Over the weekend, Mark Suster wrote a great post titled How To Communicate with your Investors between Board Meetings.  Mark continues to just tear it up with great advice for entrepreneurs.  However, he left out one thing from the post – which is one of my favorite pieces of advice for entrepreneurs.

Give your venture capitalists (and board members) assignments

Mark alludes to this in many of his suggestions but he never comes out and says it.  And, amazingly to me, many entrepreneurs either don’t ever think of this or don’t feel comfortable doing it.  They should.

Most VCs will quickly say that they want to help the companies they invest in to success. Some will go further and say things like “I’ll do anything I can to help my companies.” Rarely have I heard a VC say something like “My plan is to just hang around, go to board meetings, ask a few nonsensical, low insight, rhetorical questions, eat the crummy food, and then disappear until the next board meeting.” However, as any entrepreneur who has ever worked with multiple VCs knows, the statements a VC makes (or doesn’t make) doesn’t necessarily correspond to his behavior.

Have you ever had a day when you wished you had a partner to share the ups and downs of running your own business?

With my last company, I remember having days when I felt like it was me against the world—and the world was winning. Without partners to commiserate with, I often felt alone. That is, until I set up an advisory board.

I used my advisory board as part business guide, part support group. Here are three lessons I learned for setting up an effective advisory board:

1. Pick business owners (not your accountant or attorney)

I found the most valuable advisers were other business owners who had accomplished what I was attempting to do. I still paid for the services of an accountant and attorney when I needed technical advice, but keeping these professionals out of my advisory board meetings allowed my meetings to focus on strategic advice on company building.

During the last quarter of 2009, US venture capital investment in young Internet companies increased by 38 per cent, to $1.8 billion, compared to a year before.

And according to Crunchbase, a database managed by Techcrunch, this momentum is continuing, with VC investments doubling during the first quarter of 2010, compared to last year.

In Europe, statistics are less upbeat. Last year, venture capital investments dropped 41 per cent in all sectors. Yet, if you listen to Internet start-up investment professionals, these figures do not reflect the full picture.

The financial crisis has blown a chill wind through US technology transfer offices, making it harder to fund start-up companies. This is prompting a search for new ways to reduce the risk profile of novel technologies, and at the same time increase internal efficiencies, cut costs and sharpen academic awareness of industry’s needs.

“There has been no impact on the flow of ideas. But there has been an impact on how [these ideas] are transferred into a commercial venture and on subsequent funding,” Charles Cooney, Professor of Chemical Engineering and Faculty Director for the Deshpande Center for Technology Innovation at MIT, told delegates at the annual US BioIndustry Organization conference in Chicago this week.

“The financial community is less willing to invest and follow-on funding is very difficult to find,” Cooney said. This is creating pressure to advance ideas further than in the past.

BEIJING (Caixin Online) -- In a long-term view, the rise of China is to be welcomed, but today China remains what the journalist Martin Wolf calls a "premature superpower."

China's current reputation for power benefits from projections about the future. In one poll, 44% of respondents mistakenly thought that China already had the world's largest economy, compared to 27% who accurately picked the United States (which is three times larger). Martin Jacques even entitled his recent book "When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order."

Some people draw analogies to the rise of Germany a century ago, and predict a coming conflict with the U.S. like that between Germany and Britain. Fortunately, these fears are exaggerated.

How many times have you heard or said “Google it”?

The term has become synonymous with conducting a search on the Internet. But, few small businesses actually know how to use Google to advertise and grow their business.

That was the message Google and the U.S. Small Business Administration delivered during a webinar Wednesday morning to announce the launch of their partnership in an effort to educate businesses about how to succeed online.

The University of North Carolina isn't the only institution to develop a standardized approach to license technology developed on campus. According to Lee Taylor, technology licensing associate at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, his institution implemented a form license at the beginning of the academic year, in September 2009.

Called the "Mahele Method" (Mahele referring to a major land division that took place in the 19th century in Hawaii), the patent licensing structure derived from the realization "that there is no need to start building from the ground up every time," Taylor said. "Also, we are an understaffed office, like 95 percent of [technology transfer offices], so it did not seem worthwhile to dedicate resources to this endeavor."

Taylor explained that the university has kept news about its technology transfer approach quiet, "because we did not want to have cherry picking occur."

The nation's leading economics bloggers have a more balanced outlook than last quarter, according to a new Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation survey released today. Anticipating positive movement in the gross domestic product and other key indicators, 59 percent of economics bloggers who responded to the second Kauffman Economic Outlook: A Quarterly Survey of Leading Economics Bloggers described the economy's overall condition as "mixed," with the rest evenly split between positive and negative assessments.

The Outlook report also features questions from five economics bloggers on issues ranging from the long-range U.S. budget outlook to the future viability of China's economy. Respondents answered questions posed by Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution; Ken Houghton, Angry Bear; Arnold Kling, EconLog; Mark Perry, Carpe Diem; and Mark Thoma, Economist's View.

As the U.S. President and Congress desperately search for ways to regain the 8.4 million jobs lost during the current recession, the greatest opportunity of all to spur job growth in our stalled economy may ironically lie right under their noses: in the Patent Office.

For all its obscurity within the bowels of the federal bureaucracy, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) may be the single greatest facilitator of private sector job creation and economic growth in America. It is this agency, after all, that issues the patents that small businesses — especially technology startups — need to attract venture capital investment, develop new products and services, and serve their historic role as the primary source of almost all new net job growth in America. According to one recent study, 76 percent of startup executives say that patents are essential to their funding efforts.

Unfortunately, the diversion of hundreds of millions of dollars in USPTO fees over the years and inadequate funding levels have left the patent office with an unprecedented backlog of 1.2 million patent applications waiting to be examined. The result, says David Kappos, the new USPTO director, has been catastrophic.

When University of Michigan Ross School of Business professor David Brophy launched the Michigan Growth Capital Symposium 29 years ago, most people didn’t understand why he would want to encourage the development of startup companies in Michigan.

“I was the crazy guy who kept preaching this gospel of diversifying the economy and getting more knowledge-based, fast-growing industries,” said Brophy, director of U-M’s Center for Venture Capital and Private Equity Finance.

He’s not the crazy guy anymore. The symposium, which helps startup companies connect with prospective investors and encourages discussion about various issues confronting the state’s entrepreneurs, annually attracts several hundred attendees. The MGCS takes place May 11-12 at the Marriott hotel in Ypsilanti.

When Apple bought chip design firm PA Semi in 2008, it seemed like a crazy move. Who’d want to go back to the days when giants like IBM did everything themselves, including making software, hardware and chips? Now, in the age of smartphones and tablet computers, Apple has what it needs to control its own destiny. It’s starting to look crazy like a fox. And rivals like Google are following Apple’s lead.

“Apple is the new IBM, and everyone wants to be like Apple,” said Rob Enderle, an analyst at the Enderle Group.

The strategy is called  vertical integration, and it’s hot again in Silicon Valley. Technology giants that once focused on software or Web services — one horizontal layer of the technology stack — are now acquiring chip designers in order to differentiate themselves from the pack and disrupt their competitors.

Bill Harding: Some people like fundraising. I'm not one of them. Running a profitable company for the past year has afforded me the luxury to wake up every morning and say to my mirror: “What would you most like to do today, you cunning devil, you?”

On an average day, “talk to investors” would fall somewhere in the neighborhood of “take a multivitamin” and “backup my hard drive” on that list. It was something that I knew ought to be done, but being one of the most time-consuming and unpleasant-sounding choices on my list, it didn’t stand a chance competing against 100 exciting ways to build a better product.

At first I felt guilty about this. I take seriously my responsibility to keep Bonanzle as the fastest growing marketplace online, and, knowing that most of our competitors had raised $1 million to $5 million before even launching always gave me the nagging sense that “doing what I most wanted to do” was costing my business growth.

The National Association of Seed and Venture Funds (NASVF) and the Temple University Fox School of Business announced today that the percentage of venture and angel funds focused on investing in seed stage companies has increased 40% from 2009 based on the second annual survey to its members.

“The speed of turnaround in the situation is truly impressive. It shows the overall pick-up in the confidence that fund managers seem to have in seed stage companies” said Raj Chaganti, professor in Entrepreneurship and Strategy at the Fox School of Business.

Sixty-nine percent of the funds in the annual NASVF survey have $20 million or less under management and 85% focus on knowledge-based ventures such as technology, software, web 2.0, science based, communications and media.  Other positive results from the survey were the following:

• 51% of the funds plan to invest more money in companies over last year
• 40% increase in the number of funds able to raise new money in less than a year
• 10% increase in the capital raising climate over last year
• 34% of the funds reported their average investment was between $500,000 - $1,000,000 vs. 18% last year

“This is great news for the companies that have the largest challenge in raising capital,” said Jim Jaffe, president/CEO of the National Association of Seed Venture Funds. “It is good indicator that the economy is taking a positive step forward.  As many studies have shown, startup companies are the best and most economically efficient creator of new employment opportunities.”

