Flyover Capital, an early stage venture capital company founded in 2013, announced that it's making its first investment. Flyover Capital invested $1.75 million in a company called Opendorse, which is a technology platform designed to help athletes get connected with marketers seeking endorsements. The company isn't designed to help athletes like Tiger Woods, Tom Brady, LeBron James or Albert Pujols, who are some of the most recognized names in sports. Instead, the service targets the athletes in the next tier, who still carry a lot of brand power on a regional basis. Their clients include athletes like Rob Gronkowski (New England Patriots), Joe Flacco (Baltimore Ravens), Jamal Charles (Kansas City Chiefs) and Matt Besler (Sporting Kansas City).

At its core, coaching is a simple idea: help your direct reports improve both what they do and who they are. But it’s not a simple process. It requires a manager to know what his or her reports are doing, understand why they are doing it, and help them to recognize where and how they can get better. Good coaches create a safe space to have an open discussion, ask the right questions (and genuinely listen to the answers), and constructively challenge.

Exponentials are innovative technologies for which performance relative to cost and size is doubling every 12 to 18 months—a rate of improvement faster than even Moore’s Law. Exponentials are deceptive by nature, as the doubling effect seems relatively minute in the early phases, but then quite abruptly and powerfully picks up steam.

Image: http://deloitte.wsj.com

The chance encounter of a Norwegian research vessel with the largest waves ever recorded amid floating packs of Arctic ice shows how such rollers could reroute shipping, damage oil platforms and threaten coastal communities with erosion. In a March report in Geophysical Research Letters scientists at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) describe how large waves can penetrate more deeply into ice cover and break it up faster and more completely than anyone had suspected.

Image: Sea ice near Greenland. Courtesy Greenland Travel / Flickr

Meet this year's tech innovators — eight men and women who are helping to drive change through education technology (or, in one case, questioning that technology). This is the third time in recent years that The Chronicle has showcased creative efforts to solve problems — to enliven the classroom, cut instructional costs, recruit more women into computer science, keep students on track to graduate, conduct cutting-edge research, and more. As part of the selection process, we asked readers and higher-education leaders for suggestions. We were just as interested in a scrappy project on a shoestring budget as we were in a big-ticket outlay. We also considered leaders in various sectors, so you'll meet a professor of the Harlem Renaissance, tech-company chief executives, a college president who paints on the side, and a registrar who's looking out for struggling students. The final selections were made by a group of Chronicle editors and reporters.

Image: http://chronicle.com

In an age of regular technological disruption, for software companies, growing fast has become essential to survival. In these interviews, Anaplan CEO Frederic Laluyaux, Jive Software executive chairman Tony Zingale, and Synopsys cofounder, chairman, and co-CEO Aart de Geus discuss how important it is for software and online-services companies not only to zero in on their main priorities but also to be prepared to reevaluate products and processes as they grow. They also explain why growth alone isn’t enough and why software companies must target becoming profitable rapidly and efficiently. The interviews were conducted by McKinsey director Eric Kutcher, and edited transcripts of their remarks follow.

Software companies must constantly evolve and capture new growth opportunities or risk slowly declining into irrelevance. Only 3 percent of start-ups grow into companies boasting annual revenue of at least $1 billion.1 Yet that achievement is only the end of the beginning. Act II involves developing into a multibillion-dollar company, and the odds are slim: our latest research shows that of the 3,197 public software companies launched between 1980 and 2013, just 19 have reached $4 billion in annual revenue (Exhibit 1).

In a tiny, windowless conference room at the R&D headquarters of Intel, the world's dominant microprocessor and semiconductor manufacturer, Mark Bohr, the company's director of process architecture and integration, is coolly explaining how Moore's law, as it is commonly understood, is dead—and has been for some time. This might seem surprising, given that Bohr is literally in the Moore's law business: his job is to figure out how to make Intel's current 14-nanometer-wide transistors twice as small within the decade. But behind his round-rimmed glasses, Bohr does not even blink: “You have to understand that the era of traditional transistor scaling, where you take the same basic structure and materials and make it smaller—that ended about 10 years ago.”

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! With a growing demand for efficiency and accuracy, comes a growing demand for stellar data scientists. In fact, as of March 2015, there are over 60,000 job postings for data scientists on LinkedIn, and over 250,000 people listing data science as their profession.

