It’s a well-accepted axiom in the investor community that entrepreneurs learn more from their failures than their successes. Thus a well-explained startup failure often can actually improve your odds of funding in the next go-round. Yet, there is no doubt that the best strategy is to learn from someone else’s mistakes, so you can enjoy the millions that someone else lost in learning.

Certainly there are innumerable possible mistakes to be made, but there is a thread of common ones that I see across the range of all startups. Ryan Blair, a serial entrepreneur who admits to his share of million dollar mistakes, as well as some multi-million dollar successes, sums these up nicely in his current bestseller “Nothing to Lose, Everything to Gain:”

You throw open your wallet all the time as a small business owner. The printer is out of paper – out comes the wallet. You’re a little short on payroll – out comes the wallet. It’s time to retire – out comes the… whoops.

It’s easy to forget about the future when you’re spending so much time, money, and energy dealing with the problems that have your attention right now. Jim Blasingame, a contributor at Forbes refers to small businesses as a teenager with a hand constantly extended, asking for more and more money. Except, as Blasingame points out, small businesses have dozens of hands that clamor for your cash.

As women, we face more obstacles than most men do during our careers.

Whether we are managers, supervisors or underlings, we face the glass ceiling, gender issues, pay issues, etc. — the list goes on.  I’ve often wondered how women who own businesses are treated.  Are they treated differently because they are the owners?  Are they greeted with skeptic looks when networking?  What’s it like to be a woman entrepreneur nowadays?

Women entrepreneurs have opportunities now like never before.  But, the success they achieve does not come without barriers and challenges.  Of all the women entrepreneurs I spoke with, the biggest challenge, across the board, is the fact that women are more emotional, caring or compassionate than our counterparts.

The recent events in the American economy, namely the downgrading of the US credit rating by S&P, may affect hi-tech and biomed companies.

These companies depend on the American economy in several critical ways: the US is the main market for their products; they need to raise capital, most of which comes from American venture-capital funds; and to make an exit, they need an active capital market, or high-growth companies with money available to invest in acquisitions. These are almost exclusively American companies.

‘When the IPO market is weak, the sector suffers’ “Current events in the US are definitely not good for us,” Genesis Partners partner Dr. Eyal Kishon said. “When our companies don’t sell, when the relevant investors don’t want to invest, and when the IPO market is weak, the entire sector suffers.”

In the global economy, when Europe sneezes, the United States catches a cold. Ewww. No one knows why Europe can't just cover its mouth -- and its sovereign debt.

The rest of the world should consider dragging its sorry assets to Silicon Valley, which remained an oasis of calm last week. As fears of an impending debt crisis engulfed global markets, and a Standard & Poor's downgrade put the stink on America's credit rating, stock indexes turned into fever charts, with the Dow Jones industrial average reversing field by 1,063, 949 and 943 points on consecutive days.

The sky was falling everywhere, including much of the South Bay, where foreclosure rates in Santa Clara County remained depressingly high, and 10.3 percent of the people kept at the grim job of looking for a job. But the sky didn't fall on the heart of Silicon Valley.

The explosive success of companies such as Google, Apple, PayPal and Facebook means there is a generation of computer geeks turned multi-millionnaires, who have money to invest and are keen to plough it back into the industry they understand.

Europe, by comparison, has lagged far behind. Funding has been thin on the ground and smaller scale, prompting a succession of Britain's most talented entrepreneurs to pack their bags for West Coast America.

However, that is starting to change and will accelerate rapidly as Europe yields its own success stories, technology investors claim.

At the risk of stating the obvious, I’ll say this right up front: The patent system in both Europe and the United States is the biggest threat to innovation in the world today.

Rather than competing with each other on price and features, the biggest tech companies want to fight it out in court where some Luddite judge—rather than the market—can decide who wins and loses. By claiming that another company has violated some vague patent, one vendor can use the legal system to either block rival products from the market or demand hefty kickbacks (a.k.a. licensing fees) from their makers.

