It may not look like much at first glance, but a map created by University of Wisconsin computer science professor Paul Barford and about a dozen colleagues took around four years to produce. He believes it could make the Internet more resilient to accidents, disasters, or intentional attacks.

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Like many entrepreneurs, especially those of a certain age, Alex Blumberg never intended to ditch it all to launch a business. He was a producer for public radio program This American Life and worked on the popular business podcast/blog Planet Money. He was winning awards. Getting raises. Life was great. But all along Blumberg had an idea he couldn’t shake: to produce narrative journalism podcasts, in serial form—to be, as he puts it, the HBO of podcasts. Blumberg tried to sell the idea to his NPR bosses. No luck. So he decided to go it alone, launching Gimlet Media in the fall of 2014. 

They interrupt flow, and pop up unbidden on your iCal. They tend to convey all of the information you already knew and none of the things you really wanted to know. Meetings have emerged as one of the most universally despised conventions of American work life, and they show no sign of letting up. But if workers and managers alike feel put upon by meetings, experts say it’s not meetings per se that are the culprit. The problem is bad meetings.

Rating agency Standard & Poor’s downgrade last week of Brazil’s sovereign rating to the non-investment or “junk” category is a wake-up call for the country to correct its finances and build the political consensus to achieve that. Brazil is facing a severe recession, and its economy is expected to shrink by 3% this year and again in 2016, before returning to modest growth by 2017, according to S&P.

While recent posts have highlighted some of the happy encounters inherent in my work, it’s not all roses. Over the last few weeks I’ve been involved in a number of  situations that were unpleasant. For reasons I don’t fully comprehend, the universe seems to throw these challenges to me in bunches. I wind up dealing with several in a short period of time and then, thankfully, am free of them until the next batch gets dropped in my lap. A number of people have seen through my usual friendly demeanor and realized that when the situation calls for it, I can be as tough as required so they know who to call when things get rough…

A leader is best when people barely know he exists.  When his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say:  We did it ourselves.  — Lao Tzu

Leading innovation is a lot like parenting.

As a parent, you generally don’t have any meaningful training or preparation before you start.  You kind of learn as you go, and figure things out as they land in front of you.  Most of the advice y0u get is off base and not at all relevant to your circumstances.  By the time you’ve accumulated enough experience to be more or less competent, the skills you’ve acquired are mostly irrelevant.  To top it all off, the really important things you did, the things that will really matter somewhere in the future, are totally invisible, hidden away in a flurry of daily actions and drama and living.

Asia is likely to produce 45 percent of all growth in banking revenues between now and 2020. But McKinsey analysis suggests that global banks should focus their efforts on cities across the continent rather than adopt traditional country-driven strategies—as many do at present (exhibit). In both developed Asia1 and China, more than 95 percent of all banking growth will happen in urban areas. In the former, the greatest potential lies in the ten largest cities, though GDP growth will be higher in tier-two ones. The reason is that wealth in these developed economies is concentrated in regional financial hubs, such as Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Singapore. By contrast, the majority of China’s growth (which will be nearly as great as that of emerging and developed Asia combined) will happen in the country’s roughly 150 tier-two cities,2 which track the growth of GDP and population.

Kevin O’Leary, or “Mr. Wonderful” for you Shark Tank fans, is a seasoned entrepreneur and investor that doesn’t hold back when it comes to dishing out advice to contestants that appear on the hit television show.

Like him or not, his advice is spot on. Here are 10 quotes from O’Leary that every entrepreneur can learn from.

In March, the Texas Medical Center created TCMx, a business accelerator program focused on medical start-ups and biotechnology. Twenty-one fledgling companies were invited to take part.

TCMx provided a suite of services and resources to the fledgling companies, which are trying to bring new devices, software and biotech products to the healthcare and hospital market. TCMx does not provide any seed money to the companies, but the entrepreneurs get lots of help. The resources included free office space in the medical center, mentors and networking events, and classes on the regulatory process used by the FDA to approve a new surgical device.

