Speaking at a gathering of young entrepreneurs a few years ago, Mark Zuckerberg surprised some in the audience by saying that if he could do it all over again, he would have stayed in Boston and founded Facebook there, not in Silicon Valley. “There’s a culture out here where people don’t commit to doing things, I feel like a lot of companies built outside of Silicon Valley seem to be focused on a longer-term,” he said. “You don’t have to move out here to do this.”

The startups were different, but the complaint from founders was always the same: hiring top engineers was the single most difficult and most critical task they faced.

Seeking to build a data-driven venture firm to help founders land top technical talent at the same time, then-General Catalyst partner Chris Farmer began recruiting nearly a dozen engineers to build a data platform.

Image: SignalFire founder Chris Farmer SignalFire

Journalists constantly meet new companies who pitch their product. Often reporters are mystified by lengthy descriptions of products or services pitched by an entrepreneur or executive. Buzzwords like “big data in the cloud” and “growth hacking” tell journalists little to nothing about what your product or service actually does.

Journalists want to hear an interesting hook, something an audience will instantly connect with, and is different from things other people are working on. If you are looking to create more effective PR pitches, follow the tips below.

When you look up into the night sky you are used to seeing a collection of stars and satellites sending their light down to earth. Now imagine in less than a year, a sky full of drones, closer to the earth, more manageable than satellites and that send and receive data at a faster rate. This could be the very near future as drones start emerging into the consumer market. When you think of drones, military Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV’s) or remote controlled helicopters may come to mind. However, drones are evolving like the rest of the world and there are a lot of different ways they will be involved in our everyday lives very soon.

The only thing worse than having team players out of the loop when it comes to important company news is rumors being spread in order to compensate for the lack of information. That’s why we asked 11 entrepreneurs from Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) the following question:

Image: http://smallbiztrends.com

The number of private tech companies valued at $1 billion or more has surged so much this year that on average 1.3 so-called "unicorn" companies have been created every week in 2015.

And in spite of Silicon Valley insiders' fears of a tech bubble, that number doesn't seem to be declining.

Much has been made of the federal government’s attempts to attract top-flight tech talent from Silicon Valley. Over the past few years, the Obama administration has launched two teams of digital fixers -- the 18F team at the General Services Administration and the White House’s U.S. Digital Service team -- staffed with Facebook, Google and Apple alumni. 

But the next phase of the strategy to inculcate innovative digital practices in the halls of government might be to focus on the smartest people already in the room.

Resveratrol for the win: Red wine drinkers had better levels of HDL cholesterol, better sleep and lower cardiometabolic risk factors

MORE You Asked: Should I Count Calories? Why Some Healthy Foods Are Not Sustainable Alcohol is the Goldilocks of the nutrition world. Too much can be destructive to your health, raising your blood pressure and your risk of developing several kinds of cancer. Too little may hold you back from some of the benefits that moderate drinkers enjoy, like lower incidence of cardiovascular disease, mortality and type-2 diabetes.

The U.S. Department of Energy is markedly stepping up efforts to promote commercialization of new technologies from DOE laboratories nationwide, and New Mexico’s labs are playing a critical role in the process.

Jetta Wong, acting director of the DOE’s new Office of Technology Transitions, said she and other federal representatives have been meeting with executives from the DOE’s 17 national labs to learn more about tech-transfer programs at each and to explore ways to reinforce technology commercialization.

Image: Jetta Wong, DOE Acting director for Technology Transitions, Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., and Sen.Tom Udall, D-N.M., listen to Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., during a roundtable discussion on technology transfer in Albuquerque on Wednesday, October 14, 2015. (Greg Sorber/Albuquerque Journal)

To serious motorcycle racers like Andrea and Barry Coleman, flat-track racing is the most primal, authentic, and thrilling form of competition, harkening back to the origins of the sport at the turn of the twentieth century. The track itself is dirt and configured in the classic oval shape. Motorcycles make 20 or so counterclockwise laps during the course of a race, at speeds of over 100 miles an hour. As the bikes roar around the track, they gradually wear a groove where you’d expect to find it—near the center, just hugging the inside. Along the outside, the kicked-up dirt and dust forms what’s known as the cushion. Throughout the race, riders tend to stay in the groove, avoiding the cushion, where the ride is riskier because the dirt is soft and traction is uncertain.

