It’s the rare angel investor who scores one historic blockbuster exit in a lifetime. Ron Conway has done it, and may have a couple more in him.

Conway, one of the most well known angel investors in Silicon Valley, is a former entrepreneur who sold his last company in 1994 and since then has focused strictly on backing Internet start-ups, most recently heading super angel firm SV Angel. On Saturday, he spoke to new entrepreneurs at Y Combinator’s Startup School at Stanford University – and the talk turned to his investments in Google Inc. and Facebook Inc.

Conway first met Larry Page and Sergey Brin at a holiday party in Atherton, Calif. when their company was still called Backrub. The two Stanford students explained their page-rank idea to Conway, who was interested because he was involved with another search engine, AskJeeves.

Science and art have converged again this year at the microscopic level for the annual Nikon Small World 2010 photomicrography competition. Participants submitted images of luminous specimens taken using some form of light microscopy—including phase contrast, polarized light, fluorescence, interference contrast, dark-field, confocal, deconvolution and mixed techniques.

That we can see such tiny things in brilliant detail is a triumph of science and engineering. But to have a chance at taking home the prize of $3,000 toward the purchase of Nikon equipment, Small World contestants must produce triumphant pieces of artwork as well. As the competition Web site makes clear: "A good photomicrograph is also an image whose structure, color, composition, and content is an object of beauty, open to several levels of comprehension and appreciation."

"When I take people out here in the winter, sometimes we just lie down on it," says Susan Thoman. She's gesturing to a mound of rich black organic matter the length and height of a warehouse at the Cedar Grove composting plant, a sprawling complex an hour north of Seattle. Sealed under Gore-Tex fabric and "blimped" with fans, the giant piles reach a toasty internal temperature of 130 degrees thanks to beneficial bacteria. They steam in the foggy air, which is scented miraculously with bark mulch, not rot, like the floor of the thicket for which the place is named. Thoman, a no-nonsense blonde who is Cedar Grove's business development manager, says the company's two plants, which accept everything from cardboard to grass clippings to half-eaten enchiladas, and even Starbucks napkins and crumbs, regularly receive visitors from around the U.S. "We're a recycler, manufacturer, wholesaler, and retailer," selling bagged compost to home gardeners and the Department of Transportation, she says. "We get paid when it comes in, and paid when it goes out." This is a place not of burial, but transformation.

If Democratic Rep. Scott Murphy of New York loses his try for his first two-year term, it won’t be for lack of support from venture capitalists.

Murphy, a former venture capitalist, is the leading recipient of federal contributions from the National Venture Capital Association, garnering $20,000 during the current two-year election cycle from the NVCA’s political action committee, considerably more than the runner-up, Sen. Blanche Lincoln, (D., Ark.) who netted $12,000.

The NVCA’s VenturePAC had doled out $1.15 million as of the end of August, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which publishes Federal Election Commission filings on its OpenSecrets.org website. The trade group has given twice as much to Democrats running for Congress as to Republicans, who are poised to make major gains in both chambers. The tally was $366,500 to Democrats and $159,500 to Republicans in House races, and $114,500 to Democrats and $65,000 to Republicans in Senate races.

Ask people what makes entrepreneurs successful and you’ll hear a familiar list of adjectives: Agile, tenacious, resilient, opportunistic, etc.

What you don’t hear is that often they didn’t know any better.

I was just rereading Jessica Livingston’s book Founders at Work, and a common thread through the stories reminded me that there is a type of technology innovation that occurs in startups when a founder/team simply doesn’t know what they’re attempting is impossible.

Introduction

This post is part 2 of my three-part series: “How do I raise seed capital if I don’t know any investors?” In part 1, I discussed the importance of hustling and building relationships in order to get warm introductions to investors. In this post, I will discuss a different approach: applying to one of the mentorship/seed capital programs.

