Landing a fat venture capital investment is the Holy Grail for many entrepreneurs.

But with venture capitalists typically receiving more than 100 company proposals for every one they invest in, just getting in the door is tricky.

Good timing may help.

If you want to book a meeting with a venture capitalist, avoid suggesting Wednesdays or Thursdays because they tend to overbook...

Image: Tyler Roye, chief executive of eGIfter, in his Huntington office on March 9, 2015. (Credit: Newsday / Thomas A. Ferrara)

The “angels” in charge of Northeast Ohio's newest venture capital fund have been flying below the radar.

But they have been busy.

Some investors involved with North Coast Angel Fund have formed their own venture capital firm: North Coast Venture Fund.

Over the past year, they've raised $5 million and invested in seven technology companies, including five based in Northeast Ohio.

Johns Hopkins University is making its move.

The institution has been promising — threatening — to be a bigger player in technology commercialization, the process of turning millions of dollars of federal research funding into startup companies, patents and licenses.

Being a former professional athlete, one of the hardest things I have ever had to do didn’t involve blocking, tackling or going through the dreadful dog days of training camp. It was becoming a successful entrepreneur.

That might come as a shock, as you would expect having a 300-hundred-pound, angry, big and very agile offensive lineman trying to take your head off every single play would be difficult on you. Of course, football, and most sports for that matter, weed out the weak, undetermined and those who have no discipline at all. However, in my eyes, entrepreneurship is the true test of mental strength, guts and courage.

To be an entrepreneur requires a special combination of boldness and humility. It’s a beautiful thing to say that you are going to build something that the world needs, but that, you believe, none of the billions of people who have gone before you or live beside you now has ever seen or achieved.

To get there, though, requires the humility to confront a hundred small errors every week. The path to success is forged via a thousand small adjustments, each one possible only because the entrepreneur has their eyes and ears wide open and is able to adjust -- time after time -- to all the failures before them.

In a typical day an investor meets with two or three startups and sees an other four or five executive summaries. Each company claims to represent a unique and earth-shattering opportunity with a proven team, proven tech nology, and proven market. No company claims to be a bunch of losers who don't know what they're doing.

Just 12 hours ago, I posted a brief piece about the continuing Europtechnopanic in Germany and the effort of publishers there to blame their every trouble on Google—even the so-called sin of free content and the price of metaphoric wurst.

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The idea of using debt to support businesses in healthcare and life sciences tends to be viewed warily and with good reason. At MidAmerica Healthcare Venture Forum this week, GE Capital senior vice president in life sciences Joe Hammer offered up some helpful insights on the different kinds of debt available to biotech and medical device companies, from pre-revenue stage companies to more mature businesses.

These days, news from the Middle East tends to revolve around violence, war and low oil prices. In the midst of the challenges these forces pose for the region, young Arab entrepreneurs are seeking creative ways to tackle existing civil society problems.

From Morocco to Jordan smart, talented thinkers are creating an impressive start-up culture in the region. As a result, financial institutions and non-government organizations have begun setting up numerous seed investment initiatives to support this rise in cultural innovation.

Image: http://www.internationalpolicydigest.org

Every entrepreneur knows that the success of their business ultimately rests on their shoulders. Yes, the product you build and the team you hire are important, but your ability to lead is what carries your company.

With that kind of pressure, it’s easy to feel stressed, lonely and overwhelmed at times. Every great leader has faced a challenge that defined their greatness, which is why we often turn to their advice when needed.

This month, I will be celebrating my 40th anniversary as an economic developer. I have been blessed to have the opportunity to serve communities, such as Fond du Lac County, and contribute to creating better economies. I have been involved in large and small projects that positively impacted the communities and their residents. My career has endured both good and bad times in the economy but now things are different.

Image: (Photo: The Reporter file photo)

Forty years in, Saturday Night Live is still highly relevant and one of the hottest shows on television. Over the course of four decades, so much has changed in the landscape of the world, so a show that makes fun of all of it has had to adapt a lot, too. While the content is in a constant state of flux in the land of late night TV, there’s much to be learned from this powerhouse, even for you in your own business.

1. "To stimulate creativity one must develop childlike inclination for play and the childlike desire for recognition." - Albert Einstein

2. "If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play." - John Cleese

An innovative programme to foster cross-cultural learning and experiential learning was launched by the SMU Institute of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (IIE) on 2 March 2015.

Called the Asian Youth Entrepreneurship Programme (AYEP), more than 40 students from five universities - China’s Zhejiang University, Taiwan’s National Chengchi University, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, South Korea’s Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, as well as SMU – participated in the five-day programme which was held at SMU.

Image: http://www.smu.edu.sg

Our 2014 US Venture Capital Year in Review showed that overall VC activity reached $47.3B across 3617 deals in 2014. It was a big year for venture – the highest since 2000. Of total US VC funding, the majority of it went to tech companies. In fact, $33.4B in funding and 2859 deals were to tech companies representing 71% and 79%, respectively, of total venture activity in 2014. Venture capital activity includes pure-play financial VCs as well as corporate venture investors.

This week, bitcoin startup 21 Inc. emerged from stealth with $116M in venture funding from big name backers including Andreessen Horowitz, RRE Ventures and Qualcomm. Among the co-founders of 21 is Balaji Srinivasan, one of eight general partners at Andreessen Horowitz, who will now move to a full-time role at the bitcoin company.

The moment of truth for me came in the spring 2013 semester. I looked out at my visual-communication class and saw a group of six students transfixed by the blue glow of a video on one of their computers, and decided I was done allowing laptops in my large lecture class. "Done" might be putting it mildly. Although I am an engaging lecturer, I could not compete with Facebook and YouTube, and I was tired of trying.

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Deloitte has launched its Tech Trends, the fusion of business and IT, analysis for 2015.

Powerful technologies — such as artificial intelligence, robotics, quantum computing — have the potential to massively transform the business world.

Robert Hillard, Deloitte’s Australia consulting managing partner, says there are eight trends which will disrupt the ways government and business engage with citizens, how work gets done and how markets and industries evolve.

Good leaders know that holding regular planning sessions and reviewing goals is vital to running a successful company. It’s important that mangers set specific goals, consistently review them, focus on their skills, and act on opportunities to achieve our goals.

We all want to be consistent in focusing on our goals, but that can be tough when life presents us with unexpected situations. Your boss might ask more of you at work; your children or spouse might need you to be home more often and available to attend important events; you might even feel like you don’t have enough time for yourself to relax, have fun, and plan for the future. Before long, consistency can seem like an unobtainable dream.

After a century of encouraging Americans to light out for the open spaces of suburbia, the nation’s development gurus have now decided that what we really need are more crowds. Not just more people, but more tall buildings, more shops, more restaurants and more amenities, all of it crammed together in a compact geographic area. The planning shorthand for such concentrated development is "density" and it is hailed as a market-driven cure for a myriad of the world’s problems. By increasing density in our cities and towns, planners say we can reduce dependence on carbon-spewing automobiles, slow environmentally destructive sprawl, increase our stock of affordable housing—while making cities safer and more fun places to live.

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