Entrepreneurs inherently understand that they have to be the initial leader of their startup, but often they don’t have the experience or the training to know where their leadership competencies lie, or how to build a leadership team. For new entrepreneurs, leadership development efforts may be more valuable for achieving startup success than business skills development.

Very few people know their own leadership style, or strengths and weaknesses, despite their many years of living and working in the real world. To assess where you are, and to unlock your full potential, there are many courses available, as well as seminars and gurus, but a good place to start is a book on the subject, like the new one from John Mattone, “Intelligent Leadership.”

As the sun comes up over Lusaka, a city I share with two million others, business is well under way and has been since 3 a.m. The trucks carrying produce from the farms around the city are the first to arrive in the early hours before I wake.

As soon as I do, I am up and out, looking for new contacts and investments to help support and grow my bio-fuel company. Such is the life of a young entrepreneur in this town. Every day is a new opportunity to meet the challenges of keeping a small business alive.

Governor Martin O’Malley today officially launched data.maryland.gov - Maryland’s first statewide open data portal that will provide researchers, entrepreneurs, public servants and citizens with a wide variety of data to support transparency and innovation in government. Data such as vendor payments, vehicle accidents, licensed veterinary clinics, GIS mapping data, and per capita electricity consumption will all be made available and housed in a central place for the public. The Governor made this announcement at a panel discussion hosted in conjunction with the Future of Information Alliance (FIA) – a transdisciplinary partnership between the University of Maryland, College Park and 10 founding partners. The panel featured “futurists” and over 120 students, entrepreneurs and public servants who spoke about the importance of big data to better serve and inform the public.

Looking at the success trajectories of today’s disruptors--from Pandora cofounder Tim Westergren to Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales--it’s easy to think that they had everything figured out from a young age. But many of today’s success stories learned lessons later in life that they wished they had known as they were beginning their careers. The eight investors and entrepreneurs below share the advice they wish they had gotten in their early twenties.

It's easy to have a mentor-crush on Warren Buffett: He's worth $50 billion, he's had friendships that have lasted decades, he leans in. For an hour this afternoon, the Sage of Omaha made our mentee dreams come true.

Buffett was interviewed by Caroline Ghosn, cofounder of women's careership startup Levo League. The live-streamed conversation drew from Buffett's 82 years of facing fears, finding heroes, and painting canvases--if you have questions, ask him on his Levo profile.

From the legendary story of Marie Antoinette’s hair turning white overnight to the press coverage of Obama’s graying temples, the link between stress and gray hair has been a longtime concern. While some scientists blame the salt and pepper look on genetics alone, others suggest stress can send us straight to the salon.

Touch of Gray - Why it Matters

Since going gray is part of the normal biological aging process, even fans of ohm-ing the stress away are bound to sport the silver eventually. Gray hair usually appears around the big 4-0, when the body stops supplying strands with melanin, the pigment that gives hair its color.

If you're in the market for a new job and can't seem to find any openings, you might want to consider applying to a tech startup.

According to a recent study by Silicon Valley Bank, about 87% of tech startups plan to hire new staffers this year. This may seem like a lot, and that's because it is. In fact, the number is up significantly from 14% four years ago.

Software companies will be doing the most hiring this year, with about 90% planning to ramp up the size of their workforces, the study indicates.

The New York eHealth Collaborative (NYeC) and the Partnership Fund for New York City (Partnership Fund), today announced the graduation of the inaugural class of the New York Digital Health Accelerator (NYDHA) at its first annual Demo Day.

The eight member class celebrated its accomplishments and pitched its innovative solutions in front of a packed room of investors, healthcare providers, and a who's who of health tech in New York, providing an overview of their products that are helping to lead the transformation of healthcare across New York State.

The campaign to front a movie based on the cult television show "Veronica Mars" through crowdfunding broke records for the fastest project ever to raise $1 million on Kickstarter. It was the website's biggest film project so far, and it has the most backers of any project to date.

What it probably didn't do, Wharton experts say, is throw open the doors of crowdfunding to major motion pictures. But that's OK: Crowdfunding is successfully helping entrepreneurs raise capital without the need for them to go Hollywood.

The annual Wharton Business Plan Competition is a crowd pleaser offering brainy ideas from entrepreneurial students, more than $100,000 in prizes to jumpstart new businesses and a layer of suspense.

This year, about 300 students, faculty, business executives and potential investors attended the 15th annual competition that marks the culmination of seven months of work for the eight contenders.

How many times have investors heard startups start their pitch by touting that their technology is “disruptive?” What entrepreneurs forget or don’t realize is that most customers are initially wary of any technology, that educating the market on new technology is expensive, takes a long time, and people buy problem solutions rather than technology anyway. Investors will wait for more traction.