Entrepreneurship is a vital driving force for job creation and economic growth. The benefits however are not just economic. Entrepreneurship also plays a role in the attainment of an individual’s goals and the realisation of social objectives.

Entrepreneurship leads to the setting up of SMEs. It is organisations this size that make up the vast majority of European businesses. Their size is also attributed with giving these companies the flexibility to react quickly to economic downturns thus making the economy more resilient to market turbulence which could be instrumental in weathering a crisis.

BANGALORE: A student in the auditorium got up and asked, "How do you know your idea for an entrepreneurial venture will work?" Pat came the reply from 'unconventional entrepreneur' Saumil Majumdar, "When you get married to someone, you don't know whether the marriage will work. You work hard to make it work!"

Fun, advice, suggestions and discussions were aplenty at Eximius 2011 meet at Indian Institute of Management - Bangalore on Saturday. It's a twoday conference with the theme 'Unconventional Entrepreneurship'.

Throughout history, the American economy has been invigorated through giant leaps forward in technological vision and genius.

Today, most of us imagine the proverbial Silicon Valley garage when we think of innovators at work on the next big idea. But a century ago, the workshops of Detroit gave birth to the innovations that lifted society up.

The auto industry created new economic growth and jobs for middle class Americans. Detroit became a world-class manufacturing center -- the American dream made real.

CORPORATE social responsibility efforts have always struck me as the modern equivalent of John D. Rockefeller handing out dimes to the common folk. They may be well-intentioned, but they often seem like small gestures at the margins of what companies are really trying to do: make money.

As well they should, an argument most famously made by the Nobel laureate Milton Friedman decades ago. He called social responsibility programs “hypocritical window-dressing” in an article he wrote for The New York Times Magazine in 1970, titled “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.”

But Michael E. Porter, a Harvard Business School professor, may have an answer to the Friedman principle. Mr. Porter is best-known for his original ideas about corporate strategy and the economic competition among nations and regions. Recently, however, he has been promoting a concept he calls “shared value.”

I’m not much of a television person, but my family loves one of the popular “reality” shows, called “So You Think You Can Dance,” so I’m sort of forced to watch it every week on Fox. Over time, I’ve concluded that even startup entrepreneurs can learn a few things from this one. Of course, you must ignore the pomp and circumstance of the TV staging.

I’m on the selection committee of our local angels group, so I know that every CEO approaching our group for funding goes through ten minutes of creative “dancing,” to give us a basis for selecting startups that are most qualified and “ready” to proceed to the next level. If selected, they go through it again in the real meeting of 20-40 investors. It’s tough and not fun for either side.

The Nebraska Department of Economic Development has outlined implementation steps for the new Angel Investment Tax Credit Program.

Investors can start applying for certification to be eligible for a 35 percent to 40 percent refundable state income tax credit for investment in certified Nebraska startups. The bill goes into effect Sept. 1.

The Angel Investment Tax Credit Program is part of the Talent and Innovation Initiative supported by Gov. Dave Heineman and approved by the Legislature this year. The package of bills aims to improve the state's economic climate for entrepreneurs, inventors and small businesses and as the governor has said, "put a laser-like focus on growing Nebraska's innovation economy,"

After a decade’s lull, the IPO is back, stoking dreams of entrepreneurs looking to cash out. Yes, dramatic market swings have changed some game plans recently, but in the first two quarters of 2011, 79 companies issued initial public offerings generating $24.3 billion, more than double the amount raised in the same period last year, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. Often overlooked by newbies: By the time a company is ready to go public, the founders usually have diluted their personal ownership stakes considerably through previous financing rounds.

