Your MVP is complete. Some seed funding is in the bank, or maybe even a Series A. You’re anxious to see if your product flies off the shelf. It’s time to make that first sales hire.

This is a big step. The right call can establish the rocket-ship revenue chart every founder dreams of. The wrong call can be bring down the company.

At HubSpot, I hired over 200 salespeople. I made a lot of mistakes. I figured a few things out. Over the years, I have leveraged this experience to help dozens of startups with this critical first sales hire decision.

Venture capital investment in U.S. life sciences companies soared 29 percent in 2014 from the year before, reaching $8.6 billion, the highest level since 2007. And there is reason to think 2015 will also be a big year for a sector having its third boom of the last two decades.+

Image: http://www.technologyreview.com 

Who are innovative leaders? What are their qualities and how do they drive innovation within an organization? Jeffrey Baumgartner provides a tantalizing profile to which we can aspire. The word “innovator,” to describe an individual, is used far too widely these days. As I have written in the past, business innovation is a collaborative affair that runs from idea, through development to implementation. This process normally involves many people with various expertise. So the notion of a lone innovator simply does not exist.

The Swedish Innovation Compass is a digital hub for innovation in Sweden. It is a downloadable app that helps guide users through the complex innovation system in Sweden. Sweden has done a great job of building up the resources in the innovation system, but with that comes complexity. This line of thinking is exactly what inspired the Swedish Innovation Compass, a new tool that helps entrepreneurs, innovators, startups, SME’s, researchers and established businesses find and connect the most relevant available resources.

Image: http://www.arcticstartup.com 

Fellow entrepreneurs tell you what not to sweat over — from obsessing over social media followers to being a perfectionist! Paying attention to the hype “Although it might sound funny in this context, chasing press is often a place where new entrepreneurs spend too much of their time. If you spend the majority of your time reading the news and bemoaning your lack of press in the buzzy blogs for your industry, you’re almost certainly not really focussed on making the news by building a great company with delighted customers.” – Robi Ganguly, Apptentive

Image: http://ventureburn.com 

CHICAGO — Healthbox is excited to announce its new accelerator model helping the most serious healthcare entrepreneurs rapidly scale and grow their businesses. The “Healthbox Studios” are designed in response to evolving market needs and build upon the 12 successful accelerator programs and 79 active portfolio companies Healthbox has supported since its inception in 2012. The first Healthbox Studio in Boston is launching this week, while applications are still open for the 2015 Healthbox Studios in Chicago, Miami and Salt Lake City.

Despite being dealt one of the worst economic situations in recent history, Millennials are optimistic about money. This is especially true in the U.S. where, according to a Pew Research study, young people are more likely to be optimistic than their counterparts in Europe.

One of the byproducts of this optimism is that more young people are becoming entrepreneurs. CNBC reported earlier this month that 18 percent of the population between the age of 25 and 34 are starting businesses in the United States, which is up from 15 percent in 2013.

The pace of our interrelated social problems, economic recessions and spillover effects of the regional disturbances and political instability require stimulation of human innovation and creativity.

Social Entrepreneurship and innovation are being promoted as important drivers of economic and social progress in the latest global discussions and forums.

Student entrepreneurship directors, unite!

For the first time, nearly a dozen of them got together at Venturef0rth last month to discuss how to make the Philly region “a strong entrepreneurship destination for college students,” Drexel’s entrepreneurship director Chuck Sacco told us. They were also looking ahead to the United Association of Small Business and Entrepreneurship conference, which Philly is hosting in January 2017.

The university entrepreneurship scene has started to work more hand in hand with the broader technology community, as notable leaders like Ellen Weber, Zoe Selzer and Sacco have taken positions at universities.

Image: Drexel Startup Day 2014. (Photo by Juliana Reyes)

Previously, I wrote about the importance of planning ahead for proof-of-concept marketing based on my first-hand experience seeing the same consistent mistakes being made by the hundreds of startups calling Red Rocket for help.There’s too much focus on product, and not enough focus on planning for a proof-of-concept around that product, which is what most venture capital firms are looking for before they make an investment in a company. And, to achieve such proof-of-concept, it requires inexperienced entrepreneurs to seek out experienced coaches or mentors to help create smart customer acquisition strategies, and to budget for them accordingly.

