This (usually) means that the VC believes the opportunity you are pursuing isn’t a big enough opportunity for them to invest in.  In other words, what you are building should be a feature to something else already out there, instead of a stand-alone company that will generate the type of returns that the VC is looking for.  For instance, assume you are building something that fits inside an email client that does X.  (Perhaps “X” translates languages).  While super helpful to some folks, a VC may take the postion that this should be a feature or tool within the email client, but not an opportunity to build a large company with paying customers around it.  Of course, we can debate whether this is a correct statement, but in the eye of the VC this is how it is.

We got a tour of StartX, the non-profit accelerator program for Stanford students and recent alums.

The accelerator provides office space -- but doesn't take any equity. The startups aren't pressured to raise money, but most end up raising money anyway.

The point is to help them learn and give them access to mentors and information. And they also give them feedback.

The lecture title no doubt helped draw the throng to Shaker LaunchHouse on a cold and rainy November night. "Launching a Billion Dollar Company: The Story of OfficeMax."

More striking than the size of the crowd was its youthfulness. Young professionals, college students and even some high schoolers filled more than 300 folding chairs arrayed across what was once the service garage of a car dealership.

They came to hear local businessman Bob Hurwitz describe how he built from scratch a chain of office superstores. First, Todd Goldstein, the 29-year-old co-founder of LaunchHouse, reminded everyone why that mattered.

As assistant vice chancellor of technology transfer and intellectual property development, Alan Bentley has spent the past six months overseeing expansion of Vanderbilt University’s push to commercialize research and turn discoveries into products.

It’s an area that saw a decline in startup activity in recent years as the university reassessed how it funds new drugs, technologies and other innovations developed in-house — and gets them to market.

Bentley, 40, arrived at Vanderbilt from the technology commercialization arm of the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, where he was director of commercialization. In Cleveland, he focused on cardiovascular medical devices developed by the clinic’s doctors.

How much can you accomplish with not much?

That’s the question du jour for every entrepreneur. Investors are obsessed with “capital efficient’’ businesses, and just like a spouse haranguing you to visit the gym more often, they believe that everything could be sleeker and more streamlined.

“If you’re going out to the investor community saying that you’re going to need $50 million or more to get to commercialization, it’s going to be a tough slog,’’ says Rob Day, a Boston investor who focuses on the energy industry. “There has unquestionably been a shift to more capital efficient companies over the last two or three years.’’

Two Maryland biotechs announced inroads in their efforts to develop stem cell treatments for depression and diabetes.

Neuralstem has gotten the regulatory go-ahead to advance to phase 1b in its ongoing clinical trial of its stem cell treatment for major depressive disorder.

NSI-189 stimulates new neuron growth in the brain’s hippocampus, which may be involved in depression and other conditions, including Alzheimer's disease and post-traumatic stress disorder, according to the Rockville biotech.

One of the questions most founders always ask is about the key secrets to hiring.  What they need to understand is that there’s a big difference between “hiring” and “talent”.  I’m continually surprised how rarely I see people put down their strategy for talent compared to hiring. It’s so prevalent, in fact, you’ll often see on a company’s priorities a bullet of “hiring”.  And that slight shift in wording fundamentally sets up the wrong dynamics.  Hiring, is a sub-bullet of talent and if you’re focusing on hiring you’ll be quickly setting up a revolving door.  However, if you’re focusing on talent, you now can create a strategy to build a great team.In my experience of building teams in academia, government, and industry at different sizes, I’ve found three critical questions that help an organization create that shift to focus on talent.

Silicon Valley’s greatest asset is the brilliant minds that roam the buildings and inhabit the coffee shops. Since moving back to Silicon Valley in June, I’ve met a lot of amazing people. On average, they are the smartest people I know. I have conversations on a regular basis that I just can’t have anywhere else. Yes, I’ve worked with smart people in other places, but the concentration here is unique.

But that brilliance comes with some blinders. Instead of figuring out how to adapt to real users, we too often expect them to adapt to us.

In a post last week about car-service Uber’s outlandish New Year’s Eve  surcharges, I made the seemingly innocuous comment that the multiplier Uber used to explain the pricing was confusing to casual users; that it’d be better to display a rate in dollars or the minimum charge at a given time. A number of people responded that a user can do the math, so it’s not a big deal.

How about this for a goal: Try something — anything — for 30 days.

Simple enough, no? Matt Cutts, a Google employee who specialises in search engine optimization, expands this idea into a two minutes, 44 second pep talk at a TED conference last year.

It turns out that 30 days is the perfect time-frame for giving anything a shot, Cutts says. He took a picture a day, rode a bicycle to work, cut sugar out of his diet and wrote a novel. Not all at once, mind you. The trick is to choose something sustainable, so even if it’s hard you can think, “Only 28 more days.” Or 25, or 13. The payoff, he says, can be immeasurable.

I am passionate about cars and always have been. As a child, I imagined owning a car that would do whatever I wanted it to. Of course, it could fly as well as drive. But more important, it would do much more than simply getting me from point A to point B. My future car would look out for me, entertain me, and make sure that I would never be late for a playdate with my friends.

These are no longer childish notions. The automotive and transportation industries are entering a phase of the most significant innovation since the popularization of personal automobiles a hundred years ago. Similar to the way telephones have evolved into smart phones, over the next 10 years automobiles will rapidly become "connected vehicles" that access, consume, and create information and share it with drivers, passengers, public infrastructure, and machines including other cars. We can already predict benefits such as reduced accident rates, improved productivity, lowered emissions, and on-demand entertainment for passengers. The rise of connected cars will lead to widespread changes affecting many kinds of businesses, not to mention governments and communities. As just one example, we are seeing collaborations between automakers and life-science companies to develop in-vehicle health-monitoring sensors that can transmit data about the driver's health in case of an emergency.

