Is your business a fit small business? And what are the essentials for being a fit small business? Anyone that commits to running an Iron Man, rides The Tour de France, climbs mountains, runs marathons or engages in other highly physical endeavors, knows how important being fit is to take on and finish such a demanding challenge. Fit is defined as of suitable quality, standard, or type to meet the required purpose, as in good health, shape, or form. That might seem adequate on some levels but completely inadequate on others.

Before taking off on Virgin America’s inaugural flight from San Francisco to Honolulu to work hard and Hawaii hard, I took some time out to answer your questions on work-life balance.

My first answers were to questions all about taking a step back, convincing management to allow working from home and encouraging leaders to take time off. You can watch them all over here, and read some tips on how to be a better boss too.

ROCHESTER – A pair of tennis shoes tucked into her bag, a water bottle at the ready, Lisa Clarke steps into a meeting in a busy morning full of them and drops a well-worn line.

“It’s a good day to be in Rochester,” she says, flashing a broad smile at those in attendance.

Image: GLEN STUBBE  - As head of the Destination Medical Center’s Economic Development Agency, Lisa Clarke is its caretaker, traffic cop and chief cheerleader. 

Through the Southern Growth Studio, I have the great honor to work with non-profits. Big ones. Growing ones. And ones on the verge of collapse. There is an odd tendency for almost all of these organizations to respond to innovations in the same way; they desire them deeply but are wildly timid. It’s a dizzying and paralyzing fear-based response. What if it doesn’t work? I don’t know … They yearn to roll out a new program or recreate an experience that gets better results, but something nagging in the culture keeps them from enacting the very thing that may set them apart and catalyze their potential.

In the first six months of 2015, Indian venture capitalists (VCs) invested $2.46 billion into startups. And you’d better believe Indian angel investors are getting in on the action too. So far this year there have been 221 angel investments in India, totaling $120 million. As such, it’s clearly a good time for founders across the globe to consider seeking Indian investment – and there are two categories of startups that stand to benefit the most.

When it comes to starting your crowdfunding campaign, says expert consultant Sally Outlaw Cost of Peerbackers, it’s critical to do some math.

In terms of the rewards given out in exchange for funding, entrepreneurs need not only factor in the cost of such gifts but also the logistics in delivering them -- where they’re going to be housed, for instance, or how they’re going to be packaged and shipped.

The leading venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, Sequoia Capital, provided residents of Stone & Chalk last week with a rare insight into its thinking when it weighs up turning start-up dreams into thriving digital businesses.  

As the federal government considers how to create in Australia a culture of innovation that encourages more risk-taking to spur economic growth, lessons from Sequoia – one of the technology industry's most prolific and successful investors – can help identify the way forward for policy. 

These and other insights are from the 2015 Technology Fast 500 published by Deloitte yesterday. The Deloitte Technology Fast 500 is an annual ranking of the fastest growing North American companies in the technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences, and clean technology sectors.

I used to work a lot — 60, 80, or even 100 hours a week.

I let my work be a big part of how I defined myself. I wore those insane hours like a badge of honor . . . I loved telling people how "busy" I was and how much I "had to do".

Sound familiar?

Looking back, I realize I used my work to try and fill a void in myself. The problem was that this void was like a black hole. No matter how many hours I worked, it never seemed to fill it up. If anything, it made me feel worse.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has released the Federal Laboratory Technology Transfer, Fiscal Year 2013, Summary Report to the President and Congress. The government-wide results include both quantitative measures (e.g., number of licenses, earned royalty income, etc.) and qualitative indicators (e.g., anecdotal evidence of downstream outcomes and benefits) of effectiveness, organized by agency and summarized at the national level. 

This week I was asked to speak to a dozen billionaires at a secret meeting about putting $100b to work. They wanted me to talk about what I’ve learned over the past five years as an angel investor.

Well, here it is.

It took me five years, but I’ve learned what the two most important factors are in the success of an angel investor. It’s not being smart, it’s not being diligent, and it’s certainly not being a visionary.

Image: Jason Calacanis, serial entrepreneur and angel investor.IMAGE: FLICKR, JOI ITO  

What is the Midwest? There’s been a lot of debate about this question among folks passionate about such thing. But it defies easy definition. Here are eleven ways various people have taken a crack at drawing the map.

Innovation is not easy. In fact, it’s quite difficult, and anyone who tells you otherwise is an idiot.

Mistakes are bound to happen, and there is no shame in that  – as Edison famously observed, “I have not failed. I just found 10,000 ways that don’t work.”

Some innovation mistakes, however, are just plain dumb. But thankfully they provide us with teachable moments.

New Zealand-based Martin Aircraft Company’s flagship product is an unconventional flying machine: a jetpack that might seem like a prop from a sci-fi movie, were it not for the fact that it’s well on the road to commercialization.

In October, New Zealand’s civil aviation authority cleared the company’s Prototype 12 model jetpack for manned flights. The fan-propelled jetpack, when shown in June at the Paris Air Show, could soar almost 1,000 meters and fly up to half an hour.

Image: The view from a Toyota self-driving car prototype on the Metropolitan Expressway in Tokyo in a October 2015 media preview. Photograph: Yuya Shino/Reuters - http://www.theguardian.com

Monday’s edition of the Federal Register contains new rules for raising money online through crowdfunding platforms, scrapie regulations for sheep and goats and a removal of protections for certain fox squirrels.

Here’s what is happening:

Dave Berkus has been angel investing for more than 20 years – before the term “angel” was popularly known. This super angel has a wealth of stories from his angel portfolio of 137 companies. And his insights come from a combination of successes, failures and missed opportunities.

Dave’s experiences are colored by his early experience as a successful entrepreneur. When he started angel investing in 1993, he knew he wanted to do more than just provide money – he wanted to mentor and help direct the companies he invested in.  “I wanted to be different than a venture capitalist,” he said. “I called myself a resource capitalist.”

Most entrepreneurs are too stubborn to seek a mentor for guidance: They have so much confidence in themselves and their ideas that they don’t see the need to ask anyone for advice.

Related: 5 Tips for Finding and Keeping a Good Mentor

The best entrepreneurs, however, actually claim multiple mentors: Mark Zuckerberg relied on Steve Jobs at Apple and Washington Post chief executive Donald Graham, almost 40 years his senior.

Corporate accelerators can be better than traditional ones for startups in certain sectors. Automatic introductions to vast networks are just one of the benefits of corporate accelerators, Venture Capitalist Nancy Fechnay recently told a group of industry leaders. “I think that (networks) is the biggest value of any accelerator program I have worked with,” she said at a summit hosted by Telefónica’s accelerator, Wayra in London.

Business travel should be about relationship building, but so often the stress of dealing with logistics and the anxiety of meeting a whole whack of new people keep it from being an effective way to connect, especially at conferences. Using social tools can focus your on-the-road time on the people you really want to get to know.

This is my seven-step strategy for using social media to turn conference introductions into ongoing connections:

Are we experiencing another tech bubble, or the biggest secular move of the digital economy since the integrated circuit? This debate rages across Silicon Valley, India and the global industry, with both sides creating many convincing presentations, articles and tweetstorms to support their view and refute the other.