When you’re a kid, snow days are awesome. As a working parent, though, that dreaded robo-call or email from the school district can set off a panic. School is delayed or closed. How are you supposed to get your job done and deal with the kids’ disrupted schedule?

The good news is that snow days fall into the category of what Donald Rumsfeld called "known unknowns."

I want to share with you what I have experienced from sitting on both sides of the table on how you can increase your chances of raising capital for your business. In part one, I discussed the myth of insufficient capital in South Africa, the importance of having a team and other key things investors look for in a startup.

 

The capital of Sweden is an easy place to fly to and it feels almost "un-Swedish" to waste money on a taxi from the airport to central Stockholm when visitors are told the train is so efficient.

Stockholm is a place where excess seems vulgar and the better option is to take a slower and quieter approach to life — choose walking over driving, throw away the credit card and let things just happen.

This weekend, I’m going to the Mojave Desert, deep into an arid wilderness of a half-million acres, for some stargazing, bouldering and January sunshine on my public lands. I won’t be out of contact. I checked. If Sarah Palin says something stupid on Donald Trump’s behalf — scratch that. When Sarah Palin says something stupid on Donald Trump’s behalf, I’ll get her speaking-in-tongues buffoonery in real time, along with the rest of the nation.

Amazon Books is now open for business in Seattle. The floor is hardwood and the shelves and displays are weighed down by beautiful, physical books. It looks and smells like any ordinary bookstore.

But make no mistake. It’s anything but. Amazon’s new store is the digital economy’s coming full circle -- flipping the model to tie together online and offline in a whole new way. It’s establishing land-based business on ecommerce prowess, and modeling the methodology of the next generation of retail.

In the past few weeks, three corporate innovation clients have moved to — or had their roles expanded to include — their company’s training function. As one remarked, perhaps ruefully, “Now I’ve got to get the people who actually do the work to innovate.”

Yes, enterprise innovation conversations seem to be shifting more from the “how” to the “who.” Process and methodology debates have turned into the operational challenge of how best to boost people’s capabilities. For many firms, the innovation agenda is now as much about human capital investment as delivering new products and services.

Human beings accomplished some pretty incredible things in 2015. We landed a reusable rocket. We legalized love (as if love needed our permission to begin with). We flew by Pluto and sent back high-res images from more than 3 billion miles away. For all intents and purposes, we rocked 2015.

But not so fast. Abandon the warm feeling of pride in your stomach and delete whatever self-congratulatory tweet you might’ve been crafting to take but one moment to skim 2015’s list of most popular passwords.

Ole Miss football isn’t the university’s only up-and-comer on the national stage.

While Hugh Freeze and his coaching crew have instilled the kind of excellence that gave the football team victories in consecutive years over the likes of the Alabama Crimson Tide, mentors at the University of Mississippi Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship have excelled at helping students take business ideas from inception to market. In fact, no one in the United States does it better, according to the Global Consortium of Entrepreneurship Centers, an organization created in 1997 to help create collaboration among the world’s entrepreneurship centers. Nearly 300 universities from the United States and elsewhere are represented within the group.

Image: http://msbusiness.com

WASHINGTON — Finland ranks 1st in how its domestic policies support worldwide innovation, according to an analysis released today by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), a global technology policy think tank. The findings come in a new report assessing 56 countries—which together comprise close to 90 percent of the world’s economy—on the extent to which, on a per-capita basis, their economic and trade policies contribute to and detract from innovation globally.

Jim Breyer, the venture capitalist who made a fortune investing early in Facebook, is optimistic about the long-term picture for the technology industry.

He's particularly bullish on artificial intelligence, and he says his firm isn't investing in anything that doesn't have a smart data analytics piece to it. He likens the new artificial-intelligence era to the social-networking era, which changed the entire digital landscape.

Image: http://www.businessinsider.com

The brain on the table once belonged to a pro football player. It’s also much bigger than average, so it may have been the brain of a very big man—perhaps he played lineman. Those are the only things I know about it before Ann McKee starts cutting it into pieces.

Several minutes later something else is becoming clear: this brain is pretty messed up.

“I think this guy had CTE,” says McKee, a professor of neurology and pathology at the Boston University School of Medicine and director of neuropathology for the New England Veterans Administration Medical Centers.

Image: http://www.technologyreview.com

Millennials, the 18-to-34 age demographic, are a whole different breed of employees, and if we don't understand how to retain them at work, they can make or break a workforce.

That's what Deloitte's global chairman, David Cruickshank, told Business Insider over coffee at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Image: http://www.businessinsider.com

Ray’s Take A new avenue for investing is garnering some media attention. It’s called equity crowdfunding, and it’s a vehicle for small entrepreneurs to expand their businesses.

Investopia defines equity crowdfunding as the use of small amounts of capital from a large number of individuals to finance a new business venture.

Sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo have been around for a while, but only high income/high net worth individuals called “accredited investors” were allowed to make these types of investments. This changed in 2015.

A dose of reality may be hitting angel investing.

After valuations for young companies seeking funding soared to five-year highs last year, some angel investors—or wealthy individuals who buy stakes in startups—are starting to pull back.

On AngelList, a crowdfunding site aimed at such investors, the average valuation for a company receiving funding reached $4.9 million for two quarters last year, its highest level in five years. But valuations dropped to $4.2 million in the fourth quarter, the lowest level since early 2012. Dow Jones VentureSource data shows that deals involving angel investors fell by 16% last year.

Last year has been hailed as the creative economy's most successful year to date, according to a report released by Creative England recognising. A brilliant opportunity to showcase the creative industries from around the UK's econmomy, celebrating 50 outstanding businesses.

The report, which asked a panel of judges to choose ten of the most inventive companies from a longlist of 50, also revealed statistics on creative industries growth.

The public markets have been stumbling around lately, trying to figure out what China and oil prices mean for the rest of the world economy.  

That uncertainty creates fear--and in a US Presidential Election where fear is the debate topic de jour, we've got plenty of that to go around.  Fear, not surprisingly, weighs markets down.

But, that's a short term thing, right?

Aren't VCs investing in companies that won't exit for another 5-8 years?  Shouldn't they be long term minded?

We all need to grow — not only to stay engaged in our work but also to keep up with our employers’ changing needs. And this is the perfect time of year to set personal development goals and start making progress on them.

No matter what skills you’d like to improve, it’s important to know where to begin. So we’ve pulled together several of HBR’s best assessments and quizzes to help give you a sense of what you need to work on and how to go about it.

In the summer of 2013, Rolling Stone published a long article titled “Goodbye, Miami,” which claimed that climate change will submerge much of the titular city. “By century’s end,” the article warned, “rising sea levels will turn the nation’s urban fantasyland into an American Atlantis. But long before the city is completely underwater, chaos will begin.”

Whether you’re a startup or an existing business, a rewards-based crowdfunding campaign offers debt- and equity-free money to launch a product. That’s right! You don’t have to give up a piece of your company in exchange for money or pay interest on a loan.

Photo credit: George Is Keeping An Eye On You!-by peasap via Flickr

Women are proving that they have the right stuff to be successful at rewards campaigns. I know this from first-hand experience and from women I’ve interviewed. I raised 71% more than my $7,500 campaign goal.

A new trend in Y Combinator applications is that an increasing number of applicants have already been through some sort of accelerator or “pre-accelerator” program.  As we’ve dug into this trend, we’ve found that many of the applicants did these programs not because they needed the money or advice but because they thought it might help them get into YC (and specifically that some programs market themselves as a "way to get into Y Combinator).