Raising capital can be a thriller. Reality beats fiction hands down.

This is the riveting account of my company’s first round of seed capital financing. The true identities of parties involved have been withheld.

I founded ParisSharing in early 2010 with a pocket’s worth of personal capital.  Its survival in 2012 would be compromised without an inflow of seed capital. The goal is not to survive, but to grow. The ambitious business plan bet on a bound from a meager first year of 20k€ in sales to 4.5 million € within five years. Ambitious business plans are the only ones that attract investors. Who wants to risk money on half-hearted hopes? The paradox of this of course is that business plans are systematically over-optimistic.

Creating good content and a strong following is hard work.  Many have learned this lesson and many more are still learning.  Just ask any major media outlet. The race for content that attracts an audience is very competitive and changes rapidly. The most compelling content is that which creates ideas for others to create opportunities.

Idea That Encourage Creativity

I bought my wife an IPad 2 for Christmas. Throughout last year we had several conversations about Apple products and their attractiveness. My wife loves her IPhone but kept discounting the need for an IPad. I told her she wouldn’t feel that way if she had one. She kept saying “So what is the big deal about the IPad that would make me want one?” I could explain it accept to say “The creative experience is what makes it different.”  Now that she has one she understands why.

There's more to being a boss than just telling people what to do. It's about building a rapport and fostering a real relationship with your employees, so that you trust each other and can get things done.

Unfortunately, many managers don't care about their employees' morale, and spur them on by any means necessary. They fail to realize that it all has an impact on how well your company runs, and can have a major impact on your productivity, ability to retain talent and your bottom line.

There's no one-size-fits-all method, since every company has a a different corporate culture and every manager has their own unique style. But there are things that should be avoided in most situations if you want employees not to hate coming to work every day.

If you're considering joining a hot startup or a big tech company, you may want to weigh the differences -- in terms of dollars in your bank account. The StartupDigest quantifies the loss for you.

According to data gathered from startup employees who are part of the StartupDigest community, if you work for a startup that has raised millions in funding, your base salary will be 5 to 10 percent lower than you'd get at bigger tech companies like Microsoft or Google (though specific companies weren't mentioned for the sake of privacy).

Vint Cerf, Google's Chief Internet Evangelist and a prominent computer scientist recognized as a "father of the Internet," has an op-ed in the New York Times contending that Internet access is not a human right.

His argument seems to boil down to the idea that "technology is an enabler of rights, not a right itself."

More than 170,000 people have signed up for Codecademy’s challenge to learn how to code in 2012, and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is one of them.

The challenge, Code Year, was launched by New York-based startup Codecademy on Sunday and quickly took off as Twitter and Facebook users adopted it as their New Years resolution.

Every startup, as well as mature business, needs to learn as much as possible from Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, who have set the standards for fast growth and success in today’s business world. These companies, designated the “gang of four” by Eric Schmidt last year, are clearly driving a consumer and business revolution on the Internet today.

According to many technology pundits, including Phil Simon, in his new book “The Age of the Platform,” these four exemplify the rise of platforms with applications as a business model, rather than a single product or service. Whether you believe his conclusion or not, you can learn a lot from the tips he offers on how to build a competitive business model today:

Act small. “Bigness” and all of its attendant problems – bureaucracy, politics, infighting, and the like – put any business model at risk. Bureaucracy and excessive democracy kill speed. Shake organizations up often to avoid stiff and inflexible management structures.

Ted Olsen needed to make his Baltimore environmental testing company sound so intriguing that the venture capitalists packing a hotel ballroom would beg to hear more.

The CEO of PathSensors Inc. was on the hunt for $1.5 million in financing. Like a business version of speed dating, Olsen had six minutes — less than the time it takes to cook spaghetti — to bring to life the company into which he poured his sweat, dreams and savings.

Battling colds and doing (or pledging to do) more exercise are familiar activities for most of us in January. But different levels of exercise can actually significantly increase or decrease your chances of catching a respiratory infection, says Professor Mike Gleeson from Loughborough University.

While regular moderate exercise can reduce the risk of catching cold-like infections, prolonged strenuous exercise, such as marathons, can make an individual more susceptible. This is a topical area of research in the year of the Olympics, says Professor Gleeson talking at the Association for Science Education (ASE) Conference on Friday, on behalf of the Society for General Microbiology and the British Society for Immunology.

Upper- respiratory tract infections (URTIs) are acute infections that affect the nose, throat and sinuses, and include the common cold, tonsillitis, sinusitis and flu. Viruses that circulate in the environment usually cause URTIs. While we are constantly exposed to these viruses, it is the status of our immune system that determines whether we succumb to infection or not. Exercise can have both a positive and negative effect on immune function, combined with genetics and other external factors like stress, poor nutrition and lack of sleep. Collectively these factors determine an individual’s susceptibility to infection.

President Barack Obama signed legislation Dec. 31 that reauthorized the Small Business Innovation Research program for six years.

Through the SBIR program, the 11 federal agencies with the biggest outside research budgets are required to spend at least 2.5 percent of this money with small businesses. The new legislation, which was attached to a defense reauthorization bill, increases that share to 3.2 percent over the next six years.