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As a first-gen entrepreneur and professional by training, I have become contemptuous of the local investor community; it uses a cookie-cutter approach with very limited imagination. They would rather blow their cash on an app (without proof of concept) than on a good service model that has growth potential. We pretend in India to be like the Silicon Valley guys, but we don’t really have the b***s!”

Experts posit that jobs of the future will include roles such as neuro-implant technician, 3-D printer design specialist, and virtual reality experience designer. While it may be hard to imagine a time when such positions will be part of the regular employment landscape, not long ago, jobs such as iOS and Android developer or chief happiness officer didn’t exist.

Looks like San Diego life sciences and tech investment firm Avalon Ventures is in the midst of compiling its eleventh fund, looking to raise $300 million.

Fund XI, according to an SEC filing, has raised $103.5 million of the proposed $300 million from 26 investors.

Just as brand differentiation helps attract customers, culture differentiation helps attract the right employees. But while it’s popular to focus on corporate culture, not many companies have a truly distinctive culture. This is the equivalent to a marketing department saying, “We need to have a strong brand”—without articulating what that strength will rest on.

PitchBook has released its inaugural VC Unicorn Report, which dives into the terms, conditions and trends affecting VC-backed companies worth $1 billion or more. Drawing on valuation documents and more than 25,000 valuations housed in the PitchBook Platform, the report will break down valuation trends for specific companies, including protection terms, protective provisions, dividends, liquidation preferences, participation rights, voting rights and elections of Boards of Directors.

The Ann Arbor-based Renaissance Venture Capital Fund, a fund-of-funds affiliated with Business Leaders for Michigan, has recently invested more than $20 million in five firms, four of them out of state.

Renaissance invests in VC firms either based in Michigan or interested in investing in Michigan companies.

IBM and Medtronic are part of a group that have won a grant from the Israeli government to open a digital medicine incubator, according to a statement from the Office of the Chief Scientist with the Israeli Ministry of Economy. It’s part of a long-running economic stimulus program to improve investment in Israeli technology startups and create jobs.

The statement was translated from Hebrew with Google Translate.

Whether we’re conscious of it or not, every management decision is motivated by a desire to find universal answers to very specific questions. People who succeed in organizations tend to be pragmatic problem solvers. They have to be, because of the myriad challenges they face. How to grow the enterprise. How to get work done. How to find customers. How to be themselves in the workplace. And so on. Because there are no easy answers to these complex problems, they test the answers by starting a company, launching a project, or making a move. As they succeed and fail, the most attentive of them learn from the results. The history of business is thus the story of entrepreneurs, executives, leaders, and employees, lurching from one experimental answer to another. They gain expertise and acumen, and profits and revenues, and, along the way, add to the theory of management.

As the 1990s drew to a close, Austria’s Emporia Telecom was in crisis. The firm had started out as a B2B provider of landline phones and fax machines, but the company’s core offerings no longer held widespread appeal. Suddenly, inspiration struck from an unlikely source. The firm’s founder and CEO, Albert Fellner, was helping his mother learn how to use her new mobile phone, which was riddled with unfamiliar features. In the process, he realized he’d stumbled across a huge void in the marketplace: providing simple, functional mobile phones to seniors.

After months in stealth and bullish reviews from beta users, it was Cluster’s time to fly. Co-founder and CEO Brenden Mulligan knew no one had cracked private, group photo sharing at scale. He could envision the headline he wanted: “Cluster Finally Solves Collaborative Photo Sharing.” But the week before it debuted, competitor Albumatic launched (now defunct), to the fanfare of technology bloggers and journalists. Instantly, the conversation changed from “Amazing — can I write about this?” to “How are you different from Albumatic?”

In last month’s column on whether or not to raise venture capital, I suggested that if you hope to get the attention of a particular VC, the question you need to ask yourself is, am I confident my company will be even close to a 10-bagger in roughly five to seven years? If you’ve applied the test, and decided you still want to raise venture capital there are still a couple of last considerations before you begin.