Mentorship and Seed Capital Programs

A very exciting and relatively recent development in the startup world is the proliferation of mentorship programs for entrepreneurs. Indeed, these programs typically include not only teaching and coaching, but also seed capital (as well as introductions to investors). Thus, for first-time entrepreneurs who have little experience, money or contacts, these programs offer a “win, win, win” opportunity. Below is a brief description of the top three programs.

When the financial meltdown hit a few years ago, there was lots of talk about how retirees whose retirement funds had been decimated would have to go back to work. Well, a new study by the Families and Work Institute and the Sloan Center on Aging & Work shows that retirees are returning to the workforce—but not for the reasons you might expect.

The study, which analyzed data from the FWI’s National Study of the Changing Workforce (2008), uncovered some surprising statistics about “working retirees”:

Earlier this week Anita shared 5 Trends Uncovered at BlogWorld, commenting on several blogging-specific trends she saw while attending the show this past weekend in Vegas. Like Anita, I, too, was lucky enough to be able to attend Blogworld and came back with my own takeaways. What I found was a surprising number of presenters and small business owners taking a different look at social media, forcing themselves to admit some hard truths. These are things that, at one time, often weren’t talked about. In fact, it was almost frowned upon to utter them!

Here are four social media truths I heard SMBs finally accepting at Blogworld.

1. You can’t be everywhere.

We keep hearing that our customers are everywhere – they’re on Twitter, on Facebook, in the blogosphere, on LinkedIn, and on sites that we can barely pronounce, let alone figure out how to work. For months we’ve been racking our brains trying to figure out how to create a real presence on all the different social media sites displayed on KnowEm. You know what we’ve learned? We can’t do it. And we don’t have to. Many of the presenters at BlogWorld let us know that this was OK. We don’t have to be everywhere. We just have to find our online community and then hang out there. Instead of running yourself ragged, pick one or two sites that work best for you and your community. Spend your time there.

Two sets of information were presented to me in the last 24 hours that have dramatically reinforced my feeling that diminishing returns have set in to investments in higher education, with increasing evidence suggesting that we are in one respect “overinvesting” in the field. First, following up on information provided by former student Douglas Himes at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), my sidekick Chris Matgouranis showed me the table reproduced below (And for more see this).

Over 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees (over 8,000 of them have doctoral or professional degrees), along with over 80,000 bartenders, and over 18,000 parking lot attendants. All told, some 17,000,000 Americans with college degrees are doing jobs that the BLS says require less than the skill levels associated with a bachelor’s degree.

“What is it about innovators that leads them to make such extravagant claims for their ideas?”

No, I’m not asking the question. In an email response sent to me this morning, author/journalist Malcolm Gladwell asked it of me (albeit rhetorically).

I asked Gladwell about his feelings on the hail of criticism he’s received recently after his piece “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not be Tweeted” ran in the October 4th issue of The New Yorker. The story questioned the role of social networking in contemporary revolutionary activity and social movements; Gladwell’s opening paragraphs detail a sixties-era Woolworth’s lunchroom protest organized “without e-mail, texting, Facebook, or Twitter” by a group of black students who were refused service.

With the economy recovering, it's the time for small businesses to take their companies to the next level of success. For many companies, this means investing to become more productive, more innovative and more agile in the face of increasing global competition.

This is borne out by a recent survey of Canadian entrepreneurs, commissioned by the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC) and conducted by Angus Reid. The survey found that innovation is a priority for 74 per cent of entrepreneurs. What's more, over the next two years, entrepreneurs plan to invest to boost their company's ability to compete. Almost 60 per cent plan to purchase new equipment or machinery, while 49 per cent intend to invest in developing new products or services.

In Western Canada, entrepreneurs are even more intent on increasing their competitiveness through investment. In the past 24 months, 71 per cent of western Canadian respondents bought new equipment and machinery, while 63 per cent plan to do so over the next two years.

