We all know the saying, "The early bird gets the worm." While it can be tempting to hit the snooze button in the morning, it turns out there are some benefits to being the first one in the office.

YOU ARE GUARANTEED TIME TO FOCUS ON IMPORTANT WORK A typical day at the office is filled with nonstop interruptions and distractions. The workday is often used for "urgent work" and meetings. All these interruptions take away from our focus on the "important work," or work that requires heavy concentration. "It takes employees 15 minutes to refocus once they’ve been interrupted," says Eileen Adler, chief human resources officer at PeopleFluent.

Ellen Pao’s gender discrimination suit against Kleiner Perkins is one data point in the discussion of diversity in Silicon Valley’s venture capital industry.

As two students in the Stanford Graduate School of Business, we set out to unpack the diversity issue as Pao’s trial unfolded last March. We spoke with more than 20 venture capitalists and Valley insiders to examine the numbers and anecdotal trends. In the coming weeks, we will release our data as part of an in-depth survey on bias in the industry.

This has been thoughtfully answered by the other posters, but I’ll throw in my two cents because I get asked about my hours fairly often offline.

The VC job is as demanding as you want it to be, and that can vary based on what you want out of the job as well as your own personality match with the role. Here are some inter-related truths I’ve observed about the role and why each may or may not be demanding:

There is less and less quiet in the world. Sensory overload is rampant. Your attention is diverted by noise and moving pictures continually .Everywhere you go someone else’s favorite music blares at you. Televdisions hang on walls everywhere, sometimes with sound, sometimes with streaming words, sometimes just soundless random movement. You can’t even get gas for your car without having a television shouting at you.

When Google announced that its new Photos app would be free and come with unlimited cloud storage it crossed a line that many in the tech industry had been watching with fear.

Price: $0.

The cloud-computing industry reads like a who's who of profitable tech giants. But they've been nervously watching a competition started by Amazon, matched by Microsoft, and taken up with gusto by Google.

Many think it’s just a buzz word, but hiring someone with a high degree of emotional intelligence will help companies grow faster than organizations without this type of employee.

Emotional intelligence (EQ) can’t be taught. It is an innate skill and candidates who have it are very observant and descriptive. Someone with EQ will not only give an answer, but they will explain how and why it impacted them and the team, how it made them feel, and how it helped the company grow.

Machine-to-Machine is about the ability to remotely collect data from devices and use this data in real-time to make more informed business decisions which will inevitably lead to new business models, new business revenues and a more enriched user experience.

IoT interconnects devices, assets, processes and systems to improve business models and profits, increase efficiency, and optimise the use of resources. In today’s challenging economic times, it offers enterprises across a wide spectrum of industries an opportunity to improve productivity and cost efficiencies to gain competitive edge.

That’s how Steve Jobs described his decision to drop out of college, speaking in his now-famous 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University — and presumably striking terror into the hearts of parents who had always assumed their children’s successful futures would include a college degree. And who can blame them? After all, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics at that time was reporting that someone with a college degree could earn twice as much as someone with just a high school diploma, and that a high school graduate would be twice as likely to be unemployed as someone with a degree — figures that still hold true today.

Entrepreneur visas are all the rage. Born out of economic crises and restrictions on the mobility of labour, they nevertheless offer the best opportunity for countries to attract the next generation of wealth creators. I caught up with Josephine Goube, director of partnerships at Migreat.com and author of Open Borders to Entrepreneurs & Innovators – a report looking at the innovative immigration experiments taking place across the world.

The best part of being an entrepreneur is having the independence to make your own decisions, the flexibility for a better work/life balance, and personal satisfaction from driving change. But nobody said it would be easy. The road to business success is filled with challenges and frustrations that most aspiring entrepreneurs never even imagined.

What should leaders do to boost their organization’s ability to innovate? There’s a seemingly endless list of options to consider. Set up a new-growth group. Launch an idea contest. Change the reward systems. Run an action-learning program to develop the top leadership team’s ability to confront ambiguity. Form a venture investment fund. Take a road trip to Israel or Silicon Valley. Build an open innovation platform. Bring in outside speakers. Hire seasoned innovators. Paint the walls blue. Buy a lot of books.

Image: https://hbr.org

One of the most critical professional challenges that employees face today is being able to successfully manage positive change within their organization. Innovation is has become a watch word, with so many divisions not being able to find enough valuable ideas and then successfully manage those ideas into a commercial offering that sometimes companies even respond to customer tickets and bugs and simply label those results as “innovation.”

The big data movement is redefining the way we approach biotech – opening up new opportunities for engineers and mathematicians. It also is helping entrepreneurs launch an entirely new kind of biotech startup – one at the nexus of tech and biotech.

So there’s a lot of talk about how best to entice the tech-savvy into the life sciences – because the silos remain very real. How do we bridge the gap between tech and biotech?

Entrepreneurs and other private-sector innovators will soon, for the first time, have access to voluminous federal healthcare data stores, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced Tuesday. This reverses a longstanding rule that researchers could not use CMS data for commercial purposes.

Acting CMS Administrator Andy Slavitt presented the new policy Tuesday at Health Datapalooza, an event focused on open healthcare data.

Rittenhouse Ventures, the newly rebranded Navy Yard-based venture capital firm, found a backer in an unlikely place: an angel group in its own backyard.

Robin Hood Ventures invested $750,000 in Rittenhouse Ventures, Robin Hood managing partner John Moore told us. Rittenhouse Ventures managing partner Saul Richter declined to comment on his firm’s fundraising efforts, citing SEC regulations.

Image: Saul Richter, managing partner Rittenhouse Ventures (formerly Emerald Stage2 Ventures).

Personal recognition is something we’ve craved since childhood. You once strived for a medal at a track meet, and that ambition has transitioned into getting the corner office. Our egos feed off the applause, and we develop a laser focus on what we need to achieve. But like any ego-driven conquest, there’s a price to pay.

For at least three days this month, Philadelphia will be the Silicon Valley of biotech.

Nearly 40 startups and small businesses funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) with innovative biomedical technologies based on fundamental research will be in Philadelphia June 15-18 at the 2015 BIO International Convention, the world's largest gathering of the biotechnology industry.

The companies will be part of the Innovation Zone, a 5,000-square-foot exhibit space dedicated to businesses with cutting-edge biomedical technologies supported by NSF's Directorate for Engineering.

This might sound obvious, but if you want to build a more engaged workforce you need to, well, engage. That means, whether you are a CEO or a frontline manager, you need to be working hard to connect, face-to-face, with your people. That can mean anything from walking around and making pit stops in offices and cubicles to holding town hall discussions with your teams and staying to answer questions afterward. But most leaders simply can’t make time to sit down with every person in the company, in every office around the world, on a regular basis. It’s mathematically impossible. So what should leaders do instead?

We’re all tempted to use words that we’re not too familiar with.

If this were the only problem, I wouldn’t have much to write about. That’s because we’re cautious with words we’re unsure of and, thus, they don’t create much of an issue for us.

It’s the words that we think we’re using correctly that wreak the most havoc.

We throw them around in meetings, e-mails and important documents (such as resumes and client reports), and they land, like fingernails across a chalkboard, on everyone who has to hear or read them.

Mumbai: Incubation happens out of hatcheries and unicorns are found in cities as well. For those involved in the business of raising capital, both are terms attached to different funding stages in the life-cycle of a start-up. Read on for a primer on start-up funding.

Incubation/bootstrapping ($40,000-$100,000)

The first stage of a start-up when the idea of the business is still developing. The founders of the start-up may put up money, usually pooled together from relatives and friends, or they are helped by so-called incubators that specialise in helping start-ups.