How much money do angel investors make investing in early-stage companies? Is it a genuine “asset class” with generally predictable returns, or just a potentially expensive hobby?

When Upstate Carolina Angel Network (UCAN) investors in Greenville and South Carolina Angel Network (SCAN) investors across South Carolina invest in a startup company, we have a specific return goal: to make a 50 percent or better annualized internal rate of return (IRR), which translates to 10 times our investment in five years (or four times in three years, etc.).

In this 24/7 hyperconnected world, it can be hard to maintain a work-life balance.

Lizzie Armitstead, the world champion of women's road cycling who's been torching the competition, tells Business Insider that she has a simple rule for keeping her work life from creeping into her personal life.

In a place normally preoccupied with drafting code and dazzling investors, suddenly everyone in Silicon Valley has an opinion about the presidential election. And it tends to be the same opinion.

The innovation economy has a serious distaste for Donald Trump. The masters of this world complain that his ignorance about their work and its relationship to the global economy is horrifying. Rank-and-file programmers are quick to call him a clown, or worse. The unity is notable in an environment where groupthink is frowned upon and nobody ever seems to color inside ideological lines.

If you talk to venture capitalists in Asia and need not beg for money, ask them about rejection rates. China-based startup accelerator SOSV accepts just 3% of its applicants. Venture capital firm Beenext of Japan and Singapore funds 60 of the 1,000 companies it has screened. Just two random examples. Why do most applicants fall short? Money is naturally limited and the high-net-worth individuals behind venture capital funds want a return. But a lot of those individuals are adventurous people willing to gamble on good ideas even without an elaborate plan for making money. Startups can also seek crowdfunding or get bank loans. There’s more to the rejections.

Yair Shamir, former agriculture minister and founder of Catalyst Investments, discusses how venture capital aids new technologies and boosts the Israeli economy.

Shamir is chairman of NTA - Metropolitan Mass Transit System, which is building a new public transportation system in Tel Aviv. Shamir explains how this system will revolutionize life not only in the city, but Israel s central region s economy.

No, it's not quite as mysterious as Area 51, but the search giant had been pretty tight-lipped about the Area 120 incubator since reports of it first leaked last month. Now Google CEO Sundar Pichai has confirmed that Area 120 will be "part-incubator, part new take on the spirit of the 20% time program," says Forbes, referring to the program Google has historically had that allows their employees to spend 20% of their work time working on their own pet projects. Instead of being able to spend only one day a week on a pet project, Google employees who are accepted into the Area 120 incubator will be able to spend 6 months on it. "It is giving people a chance at 20% time more formally," Pichai said. MG

It’s no surprise that junk food is low in healthy nutrients and high in ingredients like sugar and salt. But new animal research suggests that a diet high in junk food might harm the kidneys in a similar way to type-2 diabetes.

In the study, published in the journal Experimental Physiology, rats were fed a junk food diet of chocolate bars, marshmallows, biscuits and cheese for eight weeks.

I would like to get a sense of how regions are segmenting their sector/cluster research and strategic planning. For example, if you are working on manufacturing, what type of manufacturing? How many of that type are in your region? What prompted you to work on that cluster specifically?

Small and medium size businesses represent 99% of EU enterprises and are therefore essential for creating sustainable employment and economic growth. They are key to revolutionizing the culture of entrepreneurship in Europe and promoting innovation and progress. According to the European Commission, 85% of the new jobs created during the last five years are due to SMEs. Entrepreneurs are the driving force behind these businesses and are thus vital to this process.

I’ve failed more often than most people I know. I’m actually proud of that. It just means I’ve taken more risks and learned more along the way. Still, it doesn’t mean that learning is easy. On the contrary, learning is damn hard and admitting failure is even harder. But I believe that if we can admit to our mistakes, we can turn them into lessons that help us avoid them in the future.

Every entrepreneur knows what it’s like to face adversity. It comes with the territory, and includes cash-flow challenges, fickle customers, belligerent investors and unpredictable economic downturns. The best entrepreneurs tackle these one at a time without losing their stride or their passion and many secretly get their highest satisfaction from overcoming an impossible problem.

