Do you ever notice how some entrepreneurs seem to get all of the spotlight? Or wonder how they get the referrals, the press interviews, the cross-promotions and, ultimately, the lion’s share of the market? Well, after a recent conversation with Derek Coburn, I’m convinced any entrepreneur can make this a reality for their business.

Image: http://www.forbes.com 

Internet Association President Michael Beckerman’s defense in support of the Obama administration turning the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) over to an international body can only be seen as self-serving for the nearly 40 “of the most successful and best capitalized internet companies” he represents (Letters, June 22).

California has more water in reserve than previous estimates suggested, new research finds — but it will be expensive to pump it from the ground and treat it for use.

Deep groundwater aquifers under California's Central Valley contain enough usable water to bring the Central Valley's groundwater stores to about 650 cubic miles (2,700 cubic kilometers), Stanford University researchers reported June 27 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. That's three times more groundwater as in earlier estimates.

Image: The Lost Hills Oil Field in Kern County, California, near Bakersfield. Researchers used data from oil and gas wells to determine that California's Central Valley has more water than previously thought. Credit: Rob Jackson, Stanford University 

State lawmakers took a step forward in limiting noncompete agreements in Massachusetts on Wednesday, with the House of Representatives voting unanimously 150-0 to pass a bill on noncompete reform.

Most notably, the bill would require employers to to pay half the salary of employees for the duration of the noncompete's enforcement period after they leave as part of the so-called "Garden Leave" clause, unless another mutually-agreed upon "consideration" is reached; restrict employers from enforcing noncompetes on interns, graduate students, employees under 18, hourly workers, and employees who are fired or laid off; and restrict noncompetes to 12 months.

Do you have to eat your own dogfood to become a unicorn? Can growth hacking reduce your customer acquisition cost? Is it OK to crowdsource if you’re in stealth mode? If you’re not agile will you lament your inability to fail fast?

Whether or not those questions make sense to you is a good mini-test of your knowledge of start-up lingo. The start-up world has its own set of vocabulary that can be confusing to people who are not immersed in it. But if you want to be active in the start-up scene, not knowing the jargon can be risky. At a recent pitch day attended by a friend of mine, one of the VCs asked a start-up founder, “What’s your Total Addressable Market?”  The founder had no idea what he was asking, which needless to say did not impress the VC.

Image: http://anthillonline.com

It made sense. A large high-technology company had established an innovation center in one of their U.S. offices where employees were entrepreneurial, engaged, excited to come to work, and as a result were quickly developing new ideas for customer-facing products. So the firm wanted to replicate that success in other places, namely India and China. Leaders from the U.S. held week-long workshops designed to expose workers at the China and India sites to the U.S.-developed practices of rapid development cycles, user-centered design, and collaboration in an open office layout. Leaders also provided the sites with detailed instructions on how to implement these new practices. They even sent one of the U.S. employees to work on site in India for a year.

Currently, a quarter of all employees view their jobs as the number one stressor in their lives, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The World Health Organization describes stress as the “global health epidemic of the 21st century.” Many of us now work in constantly connected, always-on, highly demanding work cultures where stress and the risk of burnout are widespread. Since the pace and intensity of contemporary work culture are not likely to change, it’s more important than ever to build resilience skills to effectively navigate your worklife.

Today in the United States there are 72,000 centenarians. Worldwide, probably 450,000. If current trends continue, then by 2050 there will be more than a million in the US alone. According to the work of demographer Professor James Vaupel and his co-researchers, 50% of babies born in the US in 2007 have a life expectancy of 104 or more. Broadly the same holds for the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Canada and for Japan 50% of 2007 babies can expect to live to a staggering 107.

Image: https://hbr.org

A recent survey conducted by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and UNICEF revealed young people aged 18-35 years old believe job creation and entrepreneurship should be the no. 1 priority for the United Nations going forward.

Dell is one company that shares in that goal, and to date has been working with the UN to cultivate a strong level of entrepreneurship globally. For instance, Dell founder Michael Dell was named the UN's first global advocate for entrepreneurship in 2014.

Last week, Great Britain voted to leave the European Union of 28 member states, or “Brexit.” Since the result was announced sterling has fallen to a 31-year low, there has been a record daily drop in  global equity markets and political turmoil has broken out as the UK Prime Minister has said he will step down and the majority of the leadership team of the official opposition party has resigned.

