Overestimating projected sales, overstocking inventory without substantial demand, passively collecting past-due receivables: all of these affect your company cash flow. When company cash flow is affected, your company’s ability to pay its bills may become compromised.

I just returned from the TED Conference in Vancouver, and I met many great people and learned hundreds of new things.  I have tried to pick out twelve interesting things from everything I saw and heard to share with you here.  Enjoy, and I would love your feedback and thoughts.

Fact: A study found that angels who spent more than 20 hours on due diligence experienced 5 times higher returns than those who spent less time. Equally important, they also reduced their losses by about one-third.

Most angels understand why due diligence is important. Beyond potentially improving your returns, as your angel deal flow increases, due diligence helps you screen deals to help determine the deals and companies you’re most comfortable with. It also reduces risks by shining a light on potential weaknesses and future problems, which helps angels prepare for the issues and help the company as it grows.

Venture capital organization NextGen Venture Partners is launching a Baltimore office with the goal of bringing more investors to Baltimore and doing more deals in the city. NextGen Venture Partners is a national network of early-stage investors that taps into cities’ entrepreneurship communities to draw out new investors. The organization has hubs in five cities and is launching in three more, including Baltimore.

Biographers have long been interested in exploring the psychological issues that drove and afflicted great thinkers and achievers such as Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein. In her new book, Andy Warhol was a Hoarder: Inside the Minds of History’s Great Personalities, medical and science journalist Claudia Kalb looks at twelve famous figures and weighs the evidence suggesting that each suffered from a different kind of mental health condition. While not a business book per se, her work does have relevance as more people are becoming aware of mental illness as a workplace issue. Kalb spoke with HBR about how mental health conditions can be particularly relevant in understanding entrepreneurs. Edited excerpts:

When it comes to consumer-facing service industries like e-commerce, media, and ride- or apartment-sharing, it’s not new to suggest that “software is eating the world,” to use the phrase of venture capitalist Marc Andreessen.

However, in recent years a parallel explosion of digital tools and services has taken place in the manufacturing realm as well, drawing in computer-assisted design and 3D printing equipment to open-source operating systems, the cloud, and the Internet of Things (IoT).

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA--(Marketwired - February 22, 2016) -  Fenwick & West LLP, one of the nation's premier law firms providing comprehensive legal services to high technology and life sciences clients, today announced the results of its Fourth Quarter 2015 Silicon Valley Venture Capital Survey. The survey analyzed the valuations and terms of venture financings for 152 technology and life sciences companies headquartered in the Silicon Valley that raised capital in the fourth quarter of 2015.

Venture capital deal terms in last year's fourth quarter signal further cooling in investors' appetite for pouring money into startups, which sparked a multi-year economic boom throughout the Bay Area. Companies raising additional rounds of capital at lower valuations, or so-called downrounds, jumped to 12 percent of the 152 Bay Area venture deals during the fourth quarter that were examined by the law firm Fenwick & West. That's triple the 4 percent of downrounds at the end of last year's third quarter and double the 6 percent of downround financings in the fourth quarter of 2014.

I have provided capital for many start-up businesses, and raised money for a few of my own. I am often asked for advice on how or whether an entrepreneur should seek venture capital. My initial advice is simple: Don’t.

Entrepreneurs usually start businesses because they need autonomy and independence; they cannot work for someone else. As my granddad used to tell me, “no one gives you money for nothing.”

Venture Capital can be an opaque industry. Everyone can read about investments and exits, but few are familiar with how it all works behind the scenes. This post will aim to demystify certain elements of the industry and, in doing so, shed light on how founders and CEOs can use this knowledge to their advantage.  In this post, we’ll start with the people and their job titles, asking the question:

There is no doubt that social enterprise (SE) is the new black in business. Since 2012, Forbes has had a special section of their 30 under 30 list dedicated specifically to social entrepreneurs, and media outlets all over the world are excited to share inspirational ideas such as Jordyn Lexton's Drive Change, a food truck that hires and teaches previously imprisoned young people in New York City. Unfortunately, despite there being much talk, we have limited knowledge of the actual impact of social entrepreneurs. It's time to stop talking about social entrepreneurship and start collecting data, measuring outcomes, and helping enterprises mature from small-scale solutions to national-level impact.

