The Kauffman Index of Growth Entrepreneurship, an early indicator of business growth in the United States that captures growth entrepreneurship in all industries, says startups experienced the largest year-over-year increase in the past decade.

There's nothing more satisfying than investing yourself in an enterprise and watching it grow – this is at the very heart of entrepreneurship. It is what propelled Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg from obscurity to unimaginable heights. It is what millions dream of – to take a seed of an idea, nurture it to maturity and have the world take note of your accomplishments.

What do you see as current trends, issues, or challenges in entrepreneurship? originally appeared on Quora – the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights.

Answer by Gary Vaynerchuk, Entrepreneur, Investor, and Best-Selling Author, on Quora:

A huge issue with the current entrepreneurial landscape is that people don’t realize you can’t just wake up and decide to be an entrepreneur. There’s been a recent over-promise of what business success looks like. It’s causing people to lose out when they try to “go for it” and is blinding them to the opportunities that are actually right for them. This issue leads to a larger conversation we need to have about self-awareness and what defines success.

Image: Best-selling author Gary Vaynerchuk. (Image: Creative Commons)

Study any successful entrepreneur and nearly every single one will point to a mentor as the key ingredient to their success.

Getting a mentor is arguably the most powerful piece of advice any budding entrepreneur can receive when embarking on a career in business. Research the wealthiest people in world and you’ll discover that they all had mentors.

With IPOs almost nonexistent and venture funding slowing down, the environment has suddenly become awful for startups. In fact, the only hot buzzword in Silicon Valley is “profit.”

Granted, it’s impossible to know how long the downturn will last. Yet for entrepreneurs, it’s probably best to assume that the trend is not a blip – but could last a couple years, if not more.

The UK biotechnology sector continues to build on the success of previous years, raising an unprecedented £900m on the London Stock Exchange in 2015 and recording the highest level of venture finance in recent years, according to the latest report Money, momentum and maturity: UK biotech financing and deals in 2015/16 compiled by the UK BioIndustry Association (BIA) in partnership with Evaluate and the London Stock Exchange.

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Change isn’t easy. That’s probably why a lot of companies stick to what they know. With technologies like video conferencing changing the face of business, though, here’s more of what companies can look forward to:

Reduced Spending

There will be no need to spend on travel fares, food, and allowances if you’re sending your people over to offsite meetings, workshops, or trainings. Online discussions can cut down on so much of your transportation costs in a major way.

Is SEO dead? If you are an online marketer, you must have come across this question on a myriad of forums. In fact, a quick search on Google will give you over 44-million results. The argument — by those who feel that SEO is not important — revolves around the lack of clear-cut guidelines by search engines on their ranking algorithms.

The June jobs report disappointed and surprised many, with the U.S. economy only gaining 38,000 jobs in May. One of the few bright spots was the strength of the healthcare sector, which added more jobs than any other industry. And before you think that healthcare jobs are likely more in demand at bigger companies but you’d be mistaken.

If you look at what’s happened in big cities around the U.S. in recent years, it’s easy to think we’re living in Startup Nation. Thanks to the plummeting cost and increased availability of digital tools, as well as greater access to early-stage funding, we’ve seen what the Economist has called a “Cambrian moment,” with digital startups “bubbling up in an astonishing variety of services and products.” The number of companies in Silicon Valley that got seed funding from investors, for instance, more than doubled between 2007 and 2012. Venture capital funding in the U.S. over the last five years has totaled a remarkable $238 billion, and 200 companies today are so-called unicorns, privately valued at more than a billion dollars each.

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Northrop Grumman Corp. Chief Financial Officer Ken Bedingfield says a lot of the company’s cybersecurity business is “restricted” and “it’s hard for us to talk in too much detail about it.”

But at Citi's 2016 Industrials Conference in Boston on Wednesday, the company peeled back the curtain on a largely secretive line of business.