Venture-capital funding is accelerating for startups focused on health care and run by women, according to data from research firm PitchBook. 2015 was a record year for these female entrepreneurs, who clinched $4.6 billion -- almost a fifth of all capital that flowed into health-care startups and double the previous year’s funding. 

Image: http://www.bloomberg.com

More than 10 years ago, we saw a boom in venture capital that would form the market today. Union Square Ventures and First Round Capital would be founded in 2003 and 2004 respectively, the first seed stage venture firms. In 2009, we saw the mighty Andreessen Horowitz emerge, fighting the established core of Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital, and in CB Insights’ 2016 venture final four bracket, these three “younger” firms would dominate. Now history is repeating itself as an energized youth seeks to beat the establishment and dominate their respective circles of venture. Venture was disrupted 10 years ago, and it’s happening again. These four entrepreneurs have shown repeatedly that they can deliver value for investors, founders and the world at large.

Down through the years, U.S. venture capital financing has resulted in some major successes, including the likes of Intel, Google and Twitter. VC investment is heavily concentrated across several industrial sectors, according to a recent report from Martin Prosperity. In fact, America’s top five industries receiving VC capital account for 76.3 percent of all VC investment nationwide, some $25 billion.

New rules that allow startups to raise capital by selling equity shares in the business could their jumpstart fundraising efforts. But the promising alternative way to attract investors also holds the potential for missteps that could have long-term financial implications.

Equity crowdfunding gives small businesses a new way to raise capital and small investors the opportunity to help build fledgling businesses from the ground up. The concept has gained considerable momentum outside the United States. In fact, in March, Mondo Bank, a banking startup in the United

Bee Partners in San Francisco has raised a $30 million fund, its second, to lead investments in very early stage startups based in the U.S.

Founded in 2009, the firm is best-known as the first investor in TubeMogul, now a publicly traded adtech company. Bee was also an early backer of the crowdfunding platform Indiegogo, drone tech startup Skycatch, the second-hand fashion marketplace Tradesy and many others.

Image: https://techcrunch.com

The startup lifestyle is known to be stressful and challenging, but it’s also meant to be satisfying and fulfilling, with you as the entrepreneur in control of your own destiny. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work out that way, based on my many years of experience with entrepreneurs and advising startups. The business can be successful, while the entrepreneur feels like a failure.

A recent article in Forbes described why a promising academic doctor at Stanford left to start his own company. This is not, by any means, the first time we have heard about doctors or doctors-to-be leaving clinical medicine for “all-in” entrepreneurship, nor the first time we’ve heard debated whether that is a good idea or not.

One reason I've heard more than once from both faculty and community stakeholders is the difficulties working with a university technology transfer (OTT) or Office of Technology Licensing (OTL), such as the one at Stanford.

Jacqueline Ros, 26, is the cofounder of Revolar, a Denver-based startup that produces an alert device designed to help people who feel they are in physical danger. The user presses the rectangular plastic Revolar, the size of a key chain, and it sends a signal to five designated loved ones who know to phone immediately. The signal is delivered via an app or a text message. Two presses signal a yellow alert, which means danger; three or more signal an emergency. If the user doesn’t respond to a call, Revolar uses GPS data and Google maps to communicate her whereabouts to her contacts. Launched in 2014, Revolar, which has 21 employees, has raised more than $3.5 million in venture capital. Since the company started retailing the $99 device in April, it has sold 4,000 Revolars through its website and through Brookstone. In this edited and condensed interview, Ros describes the lessons she has learned on her journey from an idea, through a series of pitch contests, incubators and accelerators.

Companies today recognize the value of embracing open innovation (OI) and tapping an outside pool of experts to help them compete and grow by accelerating their innovations. At the same time, scientists, inventors, entrepreneurs and research labs see how working with leading organizations can help them to elevate their solutions to new markets and build their businesses. Despite this fact, challenges remain for both solution seekers and providers around building these collaborative relationships for mutual benefit.

Today’s competitive landscape has emphasized marketing’s growing inherency to a business’ success. However, the best marketing strategies may not always be obvious, particularly for start-ups still trying to find their feet in the market and industry.

Marketing for start-ups can be an overwhelming ordeal and often neglected due to the presumed excessive costs. The key to startup marketing success is maintaining a focus on efficiency – finding the best possible marketing solutions for a particular business.