Analysts in a recent session with IBM delivered a clear message: More large companies need to reinvent themselves with startup thinking if they are going to survive an unexpected and perilous turn of events in their industries.

The slang term that is going around for this phenomenon is uberization. It is a derivative from ride sharing service Uber, which revolutionized the taxi and chauffeur industries instantly and now threatens their existence.

At 7 A.M. on a midsummer day in Piracicaba, a city in the Brazilian state of São Paulo, Cecilia Kosmann sat in the back of a van surrounded by plastic take-out containers filled with genetically modified male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. Every two minutes or so, she shook a container through a plastic funnel, releasing them into the cool outside air.

Image: https://www.technologyreview.com 

On Sunday, a picture of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg strutting through a room of people wearing virtual-reality goggles went viral. The image struck a nerve, embodying both the rising excitement over a wave of consumer VR headsets that are making their way to market and the fear that those same products might usher in a dystopian technological future—a future in which one of the most recognizable CEOs on the planet could walk through throngs of people without their noticing.

Image: https://www.technologyreview.com 

Virgin Galactic's new SpaceShipTwo space plane, the VSS Unity, was unveiled to the public on Feb. 19, 2016.

An ethereal undersea image of a seahorse cradled by the motion of the ocean earned photographer Davide Lopresti the title, "Underwater Photographer of the Year 2016."

Lopresti's striking photo of a spiny seahorse in waters near Trieste, Italy, rose above submissions from entrants in 54 countries in the the annual Underwater Photographer of the Year (UPY) contest. The image, titled "Gold," also claimed first place in the contest's macro photography category.

 Image: "Gold," recognized as "Winner" in the UPY category "International Wide Angle" and "Underwater Photographer of the Year 2016." Credit: Davide Lopresti/UPY 2016

We are opening new offices throughout many different territories. Due to the current focus on expansion, we are hiring for our Manager-in-Training or "MIT" Program. We are looking for highly competitive, ambitious and hardworking individuals who want to grow and are willing to change. Our ideal candidate is someone who is not only looking for a long term career fit but is looking for a challenge, and somewhere where they have the opportunity to grow, both professionally and personally, with a company that focuses on building business owners and leaders, not just managers.

Success in entrepreneurship is not an end destination. It's a daily battle to be your best version of yourself even as you put out information, services and products that help your customers' lives. It's a constant work in progress that requires consistent effort. The "laptop lifestyle" version of entrepreneurship exists only in misleading Facebook ads.

The Montgomery County Economic Development Corporation (MCEDC) is the official public-private economic organization representing Montgomery County, Maryland. MCEDC is a start-up organization which was incorporated in the fall of 2015 by unanimous approval of the County Council. MCEDC will replace both the Department of Economic Development (DED) and its private-sector-led affiliate, the Montgomery Business Development Corporation (MBDC). Privatizing economic development is an example of the forward and cooperative thinking of the County Executive, County Council, and the business community in their quest to maintain Montgomery County’s competitiveness as Maryland’s economic development engine and as a recognized national leader in biotechnology, health information technology, and cybersecurity.

The Montgomery County Economic Development Corporation is seeking a dynamic, high-energy executive who is focused on working in collaboration with private and public sector stakeholders and investors to create a global brand and to serve as the face of economic development in the County. MCEDC seeks a leader who is passionate about driving sustainable job growth and aggressively pursuing the creation of effective partnerships and relationships throughout the County and the region. The CEO will drive the creation of a Countywide economic development strategy that capitalizes on the rich diversity of the region while aggressively marketing the region’s exceptional value to global markets.

For more information, click here to download the PDF

Deciding to put more than a billion dollars behind a science experiment like the LIGO project (the one that detected gravitational waves for the first time) is not a straightforward task.   

There isn’t a single person at the federally funded National Science Foundation who assesses a given mega-project, it’s a large diffuse process. 

“When it comes to big asks like LIGO — and big telescopes and ships and accelerators and so on, there we are looking to a bigger community to make those decisions,” said France Cordova, head of the National Science Foundation.