The New “Cluster Moment” report just released by the Brookings Institute revisits regional innovation clusters (RICs) as a framework to restructure the nation’s economic development programs:

“Twenty years after Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter introduced the concept to the policy community and 10 years after its wide state adoption, clusters—geographic concentrations of interconnected firms and supporting or coordinating organizations—have reemerged as a key tool and rubric in Washington and in the nation’s economic regions.”

Key points:

• Clusters and cluster approaches hold out substantial attractions as the nation seeks to rebuild a damaged economy.
• When it comes to policymaking leaders at all levels should adhere to a set of core general principles when pursuing cluster-based economic development strategies.
• While keeping these principles in mind, all tiers of the nation’s federalist system have roles to play in advancing the co-development a new cluster-informed stance in U.S. economic policy.

Report’s Press Release [read more]
Read full report [pdf]

Alan sez, "It looks like the Canadian government is making life harder for scientists who want to talk to the media about their work. Presumably the science is inconvenient for those in power. In response, the scientists' union has put up a web site to inform the public directly."

Canada's Tory government is notoriously hostile to science (especially climate science, which poses an existential threat to their power base in the planet-killing tar-sands). But a state-imposed gag-order on scientists, putting their ability to communicate to the press in the hands of petty bureaucrats, is beyond the pale even for them. Why is it that so many "small government neocons" love big government solutions to their embarrassing little problems?

ViNcEnT from Jöl Brito on Vimeo.

Back in 1982, Tim Burton worked as an apprentice animator at Disney. Burton’s style didn’t quite fit with the Disney aesthetic. And so he independently created a short, stop motion animated film simply titled “Vincent.” The style of the storytelling has been called “Dr. Seuss meets Edgar Allan Poe,” and it tells the story of a young boy who wants to be Vincent Price, the Yale-educated actor who became a fixture in American horror films starting in the late 1930s. The film runs six minutes and features Price himself providing the narration. (Read a transcript of the narrated text here.) Notably, Price later appeared in Burton’s blockbuster Edward Scissorhands. Animation World Network takes a much closer look at this early Burton work, and we have now added Vincent to our collection of Free Movies Online.

Gatorade is a refreshing sports drink enjoyed by millions around the world. Few consumers realize that university research was the genesis for this successful product and the University of Florida has received over $150 million in royalties since the product was invented.

J. Robert Cade, a University of Florida professor of medicine and physiology, and a team of four researchers developed Cade’s Cola to help athletes stay energized during competitions in the hot, humid Florida climate. A football coach had expressed frustration that his players had trouble with their endurance late in their games. Researchers realized that the athletes were losing as much as 10 pounds in a single practice session.
Cade’s Cola had a mixture of water, sodium and sugar that addressed the problem, but tasted awful. Some lemon juice and artificial sweetener and a legend was born.

PepsiCo acquired Quaker Oats in 2001. Included in the acquisition were the rights to Gatorade. Gatorade’s worldwide sales were already in the billions of dollars. According to Beverage Digest, in 2006 Gatorade accounted for more than 80% of the $7.5 billion annual U.S. sports drink market. Over 12 million bottles are guzzled daily by athletes and post operative patients. Gatorade is now sold in 80 countries and dozens of flavors.

Kansas City, MO, October 19, 2010 –Angel investors and entrepreneurs are reacting rapidly to the provision of the Small Business Jobs Act of 2010 that provides a 100 percent exemption for gains made in Qualified Small Business Stock (www.irs.gov/publications/p550/ch04.html#en_US_publink100010688).

This benefit is for investments made between September 27 and December 31, 2010. The Angel Capital Association (ACA) (www.angelcapitalassociation.org) alerted members to this important development and the organization is seeing accelerated activity.

“This provision encourages angels and entrepreneurs to speed up investments that are already in the pipeline,” said Marianne Hudson, ACA’s executive director. “The significance is that entrepreneurs will receive the funds they need to grow their businesses sooner. That means they can hire people which adds new jobs to the economy.”

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