Reid Hoffman has worked the entire tech-startup ecosystem: he cofounded LinkedIn in 2002, used the money he made there to become one of Silicon Valley’s most prolific angel investors, invested early in Facebook, Zynga, and many others, and is now a venture capitalist at Greylock Partners. At Greylock, which he joined in 2009, Hoffman has focused his investments on consumer Internet companies that use software to create networks of millions of users, such as the home-sharing site Airbnb.

When it comes to climate change, action versus inaction could be the difference between the displacement of “just” 145 million people and upwards of 760 million people from the world’s coastal cities. With the United Nations COP21 global climate summit in Paris just around the corner, the scientists at Climate Central are hoping that stark visuals might spur people — especially those in power — to act. The nonprofit organization of scientists and journalists has released a new report on global sea level rise and an accompanying set of maps that illustrates just how high the water might rise.

Image: (Credit: Climate Central)

This week, Andreessen Horowitz said it’s launching a fund dedicated to investments in bioinformatics and “beyond the pill” technology.  The venture capital firm had already gotten its feet wet with investments in these areas, but a dedicated fund is something new and indicates an interest in ramping up its strategy. With its fund, the firm could make a big impact. Here are some insights on some challenges and opportunities in these areas and some companies the firm should consider.

Entrepreneurs are the lifeline of any economy, and high-growth start-ups in particular are responsible for the great majority of new job creation. It’s worrying, then, that according to several reports the number of new businesses being created in the U.S. has been stalled since the end of the recession.

As a mentor to many start-up entrepreneurs, I find this slow-down concerning, and I see one reason that’s rarely spoken about and needs a closer look: what I call spreadsheet asphyxiation. I repeatedly hear from young entrepreneurs that, as fund managers come in, they introduce too many controls for cash flows, income projections, budgeting, risk analysis, financial modeling – the list is endless.

Until a few years ago Steve Cronce’s Raphael Industries did $1 million dollars a year of specialized industrial painting for customers within driving distance of their plant in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. One of them happened to be GE Healthcare, which sent Raphael “dead” X-Ray tube parts for re-coating and re-commissioning. Challenged by other entrepreneurs in Scale Up Milwaukee’s Scalerator program to come up with a plan for rapidly ramping up his business, Cronce wondered: “What if I redefined Raphael as a strategic link in the global medical imaging supply chain, rather than as a paint shop?” This supply chain epiphany is taking Raphael toward $10 million of work a year by burrowing into GE’s global network as well as serving its competitors. He is poised to become the leader in this segment of a multi-billion dollar market. “By serving as GE’s and other equipment makers’ supply partner, the whole world is now my scope. I am no longer limited by geography.”

By Tom Ballard, Chief Alliance Officer, Pershing Yoakley & Associates, P.C.

Last week’s JusticeXL “Demo Day” might have been Dan Marcum’s swansong, more or less, after four decades involved in entrepreneurial activities. At least, that’s more or less what he says.

The long-time Tullahoma business executive and Founder of the Southern Middle Tennessee Entrepreneur Centers (SMTEC) confirmed the plans about a month ago in an interview with Milt Capps of Venture Nashville Connections.

At last week’s JusticeXL “Demo Day” in Tullahoma, Marcum reaffirmed the decision. There are those of us, including Fran Marcum, his wife, who wonder how long that will last.

Crowdfunding — or soliciting people online to fund projects -- is rapidly growing in popularity around the world, say experts.

Here’s how crowdfunding works: You pitch your project to a large group of people through an online platform. If they are interested in your project, they donate money to fund your project. 

Image: Employees at GlobalGiving at its Washington, DC, office keep the world's first and largest crowdfunding organization open year round. It operates virtually 24/7. (Photo - C. Presutti/VOA).

AUSTRALIA'S quest to develop a stronger innovation ecosystem has seen a growing focus on the income tax system, and whether it should be used as a lever to help achieve this goal.

Some have argued the government should not use tax incentives to spur the shifts needed to make Australia an innovation hub. This view is based on the argument that tax incentives have never been central to the success of Silicon Valley or Israel's innovation ecosystems. However, there has been little analysis of why this is so and no-one has stopped to ask whether this analogy is apt for Australia.

Today there are more ways to fund a new company than ever—from crowdfunding platforms to early-stage angel investors, tech incubators that nurture ideas in management boot camps, wealthy family foundations, corporate venture funds, and record levels of venture capital.

On crowdfunding platforms, where entrepreneurs are now raising billions of dollars a year, the big winners are companies making some kind of object that consumers can envision buying and using themselves.