Image: TO SUCCEED, RIDERS FOR HEALTH NEEDED TO PARTNER CLOSELY WITH COMMUNITY HEALTH WORKERS. PHOTO COURTESY OF RIDERS FOR HEALTH. 

“Whoa! What are you doing?” I asked aghast.

I had just walked into my daughter’s room as she was working on a science project. Normally, I would have been pleased at such a sight. But this time, her project involved sand. A lot of it. And, while she had put some plastic underneath her work area, it wasn’t nearly enough. The sand was spreading all over our newly renovated floors.

Image: https://hbr.org

There is a cliche in the financial world that has been around forever.

“Two things drive decisions: Greed and Fear”

For the past few years, we’ve been a zone where greed has been dominating. Every now and then a little fear creeps in and then gets squished into the corner by chants of “things are different this time” and “that’s just PTSD from the Internet bubble.” 

It took the better part of a Sunday, but my office was looking great. My files were organized and my workspace was clear, except for my laptop and monitor, as well as a notebook, cup of coffee and pen. Months of feeling guilty about the state of my office were now a memory.

The majority of all new jobs in the U.S. are created by startups and small and medium-sized businesses -- and that entrepreneurial engine has slowed down considerably.

The U.S. Census Bureau reports that the lines for the total number of business startups and business closures per year -- the birth and death rates of American companies with one or more employees -- crossed for the first time in 2008. In the nearly 30 years before that, the U.S. consistently averaged a surplus of almost 120,000 more business births than deaths each year.

A new survey of Harvard Business School alumni pointed to entrepreneurship as the strongest element of the national economy -- and that it is still improving. Entrepreneurship was joined by capital markets, universities and innovation as significant strengths in the U.S. 

What is at the opposite end of the spectrum? The tax code, politics, health care and education. 

Image: http://www.kauffman.org

All design should be about utility. What makes a product have great design is how your customer feels when they use it. Some of that feel comes from how the product looks, but so much more comes from how usable and frictionless the product experience is.

When looking at industrial design, there’s been a lot of debate about which philosophy is better: Do you design first, and then make engineering fit that design, or do you get the engineering down first, and then make the industrial design fit the guts of the product?

The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) announced today the addition of three more cluster organizations to the portfolio of communities supported through the SBA Regional Innovation Clusters initiative, raising the total number of awardees in the program to 14.

The three new Regional Innovation Clusters—each receiving $500,000 for the base year of the contract, with four option years to be exercised at the SBA’s discretion, for up to a total of $2.5 million per cluster initiative—are:

Sixty years ago, Boston was a basket case, facing a bleak economic future. After peaking in the 1950s, the city’s population collapsed. It was an almost catastrophic exodus, as 30 percent of its residents — wage-earners and tax payers — left, many of them to the suburbs.

Jump forward to today, and it’s a dramatically different story: Boston in 2015 has the highest concentration of startup companies in America, it’s at the center of the global biotech industry and it’s home to a booming tourist trade and a red hot real estate market.

Image: In Boston, what started as a colony has become a hub of international innovation. (Emmanuel Huybrechts/Flickr)  

SOUTH-East Asian entrepreneurs need to work together and drive the way the region does business, urged Dr Mohd Irwan Serigar Abdullah, Secretary-General of the Treasury at Malaysia’s Ministry of Finance.   “As long as we work together, we too can create our own ecosystem in Asean (the Association of South-East Asian Nations).   “It doesn’t always have to be about Silicon Valley,” he said in his opening speech at the media preview of the 1Asean Entrepreneurship Summit (1AES) in Kuala Lumpur on Oct 15.

Russia is pursuing its innovation dream. Over the past eight years, 12 new science parks housing 775 startups were established in the country. The range of research is ambitious, covering IT and aerospace, as well as biotechnology and the food industry. Next year, Russia will host the 33rd World Conference on Science Parks and Areas of Innovation, which is organized by the International Association of Science Parks (IASP). Its president, Jean François Balducchi, revealed to RBTH that one of the reasons Russia was selected to host the event was the country's rapid growth of new science parks, as is especially evident outside the capital.

Image: Navigator Campus technopark in Kazan. Source: Alexey Nasyrov / TASS - http://asia.rbth.com/science_and_tech/2015/10/14/startups_bring_the_revolution_to_russia_but_business_develop_50075.html)