Now is the time for a serious rethinking of how we organize in our society: from businesses, to schools, and as communities. We need to base all of our organizations on the principle of temporary, negotiated hierarchies. In this way, citizens can freely cooperate and from time to time, as required, collaborate to get things done. This requires a new approach to organizing work, abolishing the separation of employer & employee, as well as the artificial and unequal division between labour and financial capital. Simultaneously, our educational systems need to phase out teachers and curriculum and focus on everyone becoming a better learner.

Image: http://jarche.com

Finding the right job is a challenge today. Pay is not great, competition is tough and job satisfaction is low. All these factors are encouraging more people to pursue their entrepreneurial dreams. And one trend that has gained momentum in the past few years is solopreneurship. But what is the definition of a solopreneur and how are solopreneurs different than entrepreneurs?

Ashok Goel, a professor at Georgia Tech, made the news this week with the revelation that one of the teaching assistants that he used in his artificial intelligence course was actually an ”AI.” Now, I have no reason to believe that Goel was trying to do something wrongheaded. I think he was just playing around. But the media love AI stories these days and have yet again led the public on a very wrong-headed journey about what AI is and what it can be.

The Securities and Exchange Commission's crowdfunding regulations went into effect last week, which means financial advisers have another reason to pay close attention to this fast-evolving and largely misunderstood space.

To begin with, we're talking about investment crowdfunding, which is distinctly different from the more popular kick-start-type platforms that gained notice when somebody raised a pile of money to make potato salad.

Image: http://www.investmentnews.com

Toms founder Blake Mycoskie created his shoe company with the mission of donating a pair of shoes for every pair purchased. Inc. noted that, after 10 years, Mycoskie could serve as a "social enterprise poster child" after his business model was copied by other companies such as Warby Parker. In 2014, Mycoskie sold half of Toms to Bain Capital at $625 million. By then, the company has already given away about 50 million pair of shoes.

If you’re like most people, your monthly smartphone bill is steep enough to make you shudder. As consumers’ appetite for connectivity keeps growing, the price of wireless service in the United States tops $130 a month in many households.

Two years ago Mung Chiang, a professor of electrical engineering at Princeton, believed he could give customers more control. One simple adjustment would clear the way for lots of mobile-phone users to get as much data as they already did, and in some cases even more, on cheaper terms. Carriers could win, too, by nudging customers to reduce peak-period traffic, making some costly network upgrades unnecessary. “We thought we could increase the benefits for everyone,” Chiang recalls.

With the advent and growth of crowdfunding over the past few years, many entrepreneurs have predicted the demise of those demanding angel investment groups and venture capital organizations. In fact, the latest figures show that crowdfunding has already grown to over $30 billion in 2015, exceeding the amounts contributed by either angel groups or VCs alone.

Irish start-ups MagGrow, BonzaQuote and Countr have something in common: all beat stiff competition to win places on high-profile accelerators in the US and the Netherlands.

Accelerator incubation programmes are still in their infancy. The original of the species, Silicon Valley-based Y Combinator, was set up in 2005, with two of its best-known success stories being Airbnb and Dropbox. US-based Techstars and London-based Seedcamp were founded two years later. Techstars now operates in four US cities, while the pan-European Seedcamp is a leading provider of pre-seed and seed stage funding to start-ups.

When it comes to new tricks, sometimes new dogs are just as hard to teach as old ones. At least, that was what went through my mind as I sat in on a recent senior team meeting at a fast-growing, two-year-old e-commerce company. I winced when Daniel, the 32-year-old CEO, said, “Come on, guys, I need you all to focus more on execution. If we’re going to scale successfully at the pace we’ve laid out, we’ve got to execute faster and delegate more. I want you pushing hard on your teams. Get them to step up and execute! That’s why we’ve brought in Jeff here, to coach all of us on how to motivate the troops.” I smiled sheepishly. Really? I thought. That’s not what I had in mind.