It is not uncommon for angel investors and venture capitalists to seek up to 40 percent of a startup’s equity each time entrepreneurs raise capital. Over the course of multiple rounds, total ownership by outside investors can climb to 75 percent. At the same time, to keep employees excited, another 20 percent of shares have to be set aside for an options pool on an undiluted basis. The combination of new investors and an expanded options pool is a double whammy, reducing the ownership of founders (and previous investors) even more. By the time the company is close to listing, founders will be lucky to retain five percent to 10 percent of the equity.

What were you doing at 16 years old? Chances are you weren’t speaking in front of a group at a former US President’s Global Initiative, trying to raise half a million dollars in funding or cramming 4 years of high school into 2. But these things are exactly what Zak Kukoff of TruantToday is doing.

As a recent graduate of the grueling TechStars program in Boulder, Colorado, Kukoff has formed some incredibly actionable pieces of advice that apply to any entrepreneur, not just ones that haven’t yet gotten a driver’s license. I had the chance to talk with Kukoff for TNW Sessions (listen in to the interview here) and when we were done I asked him to share with us 5 things that you can start doing today to make you a better entrepreneur.

Jackson, Miss. (August 11, 2011) – Yesterday, August 10, the Mississippi Development Authority (MDA) and the Mississippi Arts Commission (MAC) hosted a Creative Economy Summit at the Jackson Convention Center in downtown Jackson, Miss. At the event, Governor Haley Barbour and officials from MDA and MAC introduced and rolled out a new study of Mississippi’s creative economy.

The two agencies commissioned the study in order to better understand the people, enterprises and organizations that comprise this key sector in the state and to gauge the impact the creative economy has on the state’s overall economy. The study also provides suggested next steps for further growing the creative economy in Mississippi.

A Boston company wants to offer people free access to a communal broadband network if a user pays for about $300 in equipment, according to an interesting summary over at Stop the Cap. The site profiled NetBlazr, which hopes to deliver free broadband with speeds of up to 60 Mbps to companies that will share that access with others in range while turning over management of the gear to NetBlazr. From the post:

NetBlazr starts with gigabit fiber from Cogent Communications, and then delivers free or low-cost access to any customer willing to do two things:

Spend $299 for the basic installation kit, which includes a high-speed router, three antennas, and some cabling; Use the included equipment to receive service from NetBlazr and agree to share it with anyone in range of the wireless antennas included in the kit.

The Huffington Post has come across this fascinating five-minute interview of Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook’s Palo Alto office in June 2005. The clip is apparently part of a longer 40-minute-interview from a documentary about millennials shot by Ray Hafner and Derek Franzese.  That interview has never been shown in full, and if I were Hafner and Franzese I’d be figuring out a way to do that stat, especially post-The Social Network.

Zuckerberg’s initial vision, “an online directory for colleges” seems remarkably short-sighted in light of the fact that Facebook users comprise now 11% of the world’s population and 35% of the world’s online population. In retrospect Zuckerberg may have wanted to put the fratty red beer cup down (Fun fact: He had just turned 21, also that’s co-founder Dustin Moskovitz doing a keg stand).

We hear the word innovation a lot. When I hear it, my mind often jumps to technology or creative businesses or something big. But when I really think about it, there are many simple ways for small businesses to innovate. We can innovate by updating the way that we see things. We can innovate by using new technology to accomplish old jobs. We can also innovate by seeing our business, department or team from a different angle and working that new perspective into your company.

Every week I check out what some of our Small Business Trends experts have to say over at American Express OPEN Forum. And this week innovation has caught my eye – again.

AMHERST - The University of Massachusetts system largely avoided immediate spending cuts that accompanied passage of the debt-ceiling compromise in Washington last week, school officials said Monday.

But the university might not be so lucky come the next round of budget cuts, officials said, noting that UMass is highly reliant on federal money to fund the $489 million in scientific research it conducts annually.

That sentiment reflects the uncertainty that follows the resolution of the debt-ceiling crisis in Washington last week. University officials and budget analysts said Congress has yet to identify specific cuts in discretionary spending.