Starting your own business can be one of the most hectic and time-demanding processes that a person ever willingly takes. Often times, some of the biggest headaches that entrepreneurs suffer are as a result of mistakes which ultimately provide much needed insight into their businesses. By following these five problems, you can learn a few tips that are vital to know and will save you a lot of time and stress down the road.

1. Failing to Track the Numbers

A lot of the time, new business owners get so caught up in the process of getting used to being an entrepreneur and making sure everything is running smoothly with the operations of their company that they forget to keep an eye on their numbers. While you may follow your bank account, are you paying attention to all of the analytical metrics of your business? By focusing in on numbers early, it is easy to correct any issues before your company grows.

Five years ago I was 22, ambitious and inexperienced, and ready to start life as an adult. I had just landed a great job at 20th Century Fox Films and a crystal-clear vision for the future. I was on track to become a film studio executive.

Now at 28, as CEO of my own digital marketing firm in San Diego with two failed business ventures behind me, it’s sometimes funny to think how confident I was back then. I couldn’t foresee the life lessons I was preparing to learn over the next five years, nor did I care. I was a sitting duck.

Hiring a lead developer for your startup is a "make-it-or-break-it-moment." This is the person whose creative vision and technical know-how will determine the success of your product. This is the leader who will guide the engineers you hire down the line, accessing each of their strengths to maximize potential for innovation. And this is the person who will determine, through ability and ambition, whether your product is a standout or just another bit of noise in a tech scene full of loud voices.

But you probably already know that. You're probably wondering how you'll ever find the right person to serve as your startup's lead developer, when the person who excels in interviews and jumps out on paper may not necessarily live up to your expectations.

A New York City startup is saying it can produce a men’s button-down shirt from wool that’s super-soft, doesn’t need ironing and won’t smell even after being worn for 100 days straight without washing. And the company’s founder apparently did just that.

The clothing company, called Wool&Prince, was started several months ago by Portland, Oregon native Mac Bishop two of his friends. Their button-down shirt prototype was made from wool put through a special process to make it soft, wrinkle-resistant and odor-free. While they don’t reveal what techniques are used to achieve this, Bishop documented wearing one of the shirts for 100 days in a row here. (Hat tip to Gizmodo.)

In another sign of the increasing importance of London as a tech hub, startup accelerator TechStars London has Monday announced a permanent base.

According to Jon Bradford, MD of TechStars London, the aim of the permanent base, at Warner Yard,  is aimed at giving those in the 90-day accelerator program (but also just as importantly the “alumni” — those who have been through the intensive business coaching scheme) a base from which to work.

Entrepreneurship is America’s secret sauce.

It’s what built the greatest economy in the world and the strongest middle class. It’s what fuels American innovation, makes our industries more globally competitive and creates new jobs across our economy.

Over the past two decades, new establishments have created an average of more than four million new jobs per year. We need more entrepreneurs doing what they do best: turning innovative ideas into successful and growing businesses.

8:40 a.m., April 29, 2013--The word “fear” flashed in bold across a screen at the front of the room as University of Delaware President Patrick Harker told attendees at the sixth annual President’s Forum on Innovation and Entrepreneurship that fear was voted the most powerful barrier against innovation and entrepreneurship.

This year’s forum, themed “Breaking Down Barriers,” was held on Thursday, April 18, in Clayton Hall and included presentations by UD alumni entrepreneurs and funding pitches from students, alumni, faculty and staff.

GUEST MENTOR Brad Bernthal, director of Silicon Flatirons Center at the University of Colorado: Entrepreneurship is an outsider way of thinking. A major would domesticate entrepreneurship. The better path for integrating entrepreneurship within universities involves a re-conception of how university institutions work. 

The greatest risk of the entrepreneurial major is isolation. The last thing you want is for entrepreneurship to become a ghetto separated from other departments and disciplines. Instead, you want entrepreneurship diffused across schools and campus departments. What would be most powerful is a confederated model of decentralized but coordinated entrepreneurship offerings that are encouraged within each campus. 

Vinod Khosla (E'78) hates being called a visionary.

"The only thing I am visionary about is that I don't have a clue," he said. "I think where people make mistakes is to pretend they know where we are going."

The alumnus and former trustee of Carnegie Mellon University recently returned as a guest of The Innovators Forum for an engaging conversation on entrepreneurship and energy innovation led by CMU's Executive Vice President and Provost Mark Kamlet. 

It’s been roughly a year since the JOBS act (Jumpstart Our Business Startups) was put in place allowing certain regulations and securities encouraging crowdfunding or micro-financing in the US. From crowdsourcing t-shirts, education or even people, entrepreneurs have adapted to the changing scenery of investment innovations. 2012 was the year of Kickstarter as more than 500-million dollars have been pledged to fund almost 40 000 projects on this popular crowdfunding site. Are the recent crowd-based enterprises just an inevitable post-fad ripple effect? Or are they future symptoms possible of disrupting traditional concepts of finance, markets or economics?