Image: http://www.technologyreview.com

In 1999, when China’s per capita income was just $850 a year, a 31-year-old entrepreneur named Neil Shen and three friends nevertheless bet that China would soon develop a huge domestic tourism industry. They created a travel-booking website, Ctrip.com. China’s per capita GDP has since grown ninefold, and the domestic tourism market has ballooned to more than $400 billion. Ctrip, which had an initial public offering on Nasdaq in 2003 (and nearly doubled its price on the first day of trading), now has a market capitalization of over $10 billion—and Shen, who went on to found other travel-related companies in China, is a billionaire.

Image: http://www.technologyreview.com

Since last year, Bill Gurley—a partner at the venture capital firm Benchmark, known for early investments in Uber, OpenTable, and Zillow—has stood out from his VC counterparts for his insistence that there’s a bubble in tech startup valuations. In particular, he says “unicorns”—startups valued at $1 billion or more—are the most visible sign of an explosion in valuations that he thinks will end in a bust just as surely as previous bubbles did.

Image: http://www.technologyreview.com

Are technology’s “unicorn” startups dangerously overvalued or not?

Both tech evangelists and critics have strong positions on either side of the argument: on the one hand, it’s now easier than ever to reach billions of people over the internet; on the other, many of the wildly-popular new companies are yet to demonstrate a serious business model.

Image: Alan Levine / Flickr

As colourful fish were swimming past him off the Greek coast, Cathal Redmond was convinced he had taken some great photos with his first underwater camera. But when he looked at the results on dry land, the images were brown and murky.

Having taken the pictures while holding his breath underwater, he blamed the limited time he had to set up the shots. All he needed, the industrial designer thought, was a little more time to properly capture the fish in their natural environment.

Image: http://www.theguardian.com/

In today’s terrifying news, it’s almost the end of the year. I know, I know—it feels like just a second ago, you were smack-dab in the middle of glorious summer. The fact of the matter is that 2015 will be on its way out very soon, and a new year brings with it new goals. Before you throw yourself into tackling your 2016 resolutions, there’s one small housekeeping item: seeing your 2015 ones through to completion. Although you have the finish line of December 31, 2015, in sight, there is still over a month to get it all done. Here, some clutch tips for doing just that.

The doctor handed me the scissors. As I pressed down the blades, snipping the umbilical cord, I looked up at my wife. She was smiling, holding our newborn son.

That was 20 years ago. Our baby is now 6 feet tall and a junior in college. When I look at him, I see all the stages of his life in one continuum, the toddling and the tantrums, the laughs and the arguments, the late nights coaxing a crying infant to sleep and waiting for a teenager to come home.

Image: http://www.fastcompany.com

Most companies make a conscious and deliberate decision to embrace digitization and the information revolution. Yet the role of big data in medicine seems almost to compel organizations to become involved. In this interview, Dr. Eric Schadt, the founding director of the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology at New York’s Mount Sinai Health System, tells McKinsey’s Sastry Chilukuri how data-driven approaches to research can help patients, in what ways technology has the potential to transform medicine and the healthcare system, and how the Icahn Institute is building its talent base. An edited transcript of Schadt’s remarks follows.

“I like to drive cars,” says Mark Reuss, product development chief at General Motors, “so this is a little funny.”

Not funny-ha-ha, Reuss clarifies, but funny-odd. He’s sitting in the driver’s seat, with his hands on his thighs and his feet on the floor of a big Cadillac that’s driving itself around a banked oval.

Image: http://www.bloomberg.com

The pursuit of innovation has pushed large companies to launch accelerators, incubators and hackathons. Some companies succeed in finding new ideas and others don’t. Why the disparity? How can companies crack the code and reap the most benefits from these investments? There are no easy answers, but there are a few necessary elements.

First there must be a problem, an uncomfortable situation, some inefficiency.  Innovation cannot be motivated unless something is broken. The old adage still holds, “Necessity is the mother of innovation.” When there is an aim or great need to make things better, people can maintain focus.

Alteration. Risk-Taking. Bravery. Curiosity. Breakthrough.

Me diving, a sport I took up in midlife.

When you think of innovation, these are the synonyms that come to mind. These characteristics are intimately related to platform diving – a sport I took up at the age of 40.

That was four years ago and I now dive competitively around the world. I also have a passion for innovation, in all its forms, and I push myself to work and think innovatively.  These two pursuits have more in common than you may think.  In fact, I’ve come up with six ways that being a competitive platform diver and striving to be more innovative share a common thread:

In the world of artificial intelligence, one of the year’s biggest coming-out parties is the Neural Information Processing Systems conference. Thousands of researchers from universities and software companies gather to share their work and wrestle with new ways to tailor software to people’s habits. At last year’s conference in Montreal, employees of Google, Microsoft, and IBM presented papers on teaching computers to work faster and smarter, such as by reading the house numbers in a photo to determine an address. But one player was conspicuously absent: Apple. This year, Chinese search giant Baidu and Facebook, along with Google and Microsoft, are slated to present papers. Apple isn’t.

Image: Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg