For centuries people have pondered the meaning of dreams. Early civilizations thought of dreams as a medium between our earthly world and that of the gods. In fact, the Greeks and Romans were convinced that dreams had certain prophetic powers. While there has always been a great interest in the interpretation of human dreams, it wasn’t until the end of the nineteenth century that Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung put forth some of the most widely-known modern theories of dreaming. Freud’s theory centred around the notion of repressed longing -- the idea that dreaming allows us to sort through unresolved, repressed wishes. Carl Jung (who studied under Freud) also believed that dreams had psychological importance, but proposed different theories about their meaning.

Fundraising is a tough name for one of the most important, and sensitive, ways to engage people. Raising funds for your venture really isn't about the money. If you want to be successful in this money business, focus on people, not funds.

One of my greatest funders has been with me for the better part of 10 years. We started out slow at $5,000 and it grew to a consistent, annual six-figure support. Our first big jump in investment was when he funded two new hires, bringing them on board to join our team.

Next year, thinking he might want a creative change, I presented an aggressive marketing plan which could take UniversalGiving to exciting new levels of brand awareness.

He turned me down, not funding a dollar. "I don't like marketing, Pamela," he said. "It's not something I invest in because it's not easy to measure."

I should have known this due to our conversations, if I had taken more time.

Every organization has a diverse group of personalities that respond differently to particular management styles. The creatives of an organization are often the group that stands out and may be misunderstood. How are creatives perceived in your company? What is the nature of the creative type, and how can they best be managed for the purposes of achieving Innovation?

First, let’s describe what creatives are like. Highly charged creative types may act out or resist when they feel restricted by the confinement of corporate culture. Some creatives may prefer to work alone, in the refuge of their own private work space until they emerge with an “Aha!” moment or solution to a vexing problem. In meetings and NPD ideation sessions, true creatives are the ones that are not afraid to ask the most challenging, thought-provoking questions to dive head-first into a problem. They do it out of sheer intellectual curiosity and the thrill of probing a conundrum – that is where they work best. It is that kind of curiosity that leads to Innovation for a business, and in turn brings profitable growth and shareholder value for the company.

Since 1979, the Massachusetts Technology Development Corporation has made equity investments in start-ups that might not have found funding otherwise — mainly relying on taxpayer money. The goal of the quasi-public corporation is to nurture entrepreneurship and create jobs in Massachusetts. and the MTDC says that its portfolio companies today employ 7,500 people in the Commonwealth, with a payroll of $612 million. But while the MTDC hasn't invested a staggering sum over its lifetime (about $83 million in 133 companies), and it boasts a 16.5 percent internal rate of return, its future always seems to be in doubt, given its reliance on money from Beacon Hill.

This summer is no different, says Jerry Bird, who took over last month as executive director. "The legislature approved $5 million for us about a year-and-a-half ago, but it's not yet in our bank account," says Bird. The hang-up? While the state has already issued bonds to raise the money, there's a technical issue related to freeing up that money to make equity investments, Bird says.

Anyone can build web apps with Flotype.

Date Founded: October 2010

Founder: Darshan Shankar, Sridatta Thatipamala, Eric Zhang

Concept: Web technology that enables everyone, from startups to enterprises, to easily build large-scale, real-time web applications.

Location: Berkeley, CA

Funding: Y-Combinator invested $20,000, plus additional financing from others

Why You Should Care: Flotype was a Y-Combinator winter 2010 company. NowJS is its main product. The startup is just six months old, but it's on track to generate $1 million in revenue. The founders are young and scrappy too. All three are 19-year-old UC Berkeley engineering dropouts.

Every so often a promising entrepreneur seems to freeze in the oncoming headlights and gets run over by his competition. Why is it that his idea which seemed so fundable only months ago fails to dazzle investors today? The team is the same. The company's market is the same.

The only difference might be the start of another recession like the last one, resulting in a lower valuation for Internet ventures, and that makes all the difference. Herein lies a key principle of decision making - “Any decision is better than no decision.”

