Sam Altman, the head of Silicon Valley startup accelerator program Y Combinator, doesn't think the tech industry is in a valuation bubble.

But he does think startups are burning "frightening" amounts of money every month.

Altman detailed his fears in an email he sent to Y Combinator alumni this past weekend, and in a phone conversation with Business Insider on Monday morning.

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As children, we’re naturally curious—it’s how we grow and learn—but by the time we start school that sense of wonder starts to escape us.

"Answers are more valued than inquisitive thought, and curiosity is trained out of us," says Hal Gregersen, founder of the 4-24 Project, an organization that challenges leaders to spend four minutes a day asking better questions. "The average six- to 18-year-old asks only one question per one-hour class per month. Contrast that with the average teacher, who peppers kids with 291 questions a day and waits an average of one second for a reply."

How do you convince investors that your business model will really work, before you have a revenue stream that exceeds your expenses? Even if you are bootstrapping your business, and you are the only investor, you should be asking yourself the same question. Too many founders have learned that passion and free beta products do not imply a sustainable business.

Fortune 500 executives spend a fair amount of time thinking about how automation and the Internet are changing the nature of employment, but they rarely wonder how technology will have an impact much closer to home: on their own jobs.

For the last several years, we have been studying the forces now shaping the future of work, and wondering whether high-level management could be automated. This inspired us to create prototype software we informally dubbed “iCEO.”

If it wasn't already clear through common sense, it's become painfully clear through science that sitting all day is terrible for your health. What's especially alarming about this evidence is that extra physical activity doesn't seem to offset the costs of what researchers call "prolonged sedentary time." Just as jogging and tomato juice don't make up for a night of smoking and drinking, a little evening exercise doesn't erase the physical damage done by a full work day at your desk.

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We've all heard how important a mentor is to career development, but many of us don't have the benefit of structured corporate mentorship programs.

But entrepreneurs and freelancers don't have to manage their career development alone. We've developed a practice we call co-mentoring. It’s changed the way we think about our work and careers.

Can trauma, stress, and even nightmares be passed down from generation to generation?

Scientists say yes. A number of research finds that those who have been traumatized around the time of conception can pass on a DNA code to their offspring that results in a higher vulnerability to stress in their molecules, neurons, cells, and genes. Furthermore, this gene expression—a chemical coating upon the chromosomes—is strong enough to be passed on to a third generation, which means grandchildren have "a kind of biological memory" of what their grandparents experienced, according to studies.

Want to master the CMO role? Join us for GrowthBeat Summit on June 1-2 in Boston, where we'll discuss how to merge creativity with technology to drive growth. Space is limited and we're limiting attendance to CMOs and top marketing execs. Request your personal invitation here! Former hedge fund manager Andy Kessler recently published an obituary for private equity in the Wall Street Journal’s opinion pages. This piece not only mischaracterizes the private equity business model but also unfairly paints the industry with a very broad brush. 

There’s a general school of thought among a number of new entrepreneurs that one should not share their business idea with anyone else. The reasoning behind this is that you need to protect your ideas and what you regard as your intellectual property. On the face of it all it sounds like logically sound argument. A business is after all quintessentially an idea that has been executed into a product which hopefully has a large enough market to sustain its expenses. New entrepreneurs network with the mentality that they will not share their ideas and try as extract as much value from their networking endeavour. This is where the logic behind the argument begins to fall away.

The United States isn’t the only place in the world where money is pouring into high-tech innovation. On Tuesday, Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev’s Skolkovo Foundation for technical development and the Chinese Cybernaut Investment Group agreed to create a $200 million venture fund, a startup incubator for Russian businesses and a new Chinese robotics center, all of which signify increased cooperation between the two countries to develop technology that benefits the both of them.

I recently returned from the Angel Capital Association’s annual summit in San Diego. In addition to a pre-conference workshop on angel investing that targeted women, there was a special networking reception and dinner for women one evening during the conference, as well as a session on increasing women’s participation in angel investing.

The Ann Arbor-based Michigan Angel Fund has closed on a second investment fund of $2.05 million, targeting early-stage investing in Michigan tech startups.

Sixty-two accredited angel investors invested in the fund, which plans its first investment this spring and a total of eight to 10 within two years. The first fund, of $2.1 million, had 72 investors and invested in eight companies.

The City of New York Early-Stage Life Sciences Funding Initiative represents an unprecedented public-private partnership across world-class academic institutions, industry leaders, top-tier investors, and the philanthropic community.

Established by the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) with at least $50 million in matching funds from top-tier venture capital partners including Celgene Corporation, GE Ventures, and Eli Lilly & Company, the funding partnership will deploy a minimum of $150 million and seeks to launch 15 to 20 breakthrough ventures by 2020.

I’ve had the good fortune of starting several companies, both in the United States and England, building them from product concept to market expansion to successful exit. In my experience, business acumen, gut feeling and luck only get you so far on the entrepreneurial journey. The rest requires a steely ability to weather the ups and downs of building a company, whilst continuing to keep all of your colleagues happy and focused.

The life sciences community presented a vision this week in which the Washington, DC region becomes a top 3 biotech hub by 2023. What role will economic development incentives play in achieving this status?

Industry, academic, nonprofit, investment and government partners participated in the Regional Biotech Forum: Growing Our Ecosystem, a program spearheaded by BioHealth Innovation, AstraZeneca, MedImmune and the Tech Council of Maryland and supported by BioMaryland, Virginia Bio, Montgomery County, MD among others.

MCLEAN, Va. — NO one who lived through the 1990s would have suspected that one day people would look back on the period as a golden age of bipartisan cooperation. But in some important ways, it was. Amid the policy fights that followed the Republican victories of 1994, President Bill Clinton and the new majorities in Congress reached one particularly good deal: doubling the budget for the National Institutes of Health.

The decision was bipartisan, because health is both a moral and financial issue. Government spends more on health care than any other area. Taxpayers spend more than $1 trillion a year for Medicare and Medicaid alone, and even more when you add in programs like Veterans Affairs, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and the Indian Health Service.

The folks who build those fun, quirky little MINI Coopers have teamed up with Qualcomm and a San Francisco-based designer to try and take your driving experience to another level. The companies have created a set of augmented reality glasses that connect drivers and their MINIs in ways few other carmakers have explored.

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“Without discovery research, without innovation, applied research can only go so far,” says MIT Institute Professor Phillip Sharp. “There are strikingly important things we just don’t know exist, but discovering them through basic science changes the whole world.”  That’s precisely what happened to Sharp. He came to MIT in 1974 to join the Center for Cancer Research, now the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, where he conducted discovery research on the molecular biology of gene expression. Three years later, he discovered RNA splicing, which changed scientists’ understanding of the structure of genes, and in 1993, he won the Nobel Prize. 

As GE’s new Oklahoma City oil and gas research center goes up across the street, the company’s philanthropic foundation announced a $400,000 donation Tuesday at the Oklahoma School of Science and Mathematics.

The GE Foundation donation to the Oklahoma Center for the Advancement of Science and Technology will be for a program called STEM Empowers OK, an effort to cultivate interest among students for careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

There is a shrine inside Hewlett-Packard’s headquarters in Palo Alto, in the heart of Silicon Valley. At one edge of HP’s research building, two interconnected rooms with worn midcentury furniture, vacant for decades, are carefully preserved. From these offices, William Hewlett and David Packard led HP’s engineers to invent breakthrough products, like the 40-pound, typewriter-size programmable calculator launched in 1968.