Startup.

Entrepreneur.

Small business.

We hear each of these terms, sometimes used interchangeably, but what really is the difference? Is it just semantics? Here’s my take on the 3.

Startup

Fifteen years ago, no one ran a startup. I’m not even sure when the term was first coined. I know with the dot com boom, there were startups everywhere. These days, startups tend to be tech services and more often than not are seeking either funding or to be acquired.

What seems to differentiate startups from small businesses and entrepreneurs is their risk/reward level, at least according to Steve Blank. Startups are volatile, and many fail. But investors who do put money into startups often make their money back tenfold. Look at companies like Mint.com, MusicMatch, Groupon. Whether they were bought by giant corporations or are going it alone (as Groupon still is), they certainly prove the risk/reward model.

Cambridge, Massachusetts. The National Bureau of Economic Research's Innovation Policy and the Economy Conference will be held on April 12, 2011 at the National Press Club, 529 14th Street, NW, Washington, DC. The conference seeks to provide an accessible forum to bring the work of leading academic researchers to an audience of policymakers and those interested in the interaction between public policy and innovation.

After two straight years of declining venture capital investment, 2010 saw an increase in deal flow compared with the previous year.

Venture funds collectively increased their investments by 19 percent over 2009 to $21.8 billion. The number of deals made grew by 12 percent to 3,277. Even though growth slowed in the last two quarters of the year, it was still the industry's first positive year-to-year growth since 2007.

"We were clearly in recovery mode," said Mark Heesen, president of the National Venture Capital Association in Washington, D.C. "We hope this continues in 2011."

The news came courtesy of the latest MoneyTree Report, produced by the NVCA and PricewaterhouseCoopers with data from Thomson Reuters.

A decade ago, as a recruiter for a data storage company called StorageNetworks Inc., Jason Jacobs was flying around the country to help his employer open field offices. “We were hiring six or 10 people every week, and at one point, I was living out in San Mateo for a month to get our West Coast office opened,’’ he recalls. “It was a crazy time.’’

The Waltham company, founded in 1998 to help fast-growing dot-coms and big corporate customers deal with the explosion of data, went public at just two years old, without ever having turned a profit. Its shares began trading on the Nasdaq stock market at $27 and ended their first day at $90.

Vernal » Utah State University has had boots on the ground here for four decades. But it wasn’t until last fall that it put a distinctive new footprint in the community with the opening of the Bingham Entrepreneurship & Energy Research Center.

The $23 million complex aims to be a hub of energy industry innovation, not just for eastern Utah but the world. It also continues to serve as an eastern campus for Utah’s only land-grant university and a community resource.

“The Bingham Center is really the focal point for opportunities for the state of Utah and the eastern Utah region to add value-added economic development opportunities,” said Robert T. Behunin, USU vice president for commercialization and regional development, at a presentation last year.

At the request of Gov. Scott Walker, former state Sen. Ted Kanavas is taking the lead in developing a venture capital fund for Wisconsin.

Saying the creation of such a fund would contribute significantly to Walker's goal of creating 250,000 jobs, his staff is laying out an aggressive schedule that would have venture dollars being invested in high-potential, entrepreneurial companies by July 1, according to a memo written by Jason Culotta that was obtained by the Journal Sentinel.

As the strongest voice for Arizona’s high-technology industry, the Public Policy Committee of the Arizona Technology Council announced today its strong support for the Arizona Competitive Package. The Council has been a key resource to Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, the Arizona State Legislature and the proposed Arizona Commerce Authority in defining the components of the Arizona Competitiveness Package.

With the release of this comprehensive legislative proposal, the Governor, Senate President and House Speaker have outlined what will truly be a great future for the state. The Arizona Competitiveness Package embraces high technology industries as the engine that will drive our state for the next thirty years. Small business entrepreneurs will be rewarded for the jobs they create and the state will be provided with the resources it needs to dedicate to the education of our children.

After years of cloudy skies in Startupland, the sun is peeking out, and investors are tipping their toes back into the wading pool. Last year, venture capitalists and angels who co-invested with them placed $7 billion into seed and early-stage deals, an 11 percent increase from 2009, according to the most recent PricewaterhouseCoopers/National Venture Capital Association MoneyTree report. From the conversations I'm having in the investor community, this year is promising to be even better.

Is this a limited window of opportunity, or more? It's hard to know just yet. But as the stock market edges ever higher and the wealthier feel healthier, there's a good chance that American startups will also get their moment in the sun.

At a time when almost one out of every ten Americans is now unemployed, progressives have the opportunity to take the lead on Job Creation policy. This Dispatch will address Job Creation policy options featured in Progressive State Network’s 2011 Blueprint for Economic Security. Now is the time for progressive to contrast the empty rhetoric of the right. After sweeping to power in many states, conservative efforts at job creation are nowhere to be seen, at the same time that they refuse to even consider the critical investments needed to help put Americans back to work and rebuild prosperity in our states.

Thankfully, progressives have a different vision to offer: a green economy that will put Americans back to work by creating good jobs at home, setting our nation on a path to energy independence, and marking a new era of American innovation, production, and leadership.

The traditional mode of starting a company is to plan a serial process, where you complete only once all the steps, leading to the “big bang” launch of the company. I strongly recommend a dramatic departure from this model, called “planned iteration,” where you assume you won’t get it right the first time.

