At last year’s Academy Awards, in front of a global audience of millions, a new troupe, the Legion of Extraordinary Dancers, or LXD, performed a jaw-dropping number. It was, many thought, the best part of the whole spectacle. The dancers were electric, exciting, and altogether unprecedented: Their routine of tricks and moves was hitherto unknown to dance.

Several of the dancers were self-taught. Or more precisely, Internet-taught. And they had been recruited by a filmmaker, Jon M. Chu, in part because of their YouTube reputations.

If you start a company, it will probably happen to you someday. Maybe it will be your VC or a board member. Maybe it will be your co-founder.

Sooner or later, they’ll try to fire you.

I’m an investor in or advisor to dozens of startups, and at least once a quarter, I get the call: “Chris, they’re trying to fire me.” (The other urgent call I get is when they’re negotiating a financing round, merger, or sale. I much prefer those calls!)

Most entrepreneurs are surprised the first time their investors or co-founders try to fire them. They can’t imagine being banished from the company that they created. Maybe they were the only employee of the company for years. Maybe they recruited and courted the very person who comes to carry out the execution.

In honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, which is to be celebrated on Monday, January 17th, 2011, I wanted to pay tribute to the great man who fought for equality even when all odds were against him.  Much like many of you entrepreneurs out there, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “had a dream.”  Nothing could stop him from achieving exactly what he wanted to achieve—even if it meant going to jail, being hated or going against people’s wishes.  MLK’s famous speech, “I Have a Dream” has touched the hearts of millions of Americans throughout the years and goes to show that with hard work, bravery, persistence, and many other qualities, anything can happen. 

Root Music founder J Sider sits on a beanbag chair and sips a fruit smoothie from the kitchen in the Howard Street loft of his technology startup. He explains how the three-person startup, which began in his apartment last year, just got $2.3 million in venture capital funding. The now-10-person team will soon head to the South By Southwest Music Festival in Austin, Texas, on the company dime. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” Sider said.

Now the largest music application on Facebook, Root Music is riding a rally in public and private funding for tech startups that has investors debating the existence of a new technology bubble like the one that burst in 2000.

There isn't much that's small about the work performed by the Michigan Pre-Seed Capital Fund in 2010. The start-up financing fund distributed $2.5 million worth of loans to dozens of companies in Michigan, many of which are in the Ann Arbor area.

The $11.6 million fund has given microloans, about $50,000 each, to 52 start-ups, such as U-M spinoff and Accelerate Michigan winner Armune BioScience. These companies mostly use the cash to help commercialize their first products. These companies employ 285 people and have since attracted another $16.4 million in outside investment.

Well before her first day today as Iowa’s new economic development director, Debi Durham was working the phones and traveling the state.

“When I read about a company looking at Iowa, I’ve been picking up the phone and asking (community leaders), ‘How can I be helpful?’” said Durham, “That’s the kind of thing they’ve not had before.”

Durham, 50, has led the Siouxland Chamber of Commerce and its economic development arm, the Siouxland Initiative, for the past 15 years and is well-known throughout the state’s business and community development circles.

There may be too many startups chasing the social trend, according to partners at VC firm Canaan Partners, but it's still going to be one of the biggest growth areas in 2011, and there are ways to stand out from the crowd.

• Go vertical. Deepak Kamra, who has been a VC since the early 1990s and led Canaan's investment in social dating service Zoosk, recommends focusing on specific verticals. Social gaming and shopping may be pretty well established, but other areas like travel, cars, and health care are not.

Dear SBIR Insider,

Our new year starts with a significantly new congress, new leadership in the House, new challenges, and of course, the Tucson tragedy. Our hearts go out to all the victims and their families, and there's little I can say that hasn't already been expressed.

The main topic for us now is to keep the SBIR/STTR programs alive as they approach their January 31, 2011 expiration date. In the final hours of the 111th congress, a compromise SBIR/STTR Reauthorization bill was passed in the Senate but ran out of time in the House.

The Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship (SBE) under the leadership of its chair, Mary Landrieu (D-LA) and ranking member Olympia Snowe (R-ME) worked their hearts out to broker a compromise on an 8 year SBIR reauthorization. Their staff worked tirelessly to strike a compromise between the two major opposing factions, the Small Business Technology Council (SBTC) and the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO). Amazingly, for the first time ever, a compromise was achieved and agreed to by both sides, and the SBIR reauthorization bill, S.4053 was passed in the Senate.

With little time remaining on the last day of congress, the House Small Business Committee (SBC) did nothing but block the Senate's efforts. They were not in support of this bill.

In this new 112th Congress, we have a stable SBE, but lose Senators Kit Bond (R-MO) and Evan Bayh (D-IN) who chose to retire from the Senate. Both were strong SBIR supporters and we will miss them. In the House, we have a new chair in the form of Sam Graves (R-MO), who has been the ranking member of the SBC, and tended to shadow and support Nydia Velazquez (D-NY), former chair, now ranking member of the committee.

The question is: "Where do we go from here?" Read on.

Startups often put a lot of work into a pitch deck. That's not necessarily a bad thing. After all, you don't want to be stuck delivering a presentation to potential investors which is eminently awful because of your slides.

But here's a piece of advice that may run counter to "build good slides." And that's "be ready to ditch the slides altogether."

To do so certainly demands that you're ready and able to deliver a compelling story and demo in order to pitch your startup.

Do you know how many hours per week you spend sitting in front of your computer? Lifehacker founder, programmer and author Gina Trapani was curious enough to use personal analytics to find out. As she wrote in a blog post earlier today, her findings were not promising.

Using time management Web app RescueTime, Trapani, discovered that she was spending as much as 48 hours sitting down in one week. For Web workers like her, this is probably not unusual.

If you dropped a giraffe into a deep pool of water, would it float, or would it sink? If it could float, would it swim briskly and confidently to the nearest bit of land, or would it flail around helplessly and drown?

Strange as it may seem, the floating and swimming abilities of giraffes—or rather their supposed lack of floating and swimming abilities—have often been written about by experts. It has been asserted that giraffes “sink like stones” and “cannot swim, even in an emergency,” and that “rivers are an impassable barrier to them.” Although a few rare photographs and segments of film show that giraffes will wade into deep rivers when they have to, definite observations of them swimming have yet to be reported.

I have provided legal counsel and assistance to hundreds of entrepreneurs over my 15-year career. A recurring question among those clients has been ‘Why do some entrepreneurs make it, while others fail?’

I’ve given this issue a lot of thought. Obviously, there are a lot of variables that contribute to success, including lady luck. But, in my mind, there are three characteristics that stand above the rest: guts, desire and passion.

Naming a startup is hard. Very hard. On the one hand, the pragmatic entrepreneur thinks: “I shouldn’t be wasting time on this — for every successful company with a great name, there’s one with a crappy name that did just fine. It doesn’t seem like a name has much influence on the outcome at all. I’m going to get back to writing code.” I sort of agree with this. You shouldn’t obssess about your name. But, you also shouldn’t dismiss it as unimportant. Part of the startup game is to try and remove unnecessary friction to your growth. Sure, you could build a spectacularly successful company despite having a lousy name — but why not stack the odds in your favor?

One more reason why spending calories on picking a great name is important: It’s a one-time cost to get a great name — but the benefit is forever. Conversely, if you short-change this and dismiss it completely, you’re going to incur what I’d call “branding debt”. Not bad at first, and maybe not a big deal for you ever, but every year, as you grow, you’ll have this small voice nagging inside your head “should I change the name of the company…”. It’s going to be annoying. And the longer you wait, the more expensive the decision is, and the less likely you are to do it. Save yourself some of that future pain, and invest early in picking a decent name. You may still get it wrong, but at least you’ll know you tried.

In the beginning, they called her a fool. When pharmaceutical chemist Victoria Hale told friends and colleagues that she wanted to start a nonprofit pharma company, they laughed at her, said it was career suicide, that it couldn’t be done. “About 90 percent said that in strong or gentle words,” recalls Hale, who had previously worked at the US Food and Drug Administration and Genentech. “But I knew I wanted to try.”

