I graduated with my MBA when I was 32 years old. I had been out of school for eight years, working for a handful of companies in various software development, consulting and sales roles. I went back to school because I knew (almost) exactly what I wanted to do in the long run: Start my own company. I was confident going back to school was a step in the right direction.

Image: FLICKR, MLEIBOFF 

Venture firm Freestyle Capital can boast of more than paper profits. The seed-stage investor “had the most number of exits out of all our portfolio firms,” said Michael Kim, managing partner at Cendana Capital, a limited partner in Freestyle and an investor in other seed funds. Freestyle’s first fund that included limited-partner capital closed in 2011 with $26 million. That fund already distributed 42% of the capital that it had drawn down, as of Sept. 30, 2014, according to Freestyle General Partner Dave Samuel. Its net investment rate of return was 28.1%.

Image: Founders Dave Samuel (left) and Josh Felser Freestyle Capital 

U.S. News & World Report is pleased to announce the 2014 STEM Leadership Hall of Fame, honored during the U.S. News STEM Solutions conference. In choosing the honorees, U.S. News sought out leaders who, among other things, have achieved measurable results in the science, technology, engineering, and math fields; challenged established processes and conventional wisdom; inspired a shared vision; and motivated legions of aspiring STEM professionals.

Image: Members of the 2014 Leadership Hall of Fame stand alongside U.S. News' Brian Kelly, far right, at the U.S. News STEM Solutions Conference on Friday, April 25, 2014. 

Eye-popping is the only word that comes close to describing the numbers we saw this year from venture finance. The valuations accelerated rapidly, with companies like Slack jumping past the billion dollar mark in less than a year of the launch of its enterprise social product. Google announced a massive $542 million round in Magic Leap in October, and just yesterday, Instacart announced that it had reached a valuation of $2 billion following a round led by Kleiner Perkins.

Image: http://techcrunch.com/ 

Even though it has been a long haul since the recession, it’s nice to see more optimism as we close out this year and head into a new one. A November 2014 report by Kiplinger asserts that economic momentum is back on track. Growth is projected to continue at a 3 percent rate, consumer confidence is gaining strongly, hiring is on the rise, and job openings are at a near record level.

Being an entrepreneur in college — though challenging — can turbocharge your undergraduate experience. Although this may already be something drilled in your head by professors or advisors, I can personally attest to it. At the age of 20, I became an entrepreneur while studying at the University of Maryland.

Image: Courtesy of Ali Von Paris 

Being an entrepreneur is a growing trend in our country today. I am glad that in my eight-year journey of being an entrepreneur I have met thousands of other entrepreneurs and had the opportunity of really understanding what being a successful entrepreneur is all about. Not all entrepreneurs get to be successful. The difference between the ones who are successful and the ones who are not is their approach to the question, ‘what they want out of entrepreneurship?’ Successful entrepreneurs always want something extraordinary out of their entrepreneurial journey. For extraordinary success, you first need extraordinary dreams and an extraordinary amount of craziness to make it happen.

Image: http://yourstory.com/ 

Governmental agencies face a wide spectrum of challenges in creating mHealth apps, ranging from a changing development culture to potential litigious issues, revealed a new report published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research.                     

"Beyond the cultural paradigm shift to design interactive apps and to open health-related data to the public, the managerial challenges include accessibility, interoperability, security, privacy, and legal concerns using interactive apps tracking citizen," stated the report, "The Long Way From Government Open Data to Mobile Health Apps: Overcoming Institutional Barriers in the US Federal Government."

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

A majority of Americans want to monitor their health with connected , wearable devices, according to a recent survey from A&D Medical.

In addition, “most Americans” are concerned about their weight, yet less than half are concerned about their blood pressure, the survey said.

A&D Medical, which manufactures and distributes bio-metric monitoring devices likes blood pressure monitors, activity trackers and weight scales, surveyed more 2,000 Americans using Harris Poll. The results include:

Image: http://medcitynews.com/ 

Last spring Laura Murphy, then 28 years old, went to a doctor to find out if a harmless flap of skin she had always had on the back of her neck was caused by a genetic mutation. Once upon a time, maybe five years ago, physicians would have focused on just that one question. But today doctors tend to run tests that pick up mutations underlying a range of hereditary conditions. Murphy learned not only that a genetic defect was indeed responsible for the flap but also that she had another inherited genetic mutation.