Even better than any decision is a good decision made quickly. What separates good decision-making from bad decision-making? H.W. Lewis, author of “Why Flip A Coin? The Art and Science of Good Decisions,” summarizes good decision making as:

Identifying all reasonable actions. Listing the potential consequences of each action and the utility of each consequence. Evaluating the probability that each action will lead to a given consequence. Choosing the action quickly which has the best expected outcome or positive contribution.

Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook all compete for top talent. In doing so, they lure and acqui-hire the brightest minds in tech — who, unfortunately for them, later go on to trade these cushy jobs for the rough-and-tumble life of a startup founder.

Which of these four mega powers in tech (at one point or another) has produced, and hence pushed out, the top talent in the industry? A little analysis of the startups that have come from the former employees of these tech heavy-hitters, and a look at the funding these startups have raised, might shed some light on the answer.

TopProspect to the rescue. The startup, a site that helps you get hired through your social network friends, fashioned the infographic below after analyzing data, dating back to 2006, from its users and their social connections — that pool includes more than 3 million folks mostly in the Silicon Valley area.

A reader asked:

Where can I get funding for my business idea?

The truth is, ideas don’t get funded, businesses do. Budget your savings and sell, sell, sell! Once you’re up and running, then you can think about approaching lenders and other entrepreneurs about additional expansion capital.

It has all of the excitement of the big game, the high school play, and your first illicit smoke wrapped up in one. It’s “all-you-can-eat night” at the adrenaline junkie café.

I’m talking about the night before the pitch for the big piece of business — it could be the final interview in an RFP process, a proposal meeting with the big prospect, or the next step with your biggest client. Regardless, it is show time and you and your team, (your team could be no bigger team than your pet, yourself, and your coffee pot), are up late getting ready with all of the final details.

I have been through it a ton of times and I have watched dozens of clients go through it. This experience has taught me some key things that you should do to get it right in getting ready.

Oklahoma Department of Commerce Secretary Dave Lopez and the U.S. Treasury Department announced today that Oklahoma has been approved to receive $13.2 million in State Small Business Credit Initiative (SSBCI) funds.

The SSBCI funds will be allocated by the U.S. Department of Treasury through the Oklahoma Department of Commerce and managed by i2E, Inc. The Commerce Department and i2E have partnered in a joint initiative called “Accelerate Oklahoma!”, which provides three distinct investment funds targeting the formation and expansion of high growth businesses.

“It is good to learn that Oklahoma is among the first few states to complete this process and that these funds will be available to our small businesses,” Lopez said.  “We appreciate working with the U.S. Treasury, and we now look forward to positive outcomes as i2E works with companies in Oklahoma to drive innovation and grow jobs.”

There’s been a lot of debate about the role of VC backing for startups in Europe recently, not least because we’ve been pushing the issue to try and provoke a response from European VCs who – with notable exceptions of course – tend not to come out fighting quite as much as their US peers. The majority of European VCs tend to blog less, tweet less and, as a result much of the debate about VC comes from disgruntled European entrepreneurs. But now one really has come out fighting.

German VC firm Earlybird has produced a long slide presentation and written notes – written by Hendrik Brandis and Jason Whitmire – that argues that although the European venture industry is a quarter of the size of the U.S. market, proportionally speaking it is outperforming the US VC industry in returns. As a result, Limited Partners (LIPs) – the funds that invest in VCs – should start sitting up and taking notice. It has to be said of course that as VCs across the globe battle for funding, it is in their interests to come out swinging from their corner to fight for these funds. But let’s hear them out.

Over the last decade we assumed that once we found repeatable methodologies (Agile and Customer Development, Business Model Design) to build early stage ventures, entrepreneurship would become a “science,” and anyone could do it.

I’m beginning to suspect this assumption may be wrong.

It’s not that the tools are wrong, I think the entrepreneurship management stack is correct and has made a major contribution to reducing startup failures. Where I think we have gone wrong is the belief that anyone can use these tools equally well.

For the sake of this analogy, think of two types of artists: composers and performers (think music composer versus members of the orchestra, playwright versus actor etc.)

Sparked by an idea and a $15-million check from Dow Chemical, the U.S. Small Business Administration will announce today that Michigan is the first test bed for a new $1-billion national Impact Investment Fund to help finance growing companies in high-unemployment areas.