Image: http://www.alleywatch.com

J. C. Penney’s recent announcement that it is resurrecting its print catalog reflects a trend of retailers returning to the print medium as an important sales and marketing tool.

While Bloomingdale’s and Saks Fifth Avenue have been mailing catalogs for years, now specialty retailers are picking up the tactic.  Some, like Anthropologie, are launching new catalogs, while J.Crew and Restoration Hardware have significantly upgraded their catalogs in the past couple of years.  Even digital retailers such as Bonobos, the menswear retailer, and Birchbox, the beauty subscription service, have started mailing catalogs.  According to the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), catalog mailings grew in 2013 to 11.9 billion.

A shortened, better edited and with nicer pictures version of this post first appeared on TechCrunch. But if you want it in it’s full V1 glory read on … You’ve never been a CEO but might like to be one some day. But how? Nobody sees you as a CEO since you’ve never been one? I wrote this conundrum and the need to take charge of how the market define your skills in my much-read blog post on “personal branding.”  If you don’t create the message about yourself, the market will. And if you want to be a CEO one day you need the messaging to reflect that.

Some of Europe’s leading research centres are joining forces to create new scientific instruments, products, companies and jobs in the field of detector and imaging technologies. 

CERN, the European Southern Observatory (ESO), the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility(ESRF) and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) are in the planning stage of putting together a new collaboration called ATTRACT.

The aim is to take technologies that these leading centres rely on to carry out their own research and work together to promote commercial applications. Detector and imaging technology in use for research could form the basis of improved computer tomography, magnetic resonance imaging and positron emission tomography scanners for use in healthcare, for example.

Recently, I got a call from Patrick, an ex-student I hadn’t heard from for 8 years. He's now the CEO of a company and wanted to talk about what he admitted was a “first world” problem. Over breakfast he got me up to date on his life since school (two non-CEO roles at startups), but he wanted to talk about his third startup — the one he and two other co-founders had most recently started.

Students, edit your resumes and type up your cover letters — it's internship time.

But the competition will be stiff, especially if you're applying to Facebook, whose internships are rated the highest for the second year in a row, according to careers website Glassdoor. (What's the secret, Zuckerberg?)

William Hakizimana is hunkered down in a tiny sixth floor office at 100state, the coworking space overlooking the capitol Square, tinkering with a platform to help U.S. firms do business overseas. 

His company is called Export Abroad and Hakizimana thinks it’s got a chance to take off. The idea is to compile a database of trusted contacts and customers in emerging markets so companies can confidently do business in new territory. 

Family-owned companies have entrenched cultures and values. Outsiders are needed to balance such firms, but they must tread very carefully.

Family businesses, like all for-profit organisations, are driven by values related to competition, wealth, responsibility, fairness and hard work. These values are built up over generations and the cultural background of the family also has a lot to do with the behaviour of family business owners. In India, for example, family actions often lead to business actions.

Why do a few entrepreneurs, like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, seem to come up with all the real innovations, while the majority of business leaders seem stuck in the rut of linear thinking? I have always wondered if innovation required some rare gene mutation, or whether I might be missing a simple formula for unlocking the ability in any intelligent business person to innovate.

A great chart is circulating on Twitter from Ian Bremmer that shows which countries have the strongest economies and how big they are.

It is from the World Bank's International Comparison Program, which is one of the most exhaustive research sources on the world's wealth and who has it.

Image: http://www.businessinsider.com

The University of Central Florida looks to break ground sometime this year on a new on-campus research and incubator facility. The project is expected to cost $45 million and is estimated to be nearly 120,000 square feet. Tom O'Neal, associate vice president for research and commercialization at UCF, said the university is coming up with $20 million for Phase 1 of the first building. Overall, the project — officially titled the Interdisciplinary Research and Incubator Facility — will have two buildings.