This idea was well articulated by Paul Graham in an old essay, called “Startups in 13 Sentences” in which he talked about “making a few people really happy rather than making a lot of people semi-happy.” One of his key points is that “launching teaches you what you should have been building,” and I agree.

All you old software development types will recognize the analogy to the traditional two year “waterfall model” of software development, which has been totally replaced with the Agile iterative methodology. Agile assumes and plans for iterative development, where requirements and solutions evolve as more is known and markets change.

SAN DIEGO, CA — Knee pain related to osteoarthritis (OA) is a common complaint among obese individuals and retired professional athletes, especially former NFL players, but researchers presenting their work at the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine’s Specialty Day program (February 19th) say they have a simple solution: lose weight.

“Our research on patients who were obese with early-onset knee osteoarthritis showed that those individuals who underwent isolated weight loss via bariatric surgery and lost an average of 57 pounds within the first six months significantly improved their knee pain, stiffness and physical function. Quality of life, activities of daily living and sports activity also improved; all of this without other arthritic treatments,” said lead researcher Christopher Edwards of the Penn State College of Medicine.

As the managing partner of Think Big Partners, Think Big Kansas City and bizperc, Herb Sih has been busy over the last three years (Left, photo from thinkbigpartners.com). Most recently, Think Big announced a collaboration with Angel Capital Group, a Tennessee-based investment group, to launch 4-6 companies in an incubator right here in Kansas City.

The Think Big KC incubator is based on the Y Combinator/TechStars proof-of-concept model. Founders apply with a business plan and receive a little funding, along with some legal and marketing help, and 90 days of mentoring to ship their concept. At the end of the incubator period, the founders will be able to pitch their concepts to investors and try to raise further seed money to grow their ideas.

Coming up on its two-year-anniversary, Kickstarter co-founder Yancey Strickler is struck by how little the site has changed. Maybe the biggest difference has been just how many artists and creative types have flocked to the crowd-funding site, helping validate a new form of fundraising that is opening the eyes of not only artists but technology leaders.

New York-based Kickstarter, which launched in April 2009, began with the promise of creating an intersection between patronage and commerce, where artists could enlist the help of supporters, who would in turn pledge their money and help validate the artist’s project. What began as a small endeavor has blossomed into a sizable business, one that now raises $1 million a week in pledges and has hit $35 million pledged overall. So far, Kickstarter has helped 5,000 projects get funded with about 2,500 actively fundraising at the moment. About 250 to 300 new proposals come in a day, hoping to appeal to a pool of supporters of more than 600,000 people. Strickler said the concept for Kickstarter, first conceived by co-founder Perry Chen, has proven to be a powerful tool in helping ideas bloom.

1. Keep it service-based and simplistic.

I was recently told by someone that their new invention was going to be global; it was going to be the next big thing. Then, I asked him about production, warehousing, distribution and patent because if it got as big as he was boasting, someone would have ripped it off half-way through.

When starting a business, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You must make it as simplistic as possible. This means staying away from government-regulated industries or not starting a product based company where you will find your margins getting hit by manufacturing costs.

At one point or another, most entrepreneurs find themselves in a place where they could use money. And oftentimes, they could use a lot of money. These entrepreneurs often dream about how much they could accomplish if they had millions in the bank. All the people they could hire. All the products they could develop. All the marketing they could do.

And as they sit and dream, most entrepreneurs think about venture capitalists. Venture capitalists, or VCs, are the folks with millions upon millions of dollars to invest in companies such as theirs. This includes the folks that funded Google and Yahoo and Netflix and Ebay, and many of the great recent companies which were able to start and grow to massive scale in just a short period of time.

The big winners in Sunday night’s Grammy Awards took many by surprise. Arcade Fire took home the record of the year for “The Suburbs” and the country group Lady Antebellum’s song “Need You Now” won awards for best record and best song of the year. The former is from Montreal, the latter hail from Nashville. The internet and social media exploded with a raft of incredulous messages – - a Tumblr called “Who is Arcade Fire?” compiled dozens of them. The Today show’s Matt Lauer blurted: “I’ve never heard of the Arcade Fire. I’m going to have to download them.”

Could these wins reflect something of a broader trend? Is the landscape of popular music changing? Could it be that new upstart music scenes in Nashville, Montreal, and elsewhere are gaining ground on New York and LA, the long-established hegemonic centers of commercial and recorded music?

Louis Lacasse admits that at a time when many biotech companies in the province are struggling because of a lack of funding, it may seem counterintuitive to start a bunch of new initiatives.

But that's exactly what he hopes to do.

Lacasse will manage a new seed fund that was announced by the Charest government yesterday. The $41.25-million fund, called AmorChem, is made up of contributions from Investissement Quebec, FIER Partenaires (a Quebec government-sponsored fund) and the QFL's solidarity fund as well as $8.25 million from the private sector, of which $6.8 million has come from pharmaceutical giant Merck. The goal of the fund isn't to subsidize new companies, but rather to invest in scientific research, and then to reap the benefits when that research is sold off.

Last fall, before I joined Zendesk, I took a role as an Executive-in-Residence at Scale Venture Partners. A lot of people asked me about this, so I've written an article at GigaOm that describes my thought process and what I ended up working on.

While there are as many variations on the EIR position as there are venture firms, there are two flavors, generally speaking: Entrepreneur-in-Residence and Executive-in-Residence. Most firms have some experience with Entrepreneur-in-Residence programs. Essentially, they give office space, coffee and food to a proven entrepreneur so he or she can spend a few months researching or prototyping a new product or service...