Entrepreneurs don’t quit, they start.

It was against the rules but I did it anyway. I slammed on the gas of my shoddy Oldsmobile Cutlass and shot over the train track ramp going 80 miles per hour with my two friends in the back. It was midnight the summer after my senior year of high school and we were fulfilling a promise we made to ourselves to jump the ramp before we left for college. All four wheels of the car left the ground and we had just enough time to drop our mouths before landing square on the pavement. I still remember the freedom of being completely airborne and the relief of landing safely on the ground.

Having founded a software startup out of my dorm room at Stanford, I spend most of my days completely immersed the Silicon Valley model of entrepreneurship.

By Silicon Valley I don’t just mean a 1,500 square miles geographical area in Northern California. I’m referring to its entrepreneurial mindset and way of doing business focused on disruptive technology-driven businesses and the venture capital that follows them.

If you expected us to say anything other than the U.S., well, you’d be wrong. A recent study shows women entrepreneurs in the U.S. have the best chance of success. Other countries seen as favorable for women entrepreneurs include Australia in the number 2 position, Sweden at number 3, France and Germany tied for the fourth and fifth positions and Chile taking up sixth place.

Image: http://smallbiztrends.com/ 

Whether it’s about how to use social media, getting through the early dark days of a startup, or about marketing your business, getting advice can help you succeed. The video below contains success tips from 11 business leaders.  It was shot at ICON14 in Phoenix, Arizona. ICON is the Infusionsoft customer conference that attracts 3,000 attendees, most of them small businesses or serving small businesses like yours and mine.

Image: http://smallbiztrends.com/ 

While you certainly have questions you like to ask (like these three), and maybe you ask one question to identify a superstar... if you’re an experienced interviewer you may almost always feel it's a waste of time when you ask the candidate, "Do you have any questions for me?"

Why? The average candidate doesn't actually care about how you answer their questions; instead they try to make themselves look good by asking "smart" questions. To them, what they ask is a lot more important than how you answer.

We all like to laugh — even smart people.

Unbeknownst to many of us in what we'd like to call the "average pool," there exists a level of humor far above anything we could hope to understand. We're talking about intellectual jokes, people.

These are the jokes scientists tell when we're not around, the jokes astronauts giggle at floating in zero gravity, the jokes many of us, unfortunately, will never fully come to appreciate. Thanks to Reddit and a handful of the Internet's geniuses, we've been exposed to these jokes. We've been fake-laughing to impress our friends for hours, and now you can too.

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Tim Draper, the founding partner of Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) venture capital firm, recently won an award from SVForum for being a Silicon Valley visionary at its annual Visionary Awards. (His father, Bill Draper, by the way, previously won the same honor for being a pioneering Silicon Valley venture capitalist.) Draper used the opportunity to talk about his ballot initiative to divide California into six different states.

Image: http://medcitynews.com/ - Tim Draper, the founding partner of Draper Fisher Jurvetson venture capital firm Read more: http://medcitynews.com/2014/06/visionary-venture-capitalist-wants-divide-california-six-states/#ixzz35TThTMg0 

A few years ago a friend told me he was taking an “Entrepreneurship Class” and I remember raising an eyebrow. How do you take a class to learn how to be a certain type of person? The word entrepreneur is defined as: a person who organizes and operates a business or businesses, taking on greater than normal financial risks in order to do so. How do you teach someone to take risks or to work hard?

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BEFORE THE 16TH CENTURY, MOST MATH EQUATIONS WERE WRITTEN AS METERED VERSE. THANK GOD FOR GRAPHIC-DESIGN-INCLINED MATHEMATICIANS.

The study of mathematics has existed since ancient times. Multiplication tables and other math exercises have been found carved into Babylonian tablets from some 3,700 years ago. But the symbols that have become entwined with our conception of math--like the + and = signs--are in fact rather modern inventions.

Image Courtesy of pakorn / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

A fresh approach to the commercialisation of research may be on the way following the recent launch of tech transfer body Knowledge Transfer Ireland. Its head, Dr Alison Campbell, says she wants to try novel approaches to the business of exploiting research, including “easy IP”, in which a company might gain access to a licence for next to nothing with no strings attached. Impossible, you might say, and yet it makes sense here where a company might have to continue with its own research effort before managing to make a research discovery pay its way.