In the 7 May 2010 issue of Science, Green et al. report a draft sequence of the Neandertal genome composed of over 3 billion nucleotides from three individuals, and compare it with the genomes of five modern humans. A companion paper by Burbano et al. describes a method for sequencing target regions of Neandertal DNA. A News Focus , podcast segment, and special online presentation featuring video commentary, text, and a timeline of Neandertal-related discoveries provide additional context for their findings.

[Note: The papers by Green et al. and Burbano et al., as well as the special presentation and podcast, are free to all site visitors.]

Health care and the economy rank among today's most dynamic and important conversations taking place in Iowa and across the nation. While viewpoints vary, in each case Americans are eager for solutions that improve the lives of their families and strengthen their communities. Looking to the future, we all can rally behind a common link that supports recovery from both a wellness and fiscal standpoint: medical innovation.

Basic numbers say a lot. Health care represents 17 percent of our nation's gross domestic product and is an industry expected to generate 3 million new jobs between 2006 and 2016. In Iowa, biopharmaceutical companies had a total economic output of $4.6 billion in 2006 and supported a total of 24,687 jobs the same year.

Iowa has identified bioscience as one of three sectors where the state will focus new development efforts, and for good reason. Effective medical innovation can have a powerful ripple effect. A healthier society translates to a more productive work force, and this combination results in a more thriving economy.

Business incorporation has become synonymous with responsible business ownership. Yet, so many misconceptions and rumors exist about the benefits of business incorporation. So it’s no wonder that even the savviest entrepreneurs are at a loss as to whether incorporation is right for them, what it will cost, and where to start.

Business incorporation (which, by the way, is an umbrella term for a number of business structure options) may be right for some business owners, but it isn’t for all. So it’s worth doing some stepping back and ascertaining whether incorporation is right for you.

The standard for wind turbines being built by the ever-innovating wind industry in utility-scale installations has changed from 1.5 megawatts to 2.5 megawatts in the last year. That means that each time a tower goes up, the standard machine will now generate enough electricity for 240 more homes than it did in 2008.

But the wind industry is on the verge an even bigger shift, a step change ahead in power, efficiency and cost. Those 2.5-megawatt turbines still have traditional gearing mechanisms. Wind's innovators want to free turbine motors from the burden of gears with the simplicity of direct drive.

"In a gear-driven system, you have three stages of gears, and each stage has multiple bearings and a structure to house all of these gears," Sandy Butterfield, the former Chief Engineer of the National Wind Technology Center (NWTC) at the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) said at a recent wind industry conference. "We want to take a 15 RPM input shaft and spin it up to 1800 RPMs on the high speed side...[an] almost 100-to-1 ratio that requires multiple stages of gears, so a very complicated, high-precision machining, lots of close tolerances."

How do you keep ideas flowing? How do you create a wealth of ideas to choose from? How do you make sure you get to the one killer idea that will make your advert, novel, article or blog post really stand out from the rest?

Some people like to wait for inspiration to strike. Most professional writers, however, don’t have that luxury. You need ideas every working day, not just every now and then.

Luckily, there is a formula for producing ideas on a consistent basis. Of course, like all formulas, it has its limits. You can’t constrain creativity, and to only ever use one method for coming up with ideas would be utter madness.

Last week at an angel investor forum I was privileged to meet Stephanie Spong, who is a Principal with EPIC Ventures, an increasingly rare early stage VC firm. Her experience includes helping startups for many years, and board positions on the Rocky Mountain and New Mexico Venture Capital Associations, New Mexico Angels, as well as several startups.

Her academic credentials include an MBA from Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration and a BA degree, cum laude, in Economics and Asian Studies from Brigham Young University. Stephanie also speaks Spanish and Japanese.

Marty: Welcome to Startup Professionals interviews. Tell us what you do.

Stephanie: I am a venture capitalist currently based out of Santa Fe, New Mexico, with EPIC Ventures. We invest in early stage IT startups and then oversee those portfolio companies through to exit.

Marty: What events led you to your commitment to venture capital investing?

Stephanie: I love building companies. I’ve run a $30m revenue operation with 150 employees and worked in finance and consulting, so I had a good broad business background with both line and strategic advisory roles which is a good fit for what we do in venture. When all goes well, it is a real partnership between the investors and the company management teams, figuring out the strategy, rolling with the punches you get from the economy and competition and working together to create a great company. This work uses everything I’ve learned, both about business and people, so it is a lot of fun.