In Michigan, $130 million will be made available to second-stage growth companies through a partnership of Midland-based Dow, the SBA and state investment funds. The new InvestMichigan! Mezzanine Fund will be co-managed by Credit Suisse and Beringea, a Farmington Hills investment firm.

Dow CEO Andrew Liveris, Gov. Rick Snyder and state Treasurer Andy Dillon, along with SBA Administrator Karen Mills, will discuss the program in a telephone news conference today.

The unemployed need not apply.

That is the message being broadcast by many of the nation’s employers, making it even more difficult for 14 million jobless Americans to get back to work.

A recent review of job vacancy postings on popular sites like Monster.com, CareerBuilder and Craigslist revealed hundreds that said employers would consider (or at least “strongly prefer”) only people currently employed or just recently laid off.

Unemployed workers have long suspected that the gaping holes on their résumés left them less attractive to employers. But with the country in the worst jobs crisis since the Great Depression, many had hoped employers would be more forgiving.

CHICAGO, July 25, 2011/PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- TechAmerica today applauded Illinois Governor Pat Quinn for signing Senate Bill 107, the Technology Development Act (TDA II), legislation critical to the expansion of the state's technology sector. The new law expands a program to increase the amount of venture capital funds available through the Treasurer's Technology Development Account which is focused on supporting early stage technology and entrepreneurial businesses in Illinois.

"TDA II further illustrates the commitment of the Illinois legislature and Governor Quinn to strengthen our economy through innovation and support of our technology-based businesses," said T. Kendall Hunt, Chairman, CEO, VASCO Data Security International, Inc., member of the Illinois Innovation Council, and Chair of TechAmerica Midwest. "TechAmerica and our members are proud to have supported this legislation as part of our continued efforts to improve and strengthen the business environment in Illinois."

Originally established in 2003, the Treasurer's Technology Development Account has invested $32 million of state money into venture capital firms investing in Illinois companies. Those firms, in turn, invested more than $115 million in Illinois companies, which attracted another $465 million from additional investors. Companies receiving TDA investments created more than 3,300 direct and in-direct jobs in the state.

It’s an awfully big undertaking to go in to alone. In fact, most entrepreneurs open the doors of their business with product or service knowledge but what they lack is the knowledge to run a business. They might be master plumbers but don’t know how to market the business. They may be computer geniuses but lack the knowledge of how to price their service competitively but still make a profit.

To go back even further, the world has an even bigger problem. Education systems encourge learning certain subjects and ideas but it falls short of teaching students how to think like an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur doesn’t think any problem is too difficult to solve and an entrepreneur doesn’t do things the same way as the people around them but that isn’t a way of thinking that is being encouraged.

Your marketing launch is the most important element of startup success these days, to get customer attention in this world of information overload. Yet it is the one element that too many entrepreneurs focus on only as an afterthought. Everyone assumes their product or service is so great that “word-of-mouth” will carry the day for them.

Even great products need great marketing “content” to fuel the ascent of their online message. I just finished a modern-day primer on the key elements of great online content in “Launch: How to Quickly Propel Your Business Beyond the Competition,” a new book by Michael Stelzner, founder of SocialMediaExaminer.com.

It's Monday, time for MBA Mondays and the next post in the Startup Financing Options series. Today we will talk about Venture Debt.

If there were two words less likely to be found together, it would be venture and debt. Startups are not credit worthy enterprises. They have little to no assets and no cash flow. Equity is the appropriate way to finance startups.

However, there is a large, growing, and vibrant market for something called Venture Debt. It is indeed debt, largely provided by a number of banks and finance companies who specialize in this market. The terms are usually three years, interest only, balloon payment, with warrants for the equity kicker. Now that I've just thrown out a bunch of buzzwords, I'll explain each of them.

In the pharmaceutical industry, universities appear to have found a partner willing and able to buy big chunks of their research. Beyond making drugs, however, such big-dollar corporate alliances remain rare.

It's not for a lack of trying. The University of Michigan, a powerhouse with a total research budget of $1.3-billion a year and growing quickly, has "worked extraordinarily hard over the last decade to increase our industry funding," said Stephen R. Forrest, vice president for...