And so she did. In 1998, Hale wrote a business plan, gathered seed money, and submitted an application for nonprofit status to the IRS. It was denied. Pharmaceuticals are a profitable industry, the IRS replied, so what’s the need for a nonprofit? Frustrated, Hale defended her philosophy for what felt like the hundredth time: Big Pharma makes drugs for Westerners. She, on the other hand, wanted to make drugs for all of humanity—drugs that don’t necessarily pull a profit.

Minnetonka, Minn., (Golden Shovel Agency) –- Executives from Golden Shovel Agency will attend The Economic Development Association of Minnesota's (EDAM) 2011 Winter conference January 20-21. Aaron Brossoit, VP of Business Development and John Marshall, VP of Sales will represent the Minnesota Web development firm.

The two-day conference on New Technologies Driving Minnesota's Economy Forward will be held at the Minneapolis Marriott Southwest in Minnetonka. EDAM's mission is to advance economic development in Minnesota. Golden Shovel Agency prospects the latest technologies and trends in community development and provides them as Web solutions to their clients. The firm recently launched Economic Gateway, a first-of-its-kind Web system for Greater America.

With today’s biblical flood of information and communication, how do you get your message heard by the right people? How do you get people to pay attention?

Do’s

1. Be brief, specific and easy to understand - Keep the message short and simple. Use 8th grade language. Use bold, vivid words and images that “stick” in people’s skulls. Avoid the bland words that have lost all meaning – value, synergy, solution provider.

In the midst of the implosion of the financial markets in 2008, True Ventures raised its second fund. Founder and partner Phil Black tells us that shortly after this raise in early 2009 (which he calls the “dark days in the financial world”), the fund’s partners were sitting at a meeting looking for innovative ways they could help jump start the tech economy. Inspired by President Obama’s 2009 inaugural address, True Ventures decided to launch their own program to encourage college students to work at early-stage startups, and to help inspire and educate the “entrepreneurs of tomorrow.”

Called the True Entrepreneurs Corps (TEC), the program places 12 undergraduate students in the fund’s early-stage portfolio companies. The internships take place during the summer in the San Francisco area and range in terms of focus, from technical coding to finance to marketing to business development. And TEC offers students a $3000 stipend for the summer.

Let’s face it. It’s cool but tough to be an entrepreneur. Jeffrey Paine previously shared with us that entrepreneurship is not about making money because you can do that better at a job and reach home by 7. He further explained that an entrepreneur is required to work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and 365 days in a year (24/7/365).

Even with all the hard work, most entrepreneurs do not make much money. He urged those who wish to follow the entrepreneurial path to find a right reason to do so. To explore this deeper, we have gathered several founders and partners to share with us their reasons on why they want to be an entrepreneur.

My last post (University Entrepreneurship Centers in America) listed many organizations that promote entrepreneurship education in the USA. This is a list of similar organizations in other countries.

• Aalto University - Aalto Centre for Entrepreneurship

• Aarhus University - Aarhus Entrepreneurship Centre

• Acharya Institute of Management Sciences – AIMS Entrepreneurship Excellence Centre

• Bradford University – Centre for Entrepreneurship and Innovation

• Carleton University - Sprott Centre for Social Enterprises

Non-profit organizations need innovation every bit as much as for-profit firms. Some might argue they need it more because they lack the resources and cash flow of large commercial firms. Non-profits need innovation in:

• Fund Raising
• Expanding their reach
• Mission delivery
• Resource utilization

The need for innovation in the non-profit sector is widely recognized. Awards, grants, and other forms of recognition for innovative programs help stimulate managers to be more aggressive.

While the need is recognized, the approach to innovating non-profits is not. These organizations should use the same methods found so effective in corporate innovation. Structured methods based on patterns inherent in inventive solutions can be applied to the non-profit business model just as effectively as the for-profit model. A method like S.I.T. can help an organization "break fixedness" about its role, resources, and process, thus opening new possibilities and approaches.