Image: http://www.irishtimes.com/ - Dr Alison Campbell: “Engaging with the business community means you have a greater chance to see your research having a broader impact.” 

Earlier this year, San Francisco and Vermont passed legislation that allows workers to ask for flexible work schedules without fear of reprisal. Are such “right to request” laws indicators of a rise in flextime? Or do they reflect a fear that flextime programs are being eliminated?

The answer seems to be a confusing “both.” New research from the Families and Work Institute (FWI) and the Society for Human Resource Management finds an “on the one hand, on the other hand” contradiction.

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This paper advances the understanding of foreign direct investment (FDI)—that is to say, the U.S operations of foreign companies— in U.S. metro areas. It presents new data on jobs in foreign-owned establishments (FOEs) across the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas between 1991 and 2011. The new data on the geography of jobs in FOEs, available below, reveals that:

Image: http://www.brookings.edu/ 

~ When your enemy’s making mistakes, don’t interrupt him. Billy Beane (General Manager of the Oakland A’s) in Moneyball

~ Can’t anybody here play this game? Manager Casey Stengel in anguish over his 1962 New York Mets. The team went 40-120– the most losses by any team since 1899.

As an avid baseball fan nothing makes me crazier than seeing my team lose because of dumb unforced errors. And anyone who follows the Pittsburgh Pirates has seen more than their share of these (like on Friday the 13th under a full moon when our pitchers walked 6 batters in the 9th inning blowing a comfortable lead). Countries, like sports teams, make inexplicable unforced errors leading to loses that are a lot more significant than just losing a game. Two recent articles and one anecdote caution that if the US loses its technological lead it could be because of our own blunders rather than what our competitors are doing.

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How do you inspire a group of unusually smart, hard working, optimistic, and largely privileged youngsters who are already destined for success? Encourage them to learn from those most in need; urge them confront inequity; exhort them channel their optimism with empathy; oh, and remind them that for all their accomplishments, they wouldn’t be where they are without a heavy dose of luck.

Image: Bill and Melinda Gates deliver address graduates at the 2014 Stanford University Commencement. Photo courtesy Stanford University 

It happens every day. Wherever you go, anything you look at, every noise you hear is another piece of information fighting for your attention. How do you block out the noises that don’t matter in order to focus on the ones that do?

This is no easy task, especially when every ping is another temptation to pull your mind away. Entrepreneurs who want to think outside the box are constantly exploring different creative avenues in hopes of finding a strategy that will get them closer to their next “aha” moment.

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Meet Melissa. These days, she's in the early stages of her career. Fast-forward 25 years to 2040, and she's the CEO of the future.

With women comprising 60% of U.S. college students and 40% of MBA students, women will represent around 30% of the top 2,500 CEOs around the world in a quarter century, according to a recent report by Strategy&.

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A new study offers new insights on the long-term future of emperor penguins by showing that the penguins may be behaving in ways that allow them to adapt to their changing environment better than we expected.

Researchers have long thought that emperor penguins were philopatric, which means they would return to the same location to nest each year. The new research study used satellite images to show that penguins may not be faithful to previous nesting locations.

Email is stressing us out. A 2013 study by researchers at Britain’s Loughborough University found that 83% of government employees became more stressed while sending and receiving email. In fact, their blood pressure, heart rate, and cortisol levels--the hormone secreted during stress--all increased while they were active on email. Some productivity experts will suggest that you organize your inbox while others will give you techniques to deal with your stress, but Claire Burge, owner of Get Organized Ireland, has another solution: Eliminate the source of your anxiety and ditch email.

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A shockwave hit the media industry in May, when an internal “innovation report” prepared for New York Times executives leaked to BuzzFeed. The report makes for fascinating reading, in part because it is a snapshot of a massive media entity that is caught in the throes of wrenching change, unsure how to proceed. But while it contained many things of value, it glossed over one of the most important factors for the paper’s success — and that is whether the content itself, the journalism that the New York Times produces, needs to change.

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Two weeks ago, we took a slight detour from our usual Awesome Stuff fare to talk about Larry Lessig's new crowdfunding project, MAYDAY.US, which aims to start a serious effort to significantly reduce the influence of money in politics. This week we're highlighting MAYDAY.US again, since it just received a major boost in the form of a video endorsement from Steve Wozniak:

Image: www.techdirt.com