T. Rowe Price sunk gobs of money into companies such as Cloudera, Dropbox, Apptio and Evernote in recent years, oftentimes at lofty valuations.

Now, the giant mutual fund manager is resetting some of those bets. According to a report in The Information (subscription required), T. Rowe Price has marked down its stakes in a number of companies.

Image: Apptio CEO Sunny Gupta at the company’s HQ in Bellevue 

There's been a lot of talk about Reg A lately. I must receive an email a day pitching a deal, a webinar, or a legal whitepaper. Heck, there was more lip service given to Reg A than crowdfunding at the CfPA Crowdfunding Conference last month.

Given all of the enthusiasm – and confusion – surrounding Reg A, I thought it was fitting to offer a "Cliff Notes" version of what's most important for you to know. I try to limit the word count in this blog and my good friend Lou Bevilacqua was kind enough to oblige by creating this “Top 10 List” for the short-attention-span crowd (like yours truly).

Though crowdfunding may seem like a relatively buzzy phenomenon given the emergence of digital platforms, it’s actually an age-old financial model dating back to the 1800s.

“They crowdfunded the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty over 100 years ago,” says expert consultant Sally Outlaw. “(Joseph) Pulitzer went to the crowd and said we need a dollar per person, and 100,000 people gave a dollar.”

 

Although Andrew Keen works in Silicon Valley, he took the Valley to task last year with the publication of his book, “The Internet Is Not the Answer.” In it, Keen argues that the Internet often hurts the middle class, artists, and small businesses.

Image: Andrew Keen is pictured in Amsterdam in 2015. (Vera de Kok/Wikimedia Commons) 

At a basic level, AngelList is the LinkedIn for startups; it’s a directory for finding and researching great startups. Many of the biggest seed venture capital firms and angel investors are on the list, and many use it to help them source and validate deals.

But AngelList is also a crowdfunding platform, a way for startups and investors not only to connect with each other, but also to actually raise money through what AngelList calls Syndicates. Most of the startups on the list that do well raising money with AngelList are in their seed or A round.

The best alternative to venture capital funding is almost never discussed and used even less.  This alternative is royalty financing. 

Royalty financing is simple.  Here’s how it works: You, the investor, advance me, the entrepreneur, $1 million.  (Note the word advance.  More on that later.)  I put the $1 million to work and promise to pay you 3% (or 5% or 2% — pick a number) of my gross sales until you get back $3 million — your initial $1 million, plus $2 million more. 

The Tampa Bay startup community's resolution for the new year must have been to kick into higher gear. From venture capital investing to clever new entrepreneurial ventures, the region is starting to leverage all those earlier years spent building an infrastructure to help sharp, committed people launch — and execute — new business ideas.

Entrepreneurs and startups are big believers in innovation, but sometimes they forget that innovation must be continual to assure long-term success, rather than the one big-bang idea that initiated their journey. By default, innovation in every business decreases over time, and continuous innovation requires ongoing initiatives and measures of customer perceived value.

Caltech researchers have found evidence of a giant planet tracing a bizarre, highly elongated orbit in the outer solar system that the researchers have nicknamed Planet Nine.

It has a mass about ten times that of Earth and orbits about 20 times farther from the sun on average than does Neptune (which orbits the sun at an average distance of 2.8 billion miles). In fact, it would take this new planet between 10,000 and 20,000 years to make just one full orbit around the sun.

Image: This artistic rendering shows the distant view from Planet Nine back towards the sun. The planet is thought to be gaseous, similar to Uranus and Neptune. Hypothetical lightning lights up the night side. (credit: Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC)) 

Iowa would have another startup accelerator if the Greater Des Moines Partnership has its way.

The Partnership, the largest business group in central Iowa, is working to develop an accelerator that would focus on agriculture-technology companies.

Babson College is an acknowledged leader in entrepreneurship education. What is less well known is that Babson, for example via the Babson Entrepreneurship Ecosystem Project (BEEP), has been innovating the use of entrepreneurship for economic development, but with a twist: Rather than increasing the growth of new firms, BEEP has been focusing on increasing new growth in firms, new and existing. The results of several years of work in Manizales-Mas and Scale Up Milwaukee have been very encouraging.

Experience is what you get just after you needed it.  Or so the saying goes, suggesting that if only you had known beforehand what you learn afterwards, you would have avoided mistakes and achieved a better result.  That’s largely true (in my experience!) but it isn’t a blanket statement that’s applicable in all cases.

A lot of people succeed at innovation because they didn’t have enough experience to realize that they should have failed.  When they started they didn’t have enough knowledge or experience to appreciate all the barriers they had to overcome, so they either ignored them or surpassed them when they were encountered.

Image: http://www.innovationexcellence.com

Entrepreneurship is a driving force in the new economy. While debates continue around whether entrepreneurs are born or can be created, one thing is clear: people learn a great deal from the experiences of others. Entrepreneurs especially learn a great deal “on the job” and often find inspiration and mentorship from those who have “been there, done that.”

Image: Julie Lenzer Kirk, Director of the Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Participates in the Commerce Department’s First-Ever Open for Innovation Event. - https://www.commerce.gov

Time has a way of slowing down to a glacial pace when you are watching the clock at work. The idea of putting in "face time" seems antiquated in the age of flexible work schedules. But what if you work in an office that seems to value how long you're at your desk more than what you are accomplishing?

Much has been written about “stress management” techniques that are primarily behavioral in nature — such as getting adequate sleep, regular exercise, and mental downtime; taking vacation; doing controlled breathing; practicing yoga or mindfulness meditation; or getting acupuncture treatments. But relatively little has been written recently on the benefits of self-disciplined articulation of a philosophical worldview and core values that help us weather the storms and devastations that inevitably rock our lives and careers.

"What is as graceful and beautiful as a butterfly, as ferocious as the most dangerous predator, and delivers a painful sting with its venomous spines?"

The Maryland region is one of the richest sources of health care knowledge and research innovation in the world. Here you can find more than 800 life sciences companies, 70 federal labs, regulatory agencies such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and elite academic, medical and research institutions. Most of these resources are unique to our area and cannot be replicated anywhere else in the U.S.

The latest report from Bloomberg provides proof if any was needed of the link between education, research and innovation. The Bloomberg US Innovation Index ranks Massachusetts as the number one state for innovation in the US in 2015, followed by California, Washington, New Jersey and Connecticut.  The least innovative states are Mississippi, West Virginia and South Dakota.

Image: http://www.thenextsiliconvalley.com

More innovation will be the determining factor in achieving greater progress. Countries’ economic and trade policies can either help or hurt global innovation. For example, policies such as robust investment in and tax incentives for research and education support global innovation. In contrast, policies such as export subsidies or forced localization harm global innovation.

Image: http://www.thenextsiliconvalley.com

When General Electric announced last week that it would move its headquarters to Boston, the accompanying $145 million incentive package received a lot of attention. Now that more details are being released, it turns out the agreement is much more interesting than the total dollar value or cost per job calculations. Here are 5 important points about the deal.