Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham just had a few interesting things to say about the accelerator’s Winter 2013 batch, the biggest of which is that it’s going to be smaller than before. There’s no firm number just yet, but he notes in a new post on the Y Combinator website that there may be less than 50 startups in the mix this time around.

In case you haven’t been keeping track, that means that Y Combinator has gone from its largest class to date (84 in Summer ’12) to one of its smallest in a long time.

With little more than an idea to go on in 2009, Paul Cypher had virtually no chance of getting a traditional bank loan to start his software company, CypherWorx.

In another community, such as San Diego, Austin, Texas, or Philadelphia, even at that early stage, Cypher figures he could have found someone willing to invest enough to get his company off the ground.

Advances across virtually all fields of science show promise for solving an array of puzzles about the nature of the world—from disease emergence and climate-change impact to the origins of our universe. Unfortunately, the pace of scientific progress is being slowed by excessive, redundant, and ineffective requirements imposed both by government agencies and by the universities where research is being conducted.

A survey released in 2007 by the Federal Demonstration Partnership, an association of federal agencies, research universities, and research-policy groups, estimated that 42 percent of American researchers' time is spent on administrative tasks, compared with 18 percent two decades earlier. A forthcoming update is expected to show that things have not improved, in spite of the outcry that accompanied the original study.

I was having a Twitter direct message conversation with a good friend recently about career challenges. She asked if I were still as interested in what I do as when I started, because she isn’t right now.

My quick response? You don’t always love today what you have loved for a long time.

Moving from entrepreneurship to a job for an organization, she has no interest in doing the work she had loved previously, prompting her question on career challenges. While she is performing comparable duties at the new job (and it’s going well), it’s less demanding than entrepreneurship, and from a financial standpoint, more stable. The thought of doing the more challenging work she’d been doing independently is “dead” to her.

How many people in the biotech industry today really feel like they are part of something special, something bigger than themselves? How many people feel such camaraderie with their co-workers that they’d show up to meet them at a reunion five years from now? How many people in biotech feel the task in front of them is challenging, but that nothing is impossible?

I’ve been ruminating over these questions the past week, since I hosted a reunion for the alumni of Bothell, WA-based Icos. This biotech company is largely forgotten now, but it made waves when it was founded in 1990. Icos brought together three superstar founders—George Rathmann of Amgen, Bob Nowinski of Genetic Systems, and Chris Henney of Immunex—and they raised a then-unprecedented $33 million Series A financing from a cast of rich people that included the young Bill Gates. The idea: develop drugs to fight cardiovascular diseases and inflammation.

Mark Cuban started his working life as a bartender in Dallas. Then he took a job as a computer salesman. Then he was fired. And only then did he start his first company, MicroSolutions. He did well, selling it for $6 million. He did even better with his next company – about 1,000 times better. He created a company called Broadcast.com, and sold it to Yahoo for almost $6 billion.

Stanford University has a lot of smart people. But the school's nickname is dumb: the Stanford Cardinal. As in the color red. How unimaginative. Here's a better idea: the Stanford Entrepreneurs.

Yes, harder to fit on a souvenir coffee mug but a much more accurate handle. A recent study by business research firm CB Insights shows Stanford dominates all other universities in the field of alumni entrepreneurship.

Whenever a discussion opens about nonacademic employment for Ph.D.'s, it isn't long before someone suggests reducing graduate-school admissions. "The market for full-time scholars has fallen off a cliff lately," this argument goes, "so why not just train fewer of them?"

The strategy to reduce the number of Ph.D. students recurs in those conversations because it's sensible. When there's insufficient demand for professors in the marketplace, the simplest response is to decrease supply.

As company owner, you need to focus only on the items that add the most value to your organization. In general, these are the things that you, and only you, are capable of doing. You should delegate the rest.

Of course, you need a way to determine what the key things are on which you should be spending your time. Consider the Pareto Principle, or the 80/20 rule, which states that 20 percent of one thing (e.g., your customers) yields 80 percent of results (e.g., total company sales). In the case of your focus, the Pareto Principle says that 20 percent of your efforts yield 80 percent of the results you achieve. Therefore, the key is to identify what this 20 percent of your work is and do more of it (and delegate the 80 percent).

Some cities are adding high-tech infrastructure. Some are implementing revolutionary sustainability plans. Others are fostering innovative business and science developments. But which city combines these qualities and others to be the smartest city? A few weeks ago, Co.Exist published a ranking of European smart cities (A global smart city ranking was published earlier this year). Now we are publishing the top 10 cities in North America.

The rankings are based on a device I developed called the Smart Cities Wheel, which contains six key components of smart cities and three key drivers for each component. The data sources used are included below. The only data source not currently publicly available is the U.S. e-governance rankings conducted by the E-Governance Institute at Rutgers University. I am grateful to Dr. Marc Holzer and his team for agreeing to forward me their latest rankings which have not yet been published.

Apparently, venture capital is a cruddy asset class where you can't get returns over the long term.

Not only that, but there's a "Series A Crunch" that we've been talking about since October of 2011 where good companies can't seem to get to their next round of funding.

And tech journalists talk about these things as if they're some kind of structural problem or at least a trend with the asset class.

That might make sense, if venture capital was an asset class.  Saying that venture capital is an asset class is like saying that Italians are a race.  Venture capital is just equity--and it's equity that isn't widely available to everyone and it gets invested in by a wide variety of investor types with different strategies.