Image: http://www.scientificamerican.com

The CMS Innovation Center paid $2.6 billion through September to hospitals, doctors and others through nearly two dozen programs that tested new ways to deliver healthcare and pay for it.

But results of those programs—some underway since 2011—including more than 60,000 providers and 2.5 million patients in Medicare, Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program, are largely not yet available, the Innovation Center said in its second report to Congress.

The label “Sick Man of Europe” has been awarded to many a European nation and empire since it was first used to describe the decrepit Ottoman Empire in the mid-19th century. Today, it seems the entirety of Europe, save the United Kingdom and Switzerland, is worthy of the “sick man” title. The Eurozone is teetering on the brink of yet another economic crisis thanks to continued low growth, high debt, and the rise of populist political parties in the weaker Euro economies. The euro currency dropped 11% against the dollar this year, falling to its lowest levels in two years. Russia, as I have already covered, is reeling in the face of 2014′s plummet in oil prices and faces a crisis in its own currency; in fact, Russia’s GDP contracted 0.5% in November, marking the first Russian decline since 2009, and is expected to decline 0.8% in 2015. Even Scandinavian economies, like those in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, are positioned for trouble in 2015.

Image: http://legalinsurrection.com

A map is much more than a place to give you directions to your next destination. Used well, a map offers a view of the world from above that can change the way you think about our geography and the people who inhabit it.

Some of the maps we've seen this year have been truly mind-altering, like the series of maps showing just how much of the state of Louisiana is sinking into the sea each year. Others have been more whimsical, showing the petty prejudices people around the world hold for each other.

Image: http://www.fastcoexist.com

Happy New Year from the Innovation America Team!

Ah, the elevator pitch. A favorite tool of the networking masses. A rite of passage of sorts. You’ve heard the scenario: you step into an elevator and go up one floor. The elevator doors open and in walks the client of your dreams. They start some small talk and ask, “What do you do?” and you’ve got the rest of the elevator ride to respond. How do you answer that in 20 seconds in such a way that gets them interested? The answer is simple. You need an elevator pitch for your elevator pitch.

Plan any event and chances are one in five of the people you invite will be late. A study done at San Francisco State University found that about 20% of the U.S. population is chronically late—but it’s not because they don't value others' time. It’s more complicated than that, says lead researcher Diana DeLonzor.

While good old paper may seem passé in the digital age, LinkedIn hasn't completely replaced the old-fashioned résumé.

"Résumés are the heartbeat of a career search," says Jacqui Barrett-Poindexter, a career and workplace adviser at Glassdoor. "If done well, your résumé will tell your story and sell you."

What a difference a year makes. At the end of 2013, the industry was still debating whether Hadoop and related big data technologies were going to become mainstream or were just niche technologies for Internet companies.

A year later, the answer is clear — Hadoop is without question the foundation of the new data stack, the first of the Hadoop distributions (Hortonworks) is now a public company, with others sure to follow. This is putting a spotlight on the next layer up the stack — big data analytics — and the use cases that will be unlocked and transformed by collecting and connecting vast quantities of raw data and empowering business analysts with new capabilities. In 2015, we’ll see the impact of big data across almost every industry sector, and there will be a multitude of proof points that go beyond vague claims often seen today.

Image: HP servers. Image Credit: HP

A tech industry that had spent years waiting for a revived IPO market finally got its wish in 2014.

The overall IPO market reached a level not seen since 2000. And Silicon Valley companies rode that wave as venture-backed IPOs soared, according to year-end data from Renaissance Capital.

Image: The Hortonworks team is on hand at the Nasdaq on the day the company goes public. Image Credit: Nasdaq/Twitter

Only a very few aspiring entrepreneurs from among 1000s are able to convert their ideas into a business.  And one of the key reasons for this is the lack of access to capital that is required to start something new. Out of 1000s of investment-worthy startups, less than 300 are able to get initial capital in India.