A great mentor is able to lead their mentee with empathy, sensitivity and patience, while constantly adapting to changing times and circumstances.

Mentoring is a much used and abused word. Becoming a great mentor is by no means a goal or a destination, but a journey that has a starting point and a constantly changing end point. To be effective at different stages of this journey, a mentor needs to keep his or her mind open, constantly adding value, helping the relationship evolve and playing different roles at different stages.

Many family owners are tempted to float their company on the stock exchange, lured by the idea of raising significant amounts of cash. But going public is not always what it’s cracked up to be.

There are numerous benefits to going public: obtaining finance for future growth, giving capital to family owners so they can invest elsewhere, providing private owners with clear valuations and even exiting, if that’s what the owners want to do. But listing may not be the ultimate solution for all family businesses for three main reasons.

Most meals at American restaurants aren’t healthy. They’re packed with processed food and enough calories to cover two or three sensible meals.

Yet it’s entirely possible to eat both healthy and tasty restaurant meals. And because eating out is one of life’s great pleasures, we’ve put together this guide to smart restaurant eating. It ranges from undeniably healthy meals — with a rich variety of foods, heavy on fruits and vegetables, light on sugar — to fast-food meals that are at least better than the alternatives if you find yourself eating at McDonald's.

“Spooky action at a distance” is how Albert Einstein described one of the key principles of quantum mechanics: entanglement.  Entanglement occurs when two particles become related such that they can coordinate their properties instantly even across a galaxy. Think of wormholes in space or Star Trek transporters that beam atoms to distant locations. Quantum mechanics posits other spooky things too: particles with a mysterious property called superposition, which allows them to have a value of one and zero at the same time; and particles’ ability to tunnel through barriers as if they were walking through a wall.

Lawsuits. I’m so tired of the nature of the legal system in the United States where bullying, intimidation and mobster-like shake-downs are becoming prevalent. As I write these words I already imagine my next deposition in which I’m asked to read this out loud.

For 50 years, Moore’s Law has reliably described exponential advances in silicon speed, power and functionality. But with the cost per transistor rising for the first time in history, we’ve entered an era of diminishing returns.

We need to get smarter about hardware and software innovation in order to get the most value from the emerging Internet of Things. And perhaps the smart thing to do is to hit “pause” on the half-century race to cram ever more transistors onto a single slice of silicon.

Recent reports on undergraduate education have emphasized the crucial role of authentic research experiences. A genomics research article published in the May issue of G3: Genes|Genomes|Genetics allowed 940 undergraduate students not only to engage in original scholarship, but also to be authors on a peer-reviewed scientific paper. The research, on the evolution of an unusual chromosome in fruit flies, was powered by the contributions of students at 63 higher education institutions across the US, coordinated by the Genomics Education Partnership (GEP).

By far the most interesting discussion at last week’s National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) annual meeting was the panel politely titled “Venture Capital Innovation,” and more aptly called “Venture Capital Disruption.”

The panelists were all top members of the AngelList team: CEO and cofounder Naval Ravikant and three of his highest-flying angels, Gil Penchina, Dave Morin, and Sumon Sadhu, who are respectively numbers 1, 9, and 33 on the roster of AngelList syndicate leaders. This was not the usual panel with diverse viewpoints. This is the disruptor A-team, come to take our cheese.

Every entrepreneur and business leader waits too long before really working on the legacy that he wants to leave to society and his family. They realize too late that they don’t really want to be remembered for how many hours they spent on airplanes, how many emails they produced, or even how much money they made for the business.

Image: http://blog.startupprofessionals.com

One of the first decisions every potential crowdfunding creator has to make is how much money s/he is going to ask for. There is no simple answer, but I’d like to share with you several things to keep in mind and strategies to consider.

Reading all the stories and hearing the rumors about Apple’s autonomous vehicles, Google’s drones, and Amazon’s experiments with new delivery systems, it’s easy to imagine looking out your window in a few short years and seeing a world that is positively Jetsons-like. Think through the implications of these technologies, however, and an even more startling vision emerges: the future will look more like the past.

Do you have an accurate sense of how your company stacks up?

Figuring out a company’s relative performance is ferociously problematic. It depends on which other companies are included in your comparison. Just change the peer group, and a laggard becomes a leader, or vice versa.

And if a company’s relative performance is in doubt, so are its goals, because the two are tightly linked. When Jack Welch was CEO of GE, he famously tasked each business with achieving number 1 or number 2 status in its industry, a goal-setting principle that echoes across the decades. 

This year’s budget deficit is predicted to be nearly $45.9 billion – with an even worse projection for next year. According to the Deloitte report, “2015-16 looks like it has been written by Stephen King and painted by Edvard Munch.”

Many people say that Australia is “The Lucky Country”, but if we want to continue to be lucky, we need to change our game. If we want economic prosperity, we need to shift our focus from extracting natural resources to mining knowledge resources and growing innovative companies.

Image: Fishburners.

Corporate profits and cash flow are strong, cash on the books of American firms is at record highs, and prospects for future economic growth are promising. Yet capital investment, which is one of the main pillars of growing productivity and rising living standards, is historically weak. Understanding why is crucial to reversing course and fostering a more robust economy.

At their previous jobs at venture capital firms, Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners, respectively, Neha Singh and Abhishek Goyal often had to help identify prospective startups and make investment decisions. But it wasn’t always easy. Startups usually don’t disclose information about themselves, since they are privately held firms and are under no compulsion to share data publicly. So, Singh and Goyal had to constantly struggle to collate information from multiple sources.

Elon Musk’s keynote address last week, at which he took the wraps off a much-anticipated battery technology, was fascinating to watch.

Firstly, here was a South African-born entrepreneur and inventor — his accent still giving away his heritage, despite 27 years living in Canada and the US — standing on a stage and attracting the interest of millions around the world.

NEW YORK — Take a product on a home shopping channel and sell out in a matter of minutes — it's the dream of many entrepreneurs.

Lori Greiner, who's sold her jewelry organizers, home décor and other products on QVC since 1998, encourages other entrepreneurs to try to get on the air. Greiner, who's an investor on the ABC program "Shark Tank," has also brought some of the products she's invested in to QVC.

Saul Alinsky published a somewhat controversial book back in 1971, called Rules for Radicals. It details the structure and organisation employed in revolutions. A lot has changed since then, but with buzzwords like disruption shaping our economic landscape more than ever before, crucial lessons can still be drawn from Alinsky’s theory of radicals and applied to a startup perspective.

The U.S. Small Business Administration is thrilled to announce a second round of the Growth Accelerator Fund contest. In 2015, we will again be awarding $50,000 prizes to the winners of the contest. These funds are to be used to fund operating budgets, not for investing in start-ups in your ecosystems.

The winners of this year's contest must demonstrate the ability to raise (or have plans to raise) a 4 to 1 match of prizes awarded. This match can be in the form of cash, in-kind donations, or sponsorships.

It helps to have more than just a great idea to get into Silicon Valley-based startup incubator Y Combinator these days. It's also about who you know.

A new blog post from Y Combinator's president Sam Altman made it official that having a recommendation from an alum could give your application a leg up: