have basic infrastructure, water supply, road connectivity, waste management, IT connectivity, e-governance and citizen participation. Govt. plans to make them smart cities by 2022.

The city that tops the list is Orissa’s capital Bhubaneswar  followed by Pune and Jaipur.

Governor Charlie Baker’s administration filed a bill Thursday aimed at pumping more than $900 million into the state’s economy over five years and helping to spread the success the Boston area is enjoying to all corners of the state.

The bill calls for an infusion of funds into existing economic development programs and would help launch several new ones. It also includes some policy changes that would modify outdated rules — such as allowing qualified brewers to sell beer at farmers markets and exempting online retailers from paying time-and-a-half on Sunday for warehouse workers.

Image: ASSOCIATED PRESS/FILE 2016 - Governor Charlie Baker

Meeting today in Amsterdam, EU ministers with research in their portfolio discussed a number of key issues, including the ‘innovation principle’, European innovation deals, a start-up visa and open access.

Health systems around the world clearly recognize the potential of digital health: over the past decade, they have invested heavily in national e-health programs. Yet most have delivered only modest returns when measured by higher care quality, greater efficiency, or better patient outcomes. And in some cases, e-health projects have been cancelled due to significant cost overruns and delays, such as the National Program for IT in the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS).1 That’s because such ambitious information-technology initiatives—with a clear focus on IT support for clinical professionals—are typically beyond the core mission of healthcare systems, which also often struggle with legacy systems that impede data integration.

The tech boom has diffused beyond the traditional hotbeds in California, New York, and Massachusetts, across the the entire United States. Other states are home to well-funded and well-known startups, including Jet (New Jersey), LivingSocial (DC), and sports e-commerce company Fanatics (Florida). The less well-known include Minnesota-based Code42 Software, which has raised $137.5M in equity funding to date.

Image: https://www.cbinsights.com

The days of your first job being your last are now long gone.

Take the baby boomers—people born between 1946 and 1964. People in this generation have held an average of nearly 12 jobs before age 48, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). And people born in the early 1980s—aka millennials—held an average of six jobs by age 26, according to the BLS.

Not Your Grandfather’s Manufacturing wasn’t the title of Wednesday’s Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce event on manufacturing.

But it could have been, given the panelists on stage at the Hyatt at the Bellevue.

Give up the image of “dark, dirty, dangerous, and underpaid,” with “rows of people doing menial tasks,” said panelist Evan Malone, founder of NextFab, the hardware technology incubator and product development services company in South Philadelphia.

Image: http://digital.olivesoftware.com

Tammy Han sees the tech ecosystem from a very unique vantage point. She spends nearly every waking hour (including those when she really should be sleeping), working with startup founders looking to hire and candidates looking — or in most cases not, actually — to get hired. Her role on First Round’s Talent Team is to make matches between great talent and the right companies in a market that can only be described as red hot. She’s also observed the broader industry trends and many mistakes that this frenzied mentality has driven over the past few years.

A few weeks ago, Cambridge University announced research findings saying that Spider-Man could never exist because a human being’s hands and feet don’t have enough surface area to include the size of the sticky pads they would need to lift a body up on a smooth surface. The Cambridge researchers said any Spider-Man wannabe would need adhesive pads covering at least 40% of their body–-making wall crawling impractical.

Image: http://www.fastcompany.com

Everyone from Facebook to Google to Salesforce is trying to make it easier to build software for the Internet of Things, the catch-all term that's come to embrace a wide variety of connected devices in our homes, on our bodies, and around the towns and cities where we live.

Into this scrum came MyDevices, a Los Angeles-based company, which unveiled Cayenne, a set of software tools for IoT developers and makers.

Image: http://readwrite.com/

On Tuesday, the White House announced its newest cohort of presidential innovation fellows—each promising figures in their respective industries—to, as president Obama put it, "encourage a culture of public service among our innovators and tech entrepreneurs."

Founded in 2012, the Presidential Innovation Fellowship (PIF) program has now helped mentor more than 95 top innovators by bringing them together with leading federal agency officials to create new, disruptive civic technology products and services. In the past, fellows have included startup founders, designers, entrepreneurs, developers and other technologists. In this year's crew, two of the fellows hail from the District; Amy Wilson and Wendy Harman. The 2016 class is comprised of 11 innovators in total.

Insuring the security of connected products is hard for a simple reason: they are too new, and too little is known about the economic losses or personal injury they might cause. What the industry needs is data, and analytics to translate statistics on losses into policy standards and consistent pricing. Only then can emerging industries like self-driving cars and network-connected medical devices really take off, says software security expert Josh Corman.

Image: http://www.technologyreview.com

In an age of continuing electronic breaches and rising geopolitical tensions over cyber-espionage, the White House is working on a national cybersecurity strategy that’s expected in early 2016. Helping to draft that strategy is Greg Shannon. He was until recently chief scientist at Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute and is now on leave to serve as assistant director for cybersecurity strategy at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Image: http://www.technologyreview.com

In 2013, the University of Arizona created Tech Launch Arizona to commercialize inventions stemming from university research. Today, the Tech Launch Arizona structure has coalesced into three integrated teams.

Technology transfer, which identifies, protects and licenses UA inventions and supports startup formation. Business development resources, which pulls in community technology experts, experienced entrepreneurs and successful business leaders to position inventions for market success. Tech Parks Arizona, which provides space and support for businesses to grow their products and services while leveraging the talent and resources of the university.

Image: Courtesy of Tech Launch Arizona

The United States has historically been the world leader in providing patent protection for new and emerging technologies. Think about gene sequencing, personalized medicine and computer-implemented technologies that run everything — and America's dominance in these industries. But due to a series of poorly considered and frequently misapplied Supreme Court decisions, applicants in key technologies such as biotech and software are now facing more stringent criteria for obtaining and keeping patent protection in the U.S. than they are in China, the European Union and other jurisdictions, which reduces America's global competitiveness.

Texas Medical Center added a second class of startups to its accelerator program and acknowledged that it has tweaked its approach.Although the second group will focus on digital health, the next cohort starting in July will be devoted to medical device innovation.