The concept of disruptive technology was first introduced by Clayton M. Christensen in “The Innovator’s Dilemma” way back in 1995. Such technologies, like the digital camera and mobile phones, introduce such novel concepts that they displace existing technology quickly by societal standards. Unfortunately this “quickly” may be too slowly to save initial startups in the space.

The Obama administration on Wednesday announced the selection of nine university groups for a $10-million initiative with corporate partners to improve the teaching of engineering to undergraduates.

Under the program, known as "Graduate 10K+," the selected public and private institutions will spend the next five years testing various strategies to raise graduation rates in the sciences. Currently only about 45 percent of undergraduates majoring in sciences complete their degrees.

Interacting with friends and family across long distances has been a concern of humans for centuries. As social animals, people have always relied on communication to strengthen their relationships. When face-to-face discussions are impossible or inconvenient, humans have dreamed up plenty of creative solutions. Avalaunch Media recently unveiled their Interactive Infographic entitled, “The Complete History of Social Media.”

When Julian Kyula and Josphat Kunyua launched Mobile Decisioning Africa Ltd. in Nairobi, Kenya, in 2010, they had a big idea, lots of energy and solid business experience. But nobody could have predicted that just three years later their company, called MoDe for short, would be offering instant microcredit for more than 100 million prepaid mobile phone users across the African continent.

MoDe popped onto the radar of the global tech community when the company won the IBM Global Entrepreneur of the Year award. Each year, IBM stages numerous SmartCamp contests in cities around the globe where startup entrepreneurs hone their business plans, get advice from mentors and compete for prizes. MoDe won regional contests in South Africa and Brazil before winning the finals in New York City.

Most business accelerator programs give entrepreneurs a bit of cash, connect them with mentors, and run boot camps to help turn their ideas into products. At the New York Digital Health Accelerator, tech startups get two other things to help them build software to improve health care: access to New York State’s many hospitals and their data.

Seven entrepreneurs in the year-old accelerator pitched their products to investors Wednesday at the program’s demo day to show off the software they’ve refined over the last nine months. They’re trying to solve some of the thorniest tech problems doctors and hospitals have: How do you keep patients who leave the hospital from returning? How do you keep track of treatments prescribed by different doctors and ensure they don’t conflict with each other? How do doctors securely communicate with each other and with patients once they leave the clinic?

PersonalWineBottles.com is a company that creates hand-painted and, hand-etched wine bottles. Customers can select everything from the design of the bottle to the type of wine allowing for a truly unique personalized wine bottle entirely over the web.

Ordering from PersonalWineBottles.com is done in three easy steps:

1) Choose a Design. Customers select a category for the occasion. Templates range from holiday Christmas trees and menorahs to weddings, birthday designs and humor messages such as “You had me at Merlot.”

Famed restaurateur and chef Mario Batali took the stage with Fast Company Editorial Director Tyler Gray at our Innovation Uncensored event last week in New York. As he expands his restaurant Babbo in the east, his Mozza Restaurant Group in the west, and his Italian market Eataly in Chicago, London, and other cities, Batali shared some of the business lessons he's learned over the years. Listen to the audio of the full interview above and read the big ideas below.

On Nurturing Talent: "We don't hire executive chefs ever. We hire line cooks and prep cooks and wine waiters and busboys and waiters--and they become chefs and sous chefs and sommeliers and general managers and service directors."

The Lean Startup. Lean Thinking. Design Thinking. Agile. Skunk Works®. Outcome-Driven Innovation. Customer Co-Creation. Future Search. The World Café.Hunting for Hunting Grounds. Choosing an approach by which to pursue collaborative innovation is like choosing a religion. In this article innovation architect Doug Collins reflects on the essence of the practice.

Steve Reaser made me aware this morning of the following statement from Rep. Patrick McHenry of North Carolina:

"New crowdfunding legislation will pave the way for startups and entrepreneurs to grow their businesses and fuel job creation around the country. While the SEC has delayed implementation of crowdfunding rules at the federal level, I applaud North Carolina leaders such as Tom Murray for taking the initiative of offering crowdfunding across the state. From small craft breweries in Asheville to high-tech startups in RTP (Research Triangle Park), crowdfunding offers a new source of capital to entrepreneurs chasing the American Dream."

Start with a problem and find the solution, that’s where success lies. That’s the advice of 27-year-old tech entrepreneur David Truong, and he can teach you a thing or two.   Passionate about learning and education, the Melbourne man founded Broccol-e-games last year, an educational games company that produces fun learning games for iOS devices, aimed at the ‘lost generation’ – students that slip behind at school and struggle to close the gap.