Social media is used by businesses to increase brand loyalty, share new products, and even gain new customers. Every company uses social media differently, some more successfully than others. Below are ways to tell if your company is a social media success.

30 Ways to Tell if You’re a Social Media Success

1. Customers Seek You Out

In the early days of creating a social media account, you likely had to try very hard to find new connections and convince them that your brand was worth following. If customers begin finding you without you needing to go through all this extra work, you’re well on your way to social media success.

I’m a big fan of mentoring in business, and have been at different times on both the contributing and receiving end of the process. These days, I seem to often hear from entrepreneurs who are struggling to find a mentor, or complaining about their lack of effectiveness. Like any other relationship, it takes work on both sides to make mentoring work.

Most entrepreneurs view a mentor as someone older and more experienced who takes the time to personally give guidance, advice, and takes an emotional investment in your success. They don’t think about this process requiring an investment on their part, both in nurturing the relationship, and really listening, without being defensive, to advice given.

Theodore Berger, a biomedical engineer and neuroscientist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, envisions a day in the not too distant future when a patient with severe memory loss can get help from an electronic implant. In people whose brains have suffered damage from Alzheimer’s, stroke, or injury, disrupted neuronal networks often prevent long-term memories from forming. For more than two decades, Berger has designed silicon chips to mimic the signal processing that those neurons do when they’re functioning properly—the work that allows us to recall experiences and knowledge for more than a minute. Ultimately, Berger wants to restore the ability to create long-term memories by implanting chips like these in the brain.

Fast Company hosted Innovation Uncensored in New York last week with the hope of inspiring leaders to spark new ideas and trends. Visionaries like Jack Dorsey (Twitter), David Karp (Tumblr), Justin Kan (Exec), and Diane Von Furstenberg (DVF Studio) shared experiences from their pasts and their visions for the future. I’ve been to a lot of conferences, and this experience certainly stood above the rest.

However, it was disappointing to hear attendees talk about the barriers they would face in bringing this knowledge back to their companies. Here are 10 barriers you should remove to enable your employees to take your company into the future:

Chamath Palihapitiya, a former Facebook executive and founder of investment firm The Social+Capital Partnership, said today that the tech world should be “utterly ashamed,” because “we are at an absolute minimum in terms of things that are being started.”

Palihapitiya was interviewed onstage at our Disrupt NY conference. He argued that in contrast to past decades, where tech entrepreneurs were inventing silicon chips, putting computers on every desktop, or wiring the world, we’re now “rehashing ideas from 2003.” He didn’t name a specific company, but when Palihapitiya talked disdainfully about an instant messaging app that allows you to send photos of everything from an apple orchard to your genitalia, and that the message disappears after a short period of time, it’s not too hard to decipher who he’s talking about.

While many legendary Silicon Valley companies were founded by teams of two, partnerships aren't without their problems, states venture capitalist Mark Suster. Disagreements arise based on personal life changes, business strategies, and roles within the company. Suster prefers to avoid playing the role of co-founder "marriage counselor" by working with a strong, individual entrepreneur.

In response to a question from STVP's Tina Seelig, Instagram Co-Founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger describe their working relationship. Both Systrom and Krieger explain the stages of their relationship, and how the partnership respects each other's areas of specialty, while also providing a tremendous opportunity to sound out ideas. Because of this benefit, Systrom explains the co-founder relationship needs to be cherished. Krieger also believes honest and direct communication of expectations can prevent the relationship from wearing down over time.

In a few weeks, Ashley Robbins will join thousands of Purdue University students in graduation ceremonies.

But unlike most of those wrapping up their studies on the West Lafayette campus, Robbins will start her professional career nearby.

Robbins plans to start work this fall at Find8 Digital, a Lafayette media marketing company where she excelled as an intern.

What are the biggest ideas in education technology this year, and who's driving them? For the second year in a row, The Chronicle has identified a group of key innovators who are rebooting the academy, and we've profiled 10 of them on the pages that follow. This is not an endorsement of their projects: In some cases, the subjects of the profiles disagree with one another on how best to change higher education. But all of the people you'll meet here think technology could break established molds and help students learn more effectively, researchers make discoveries more easily, and colleges operate more efficiently. Earlier this year we invited readers and higher-education leaders to submit their nominations for this project, and we received more than 125 entries. Ultimately, the selections were made by a group of Chronicle editors and reporters, with a goal of considering innovators in various sectors.

Denmark, Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Finland and Sweden have already met or even exceeded their 2020 national targets on boosting university education, defined three years ago at EU level to enhance the bloc’s labour force and ability to compete against global economic rivals. The figures were released by Eurostat on Thursday (11 April) as part of its monitoring of the five headline targets defined in the ‘Europe 2020’ strategy, adopted in 2010 by the EU’s 27 heads of states and governments (see background).