The prominence of technology is riding high, with billion dollar initial public offerings (IPOs), news of large acquisitions, and a seemingly egalitarian spree in mobile applications pushing the profile of the industry up among the public; you can’t open a newspaper today without seeing story after story not just profiling firms, but even fashion and intrigue in the technology sector.

The old joke is that if your taxi driver gives you stock tips, it’s time to sell. Take a ride in San Francisco today, and try to find a taxi driver – and why are you taking a taxi and not one of the several new car sharing services in the city? – that doesn’t sport a smartphone and know about Facebook’s IPO. Consumer-facing technology companies and their financial moves, buying, being acquired, flaming out, and going public, are now common conversation.

We talk a lot about major pivots--but what about minor ones? Here's how one small piece of pivotal behavior can change your company for the better.

Can a single behavior elevate an entire organization? It can--if it’s the right behavior. Here’s how a simple 1-minute act helped an organization reinforce its purpose and outperform its competition by leaps and bounds.

I have a college-age daughter. My family and I were moving her into Boston University (BU) over Labor Day weekend. The four of us, mom, dad, college daughter and her younger sister, were standing on the street, looking befuddled at the campus map. At that moment, a friendly and official-looking gentleman approached us, asking, “Can I help you find something?”

Over the course of three trying decades, the Rust Belt has scraped off years of oxidation and is in the process of polishing itself into a shining new landscape of technological advancement. But try telling that to the rest of the country.

"When people think of the Rust Belt, they think of a hard work ethic, blue-collar values, stick-to-itiveness. There's always a sense of true American grit associated with the Rust Belt, which I don't think we take advantage of as much as we should," said Sewickley-based startup adviser Kit Mueller.

A recent blog by Dan Isenberg from Babson College argues that there has been too much focus on startups around the world and that “infinitely more important is to embed scale-up.” Of course, Dan has a point in that I frequently hear leaders outside the United States lament their lack of billion dollars firms, but I think we are far from the point when we can stop advocating for better support for new starts. Not only is most of the world still focused on size not age of firms—talking “SMEs”—but we still do not know enough about the science of startups and how to best support those that want to scale. As with kids—to play along with Isenberg’s analogy—we have to help firms start better if they are to scale later in life and now is not the time to pull back the throttle on legitimizing founders and startups as a centrepiece of that economy policy.

You’ve probably heard of glycemic index and glycemic load. Some studies suggest that sticking to foods with a low glycemic index may help prevent diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer. Some claim it helps with weight loss. The truth is, we don’t know all the answers yet. Here’s what you need to know.

The glycemic index and load concern carbohydrates, or carbs—one of the main types of nutrients in our diets. Carbs with a simple chemical structure are called sugars. Sugars are found naturally in foods like fruits, vegetables and milk products. They’re also added to many foods and drinks. Complex carbs, like starches and fiber, are found in whole-grain breads and cereals, starchy vegetables and legumes.

After mastering the mortgage pitch, Dan Gilbert is now attempting to sell an even bigger product: Detroit.

There’s something in the air in downtown Detroit. Depending on who you ask, it’s a resurgence, a revival, or perhaps a white-washing. Ancient skyscrapers have new life. People are milling in the streets on lunch breaks. Startups are moving to the city at a surprising rate. Downtown Detroit feels alive – if only between 9 to 5. There’s one man primarily responsible for much of the urban renewal: Dan Gilbert, founder and chairman of Quicken Loans.

Almost every large company understands it needs to build an organization that deals with the ever-increasing external forces of continuous disruption, the need forcontinuous innovation, globalization and regulation.

But there is no standard strategy and structure for creating corporate innovation.

We outline the strategy problem in this post and will propose some specific organizational suggestions in follow-on posts.

I’m sitting at the ranch with Alexander Osterwalder, Henry Chesbrough and Andre Marquis listening to them recount their lessons-learned consulting for some of the world’s largest corporations. I offered what I just learned from spending a day at the ranch with the R&D group of a $100 billion corporation along with the insights myStartup Owners Manual co-author Bob Dorf who has several Fortune 100 clients.

It is hard to hear a newscast these days without some mention of the impending fiscal cliff. By the end of the year, we could be facing a ‘perfect storm’ of tax cuts, tax breaks and spending cuts that will have a significant impact on the U.S. economic recovery, if it is not handled appropriately.  Over 1,000 government programs, including the defense budget and Medicare, are in line for deep, automatic cuts that begin to bite in January. According to Science Magazine, specific science and technology-based programs in jeopardy include, National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Energy,  NASA, and Environmental Protection Agency, to name a few.

But rather than just looking at tax and spending cuts, why not reimagine the federal government’s role in funding? Why not use this opportunity to transition from our 1950’s approach to government funding and move it into the 21st century?

I’m Pat Hull and I’m an accidental entrepreneur. Actually, this wasn’t my plan.

Virginia Tech, where I began my life as an entrepreneur. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Real-estate development was my plan – at least that’s what I thought when I was a college student at Virginia Tech. But somewhere along the way, my uncle derailed my plans.

It started with a pretty simple question. I was studying Critical Path Method scheduling in school and it was something I did well — well enough that, when professors were contacted by businesses looking for specific CPM skills, my name was mentioned.  So businesses began to contact me to do work.