Introverts are making a lot of progress at work. Companies have begun recognizing the advantages introverts bring to the table and introverts are starting to recognize they no longer needed to pretend to be extroverts in order to excel.

While there are certainly many reasons to celebrate introversion, a new book by writer Emily White called Count Me In: How I Stepped Off The Sidelines, Created Connection And Built A Fuller, Richer, More Lived-in Life warns introverts about shying away from social life altogether. Although extroverts are known to have large social communities, White says even introverts need a community.

Image: http://www.fastcompany.com

After weeks of battling it out with venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in the courtroom, Ellen Pao is continuing her fight against gender discrimination with a new initiative: eliminating salary negotiations in the hiring process at Reddit, where she serves as interim CEO.

Image: By Antonio Zugaldia (originally posted to Flickr as Reddit) (CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)), via Wikimedia Commons

You have to be extra tough mentally to be an entrepreneur. While thinking about it, I realized that it’s really not that different from the toughness required and trained into America’s elite military force of Navy SEALs, who are known to be cool under fire, able to sense danger before it’s too late, and never give up on achieving their objective.

Like all co-founders, Richard Hordern-Gibbings and I are working hard to make our startup Nexus Notes a success. Late last year we did two things to help us on our way: we pitched to be a part of the tech accelerator, Startmate, and the television series, Shark Tank.  

We were fortunate to be selected for both. This post explains a bit about both experiences.

Image: http://www.startupsmart.com.au

IBM’s Watson, the machine-learning computer that won Jeopardy! in 2011 and has found work searching medical and scientific data for insights, could soon have yet another job: museum tour guide.+

A group of researchers at IBM Research India used Watson as part of an Android app called Usher that supplies information about nearby artwork in a museum and answers questions that you ask about it. It’s an example of the way IBM hopes programmers will make use of the capabilities of Watson in all sorts of apps. The research was presented last week at a conference on intelligent user interfaces in Atlanta.

Image: http://www.technologyreview.com/

District tech incubator 1776 has partnered with Montgomery County’s Office of Economic Development to create a pipeline for startups to work on county projects. Neither county nor 1776 officials would disclose the price tag attached to the partnership, but it was described by officials as a way to beta test startup technologies for public projects.

Image: http://www.bizjournals.com

Dedicated to the notion that knowledge often comes when you’re studying something else, I offer up the following pre-enterpreneur (incidentally also the pre Columbia University Entrepreneurship in Biotechnology course) reading (or listening or watching) list.

Joe Hyams: Zen in the Martial Arts. Focus. Calm. Wisdom. How to learn. I have given this book to so many people over the years I have lost count. Available used on Amazon for 2 cents. Barry Targan’s 1975 short story “Harry Belten and the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto.” Google it. Not only the best short story I have ever read but a great illustration of the heart of entrepreneurship: how to handle being right when everyone else is wrong. Read and enjoy.

The venture capital market is getting more and more irrational every day. VentureBeat just reported this week that VCs are ‘collecting logos’ of unicorn companies.

According to Pitchbook, more than 60 percent of all VC-invested capital went to rounds of more than $25 million in 2014, the highest percentage since the dotcom boom. There were 414 rounds of $25+ million last year, 50 percent more than the 276 rounds in 2013. VC capital invested jumped $20 billion from 2013 to 2014, while the number of financings fell by 16 percent.

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A senior banker – let’s call him Jack — was on a conference call attempting to close out an acquisition. The stakes were high. It was a multibillion-dollar deal and the negotiation of the final price hinged on the measurement of the target’s EBITDA, the Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization. Jack argued that the EBITDA was lower; the opposite party asserted it was higher.

When I lived in India, people often told me, “Send your man.” Medical test ready for pick up? Send your man. Need some onions last minute from the grocer? Send your man. I had no man. But this I could not confess. Any self-respecting man, it seemed, had a man.

Sometimes these men were called “boys.” Sometimes, they were called P.A.s, as in personal assistants. Sometimes they were “peons,” but pronounced more like “punes,” making the Spanish conquistadors’ term for forced servitude sound worse than it already does.

Research Triangle Park never received much consideration as a location for GlaxoSmithKline (NYSE: GSK) to put a new global center for vaccine research and development, primarily because RTP never supported much of GSK’s vaccine business.

“We don’t do any vaccines R&D in RTP and we only have a handful of employees here who support vaccines,” according to Melinda Stubbee, GSK director of Global External Communications. “The location was selected because in Rockville (Maryland) we have a state of the art facility that meets our demands for the size and technological capability required for vaccines R&D. It is also in close proximity to Washington, D.C., and our key U.S. stakeholders.”

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By most definitions of the term, an entrepreneur is someone who starts a new business, incorporating innovative changes to existing products, services, business models, and creating new markets. Yet very few achieve that great aspiration of really driving economic, social, and environmental changes on a global scale.

It’s only natural to seek certainty, especially in the face of the unknown. Long ago, shamans performed intricate dances to summon rain. It didn’t matter that any success they enjoyed was random, as long as the tribe felt that its water supply was in capable hands. Nowadays, late nights of number crunching, feasts of modeling, and the familiar rituals of presentations have replaced the rain dances of old. But often, the odds of generating reliable insights are not much better.

If there's one major issue plaguing smartphones, smartwatches and other gadgets we use every day, it's battery life. Now, a team of researchers at Stanford University has built an aluminum-ion battery prototype which offers several improvements over today's ubiquitous lithium-ion batteries, including super-fast charging times.

Image: An aluminum battery prototype designed by researchers from Stanford. It has many advantages over conventional, lithium-ion batteries, including super-fast charging and potentially lower price. VIDEO: YOUTUBE, STANFORD PRECOURT INSTITUTE FOR ENERGY

Let’s begin with a hard truth. People use stereotypes about the groups to which you belong (or appear to belong) to interpret everything you do and say. And most of the time, they don’t actually know they are doing it. In fact, they don’t even have to believe a stereotype to be affected by it.

Image: http://www.fastcompany.com

You know you’re in a bubble when no fewer than 100 startups are worth over a billion dollars.

You know you’re in a bubble when each month 2 or 3 new members join this billion dollar club.

You know you are in a bubble when a prominent Silicon Valley VC analyzes the common denominator among all billion-dollar startups at their Series A stage and concludes that it should add some new criteria to its deal flow selection such as:

Fortune’s Dan Primack sits down with the Andreessen Horowitz co-founder to discuss the pros and cons of innovation in the health and education sectors.

SEC Chair Mary Jo White opened up last weeks Investor Advisory Committee meeting with a brief welcome and recap of recent events. She first commented on the final rules for Reg A+ “which are intended to enhance the ability of small companies to raise capital”, highlighting the increased funding cap to $50 million, and the fact that state review will no longer take place (Tier 2 only).  She made certain to mention NASAA, a special interest group that lobbied aggressively to maintain state Blue Sky review, and their “coordinated review process” which remains incomplete.

Image: http://www.crowdfundinsider.com 

Some people are not cut out to be entrepreneurs. This is a good thing, or the business world would be chaos, with everyone trying to do their own thing. So what about you? How do you know if you should be running your own company, or concentrating on that queue of work that someone else has built for you?

In many ways start up culture is like a local music scene. A place can influence what comes out and create a strong association. Just think about Memphis and you think blues, which can feel a bit different from Chicago blues. Or say the word Motown. Despite Barry Gordy’s decision to move his record studio to Los Angeles, the word Motown will always be synonymous with Detroit.