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!

U.S.-based medical startups raised a record amount of funding in the first quarter of 2015, Brian Gormley reports for Dow Jones VentureWire. The $3.9 billion invested in the sector surpassed the previous record high of $3.42 billion invested in the second quarter of 2014, according to data provider Dow Jones VentureSource.

There has been a lull in the chanting that “Silicon Valley is the center of the tech universe.” I’m in Boulder for the next three weeks and I woke up pondering something Ben Casnocha said to me the last time we were together.

Silicon Valley is a religion, just like Crossfit is a religion.

This has stuck with me for a long time and I’ve read many posts about Silicon Valley through this lens.

Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, a vocal group of advocates insists that the United States does not face a shortage of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workers. The advocates argue incorrectly that high-skilled immigration is not only unnecessary but is actually harmful to American workers. In this report, ITIF refutes 10 of the most common myths asserted to deny the existence of a STEM worker shortage and provides clear evidence that a STEM shortage hurts the American economy and workers.

California has met the future, and it really doesn’t work. As the mounting panic surrounding the drought suggests, the Golden State, once renowned for meeting human and geographic challenges, is losing its ability to cope with crises. As a result, the great American land of opportunity is devolving into something that resembles feudalism, a society dominated by rich and poor, with little opportunity for upward mobility for the state’s middle- and working classes. 

Meet this year's tech innovators — eight men and women who are helping to drive change through education technology (or, in one case, questioning that technology). This is the third time in recent years that The Chronicle has showcased creative efforts to solve problems — to enliven the classroom, cut instructional costs, recruit more women into computer science, keep students on track to graduate, conduct cutting-edge research, and more. As part of the selection process, we asked readers and higher-education leaders for suggestions. We were just as interested in a scrappy project on a shoestring budget as we were in a big-ticket outlay. We also considered leaders in various sectors, so you'll meet a professor of the Harlem Renaissance, tech-company chief executives, a college president who paints on the side, and a registrar who's looking out for struggling students. The final selections were made by a group of Chronicle editors and reporters.

Image: http://chronicle.com

You’ve just landed your dream job and can’t wait to start. You’ve negotiated your salary, your title, your benefits, and now it’s just time to negotiate one last thing: your start date.

Yes, you should negotiate your start date.

Too often, I hear about friends packing up their things at one job on a Friday and starting in a new office the following Monday. When I ask why they didn’t take a buffer break in between the two, they tell me: "My new manager really wanted me to start ASAP." "I’m afraid I’ll be behind if I take time off." "I don’t know what I’d do with that time off anyway, so might as well just get started!"

Venture capital investing just had its biggest Q1 in 15 years, according to new data on VC investment trends.

At $13.4 billion in 1,020 deals, the first fiscal quarter of 2015 clocked in the most first-quarter funding since 2000. Investors threw 26 percent more money into deals than they did in the first quarter of 2014. If you needed any more proof the market is on the upswing, this is it. The numbers come from the MoneyTree Report produced quarterly by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association, using data provided by Thomson Reuters.

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!

There’s a lot of debate in the tech startup world about the merits of accelerators. In some circles, it’s become a status symbol to be able to say, “We’re a YC company.” In others, accelerators are viewed as shortcuts for rookies.

One entrepreneur has dreamt up a simple fix to an age-old problem: the constant need to buy new shoes for kids who outgrow them just months later.

American charity worker Kenton Lee and his team invented sandals that match the pace of children's growth via a system of buckles, buttons and pegs, which expand the shoes in length by up to five sizes. Build to last at least five years, they are made out of durable leather, metal snaps and compressed rubber.

In the course of our research, we have found that some human capital-intensive industries are more inherently receptive to social innovation than others. Accounting and consulting firms are often highly responsive to the social demands of their employees. For example, interns at PricewaterhouseCoopers championed a social audit practice. We also found that the professionals we spoke with at Accenture, in offices on three continents, consistently lauded the firm for its willingness to support innovations, from Accenture Development Partnerships to professional programs for First Peoples in Canada and support for call centers in native communities. This fits with the idea that much innovation is driven by a war for talent. Businesses that require professionals with skills in high demand are virtually required to embrace the preferences of the next generation.