Much has changed in the past four months of the technology startup world and how outsiders value the business. Of course it’s too early to predict whether this is a trend or an aberration but the smartest people I know in the industry are predicting the former. The startup industry may be “resetting,” which doesn’t mean a “crash” but rather just a resetting of valuations, timescales, winners/losers, capital sources and the relative emphasis of growth rates vs. burn rates.

When Paul Berry was CTO of The Huffington Post — where he grew their audience from zero to more than 110 million monthly readers — President Greg Coleman and CEO Eric Hippeau had a running joke that they needed an armed military vehicle to bring him to and from work, because he was too darn valuable.

“If you die on the way here, Paul, we’re all screwed,” they’d say. “You have to start hiring people who are as good as you so that we can replace you if we have to.”

Directors say they dedicate more time now to their board duties than ever before and that, since 2011, they’ve cut in half the gap between the actual and ideal amount of time they spend on board work. In the newest McKinsey Global Survey on corporate boards,1 the results confirm that strategy is, on average, the main focus of many boards. Yet directors still want more time for strategy—more than any other area of their board work—when they consider its relative value to their companies.

Dubai Chamber of Commerce & Industry released the Dubai Innovation Index Report today. The Report highlights the results of the Dubai Innovation Index (DII) which was launched by Dubai Chamber in collaboration with PwC in 2015, to support UAE’s vision for innovation and to promote Dubai’s quest towards being the smartest city in the world by 2021.

The Index has been designed to compare Dubai with 28 global cities on macroeconomic measures of innovation and to analyze innovation performance of Dubai’s private sector, including at the firm level. Through the Index, the Chamber wants to create awareness and increase the participation of the private sector in the total innovation efforts of the city of Dubai, and provide a benchmark to measure innovation.

Image: H.E. Hamad Buamim, President and CEO, Dubai Chamber

Today, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker announced the 25 awardees that will receive $10 million under the Economic Development Administration’s (EDA) 2015 Regional Innovation Strategies (RIS) program. The 2015 RIS program is managed by EDA’s Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (OIE) and is designed to advance innovation and capacity-building activities in regions across the country through two different competitions: the i6 Challenge and the Seed Fund Support (SFS) Grants competition.

“As the driving force behind the Administration’s focus on entrepreneurship, the Department of Commerce is committed to helping set the conditions for innovators and entrepreneurs to test new ideas, take risks, find financing and customers, and ultimately thrive,” said Secretary Pritzker. “The Regional Innovation Strategies program is critical to ensuring that entrepreneurs have access to the tools they need to move their ideas and inventions from idea to market.”

Dear Technology Transfer Community:

I am happy to announce that the NCATS’s Office of Strategic Alliances is going to be advertising a Technology Transfer and Patent Specialist position at the GS-13 and GS-14 level for all sources- see links provided below. This job posting will be open on USA Jobs https://www.usajobs.gov/ on Monday, February 8, 2016. Please note that NCI Frederick will be sharing the GS-14 job posting in order to fill a similar position at their Frederick, MD duty station.

Dan Primack and Fred Wilson sat down for an interview last week at the Upfront Summit and the results were amazing. It’s 25 minutes and it’s both a pleasure to watch and is super insightful.

You can watch the interview embedded above of click on this link: Dan Primack interviews Fred Wilson at the Upfront Summit.

You’ve decided it’s time to let the low performer on your team go. You’ve covered your bases in terms of documentation, and you’ve coordinated with HR. But now you have to have the dreaded conversation. What’s the best way to deliver the news? Who should be in the room with you? What do you say and not say? And how do you tell the rest of the team?

Master negotiators are agile. Whether they’re lobbying for team resources, forging a complex M&A deal, or seeking a salary increase for themselves, they tailor their styles to their goals and situations. But that takes self-awareness. Before you can adjust your approach, you need insight into what comes most naturally to you.

When Sabine Dulac, a marketing manager for a French luxury goods company, moved from Paris to London, she was looking forward to working in a more practical and efficient environment. Her new boss in the London office was American, and she walked out of her first performance review with him feeling confident. According to Sabine, it was the best review of her career.

Asking the right questions can mean the difference between success and failure. Unfortunately, asking questions can also feel uncomfortable.

"It can be embarrassing to admit that you didn't understand what someone said, or that you don't get it," says Heidi Grant Halvorson, associate director of Columbia Business School’s Motivation Science Center and author of No One Understands You and What to Do About It. "You might fear it will make you look incompetent, but that’s not true. Research has found that people who are inquisitive are generally judged to be more intelligent and engaged."

The combination of government initiatives and private sector support is key to developing the innovation and startup ecosystems, as highlighted by a new report from Compass on the startup ecosystem in Estonia. The country also benefits from a global outlook of startups from day since the local market is limited for companies looking to scale up rapidly.

While small, the Estonia startup ecosystem is growing very rapidly, building on several success stories – including Skype and TransferWise. The former is often considered the trigger of Estonia’s emerging startup ecosystem; Skype’s acquisition by eBay for $2.6 billion in 2005 put the Baltic state on the global map of innovation and fueled it with financial resources and startup experience.

Image: http://www.thenextsiliconvalley.com

Two studies released last week indicate that at least a handful of smaller cities in the US, including the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina, Salt Lake City, Jacksonville, Florida and Nashville are emerging as places that investors and entrepreneurs are increasingly making bets.

Richard Florida, the director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto and a professor of global research at New York University, writes in “The Rise of Global Startup Cities,” that while venture capital has “gone global” by spreading to places like China and India, the dominant centers remain US cities that combine density, great universities, and an open-minded culture to attract the best talent. In sheer numbers, the San Francisco Bay region and the northeast US continue to account for the most dollars.

Everybody's been talking about the tech bubble for the last few years.

But in 2015 the talk peaked, as private company valuations grew to the point where Facebook's $1 billion acquisition of 13-person company Instagram in 2012 now looks cheap, and privately held Uber with no published financial returns and massive losses is supposedly worth more than Ford and GM.

When I first heard the term “serial entrepreneur,” I had no idea what it meant.

It was only after my attorneys yelled at me for not keeping them in the loop with all my incorporation activities that I realized that I had become a serial entrepreneur. But what made it not so great was that I was an ADHD serial entrepreneur.

I was starting companies before I ‘finished’ the previous ones. Evidently I’m not unique in that aspect and there are pros and cons to this entrepreneurial path.

In January, the European Commission dropped its yearly Flash Eurobarometer of quality of life in European cities, a huge survey of how happy people in hundreds of cities across Europe are.

The survey asks people to rank their satisfaction with everything from the sports facilities available in their area to how good the public transport system is.

Creating the right company culture must be a top priority of every entrepreneur and business leader. Simply speaking, culture-driven businesses put their people first, and people make the business, rather than the other way around. Today’s business mantra must be “Take care of your people and they will take care of your customers.” Unfortunately, it’s easier said than done.

Helmet designers have so far failed to account for a key cause of brain injury—the kinetic energy that travels through the head after an impact and makes the brain slosh inside the skull. That’s according to Ellen Arruda, a mechanical engineering professor at the University of Michigan, who is leading an effort to change that. She and her colleagues have unveiled a prototype of a new helmet technology capable of dissipating a significant portion of that kinetic energy, also known as the impulse, before it reaches the brain.

Venture capital has, for many endowments, been the best performing asset class in recent years.

But because of those outsize returns, in part, some endowments' venture capital portfolios now exceed their target allocations. Should there be a correction, as many experts expect, and valuations of venture capital-backed companies drop, it could erase the gains endowments have enjoyed, potentially keeping the organizations from fulfilling their missions.

Image: http://www.pionline.com