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Unlike its tech competitors, Apple Inc. doesn’t have a venture-capital arm. The reason goes to the core of Apple itself — it’s all about secrecy.

At least that’s what experts say, after Apple AAPL, +0.44%  made a $1 billion investment in Didi Chuxing, nearly double the total 2015 spending of the largest corporate venture arm, with no signs of forming a separate investment vehicle. And while Apple has several advantages which imply it never needs to form one, a venture-capital arm might benefit the company’s tax bill if Didi sells or goes public.

“This stuff makes my skin look like chalk.” That was 13-year-old Balanda Atis’s immediate reaction when she looked at herself in the mirror.

Trying on makeup is a rite of passage for many teenage girls, and that made it all the more disappointing for Atis when she applied liquid foundation for the first time and found the results unimpressive. Cosmetics companies, it turned out, didn’t make shades that suited her skin tone. Atis and with her Haitian American friends in East Orange, New Jersey, found that liquid and powder foundations had an unattractive, ashy-white effect on their darker skin. It was a problem regardless of brand, formula, or product — until Atis set her sights on solving it once and for all.

This program is designed to find, understand and grant funds to nonprofit entrepreneur-support organizations that can help female entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs of color achieve higher rates of success.

We expect to award $7 million to $8 million in grants over the next two years, at up to $500,000 per grantee. 

In addition, we intend to share knowledge and best practices with entrepreneur-support organizations that pass the first round of our challenge.

If your organization also seeks to make entrepreneurship a viable option for everyone who has a great idea and the grit to bring it to life, please click the LARGE ORANGE BUTTON in the top left corner and follow the instructions.

It is unquestionably a challenging task to select the 20th century’s finest prose, but certainly the late President John F. Kennedy has to rank among the best elocutionists of the era. Whether or not you were a supporter of the Kennedy administration, or even alive then, its’ hard not to be moved by eloquence like this:

“…We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”

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Advanced manufacturing — broadly defined as the integration and utilization of new technologies to improve products and processes — is a sector that Oxford Economics estimates now accounts for 44 percent of all U.S. manufacturing employment and supports 19 percent of U.S. GDP through its operations, supply chain, and payroll. Companies all too often must choose between introducing advanced manufacturing equipment and processes into existing plants or shutting down operations and beginning production somewhere else. Consequently, many communities are anxious to support manufacturers that are modernizing plants rather than risk seeing those plants close.

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Boehringer Ingelheim Vetmedica Inc. (BIVI) recently opened a new research and development facility at Iowa State University Research Park in Ames, Iowa and ZimmComm’s own Jamie Johansen had the opportunity to tour the facility prior to the official kick off of the 2016 World Pork Expo in Des Moines, Iowa. The Health Management Center (HMC) is also located on the same campus and was founded to enable deeper investigation into debilitating swine diseases such as Porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS) and Porcine circovirus Type 2 (PCV2).

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With a little more than a week to go, a new survey has revealed some quite startling figures on how entrepreneurs view the EU referendum debate. According to Entrepreneurial Spark, a business accelerator, less than one fifth of entrepreneurs support a Brexit. And there is clear concern over the outcome of the referendum, with Half of the 192 entrepreneurs questioned from start-up and scale-up businesses based at Entrepreneurial Spark’s business accelerator ‘Hatcheries’ believing that the referendum would impact their business, with more than half stating that there wasn’t enough impartial information.

Entrepreneurs need to be prepared when pitching their startup companies to angel investors by anticipating the questions they will receive. The failure to have thoughtful and reasonable answers to these questions will decrease the likelihood of the entrepreneur’s company getting funded. The following is a list of key questions all entrepreneurs should be well prepared to answer during their investor pitch:

I have been writing about how to raise venture capital for years. But I got a very unexpected question the other day: what exactly is venture capital? I just assumed everyone understood what venture capital actually was. For those of you who are new to the startup or fundraising scene, this post is for you!!

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