Jesse Draper is creator and host of The Valley Girl Show, through which she’s become a spokesperson for startups and helped pioneer the way of new media content distribution. Formerly a Nickelodeon star, Draper is now CEO of Valley Girl‚ where she oversees the show and runs technology blog Lalawag.com.

Alexa Von Tobel is CEO and founder of LearnVest, which she describes as “Daily Candy meets personal finance.” She started her company with a 75-page business plan that won a contest, and has since raised $24.5 million in funding for this female-focused finance startup.

Doctor, daycare owner, bungee jump operator — these are businesses typically associated with risk and liability. But what about more “virtual” professions like a social media consultant, blogger or app developer? It’s hard to imagine that sitting behind a computer can put you in any real danger of a lawsuit, right?

While a job in tech may be less risky than being a plastic surgeon, things can (and will) happen. A freelance writer could unintentionally plagiarize someone’s work or end up leaving an exclusive smartphone prototype at a bar. But problems aren’t exclusive to an editorial or content-based company: An advertiser might fail to pay (making it impossible for you to pay your own vendors) or a less-than-reasonable client may choose to sue for breach of content.

Women have been a hot topic in the 2012 presidential campaign. Mashable recently put together a cool infographic that pulls together a lot of data about women in corporations, small businesses and different industries. Some of the information might be familiar to you; some might be new, but overall, it paints an encouraging picture of how far women in business have come…and how far we still have to go.

First, the good news. Women are starting businesses at 1.5 times the national average. This trend has been growing for a while; between 2002 and 2007, the number of women who own businesses increased by 20.1 percent, representing about 28 percent of all businesses. Nor are women stuck in traditionally “female” fields: Their industries vary widely, with the greatest representation in real estate, administrative and support, waste management and remediation, professional and technical services, retail, healthcare and other services.

Entrepreneurs have to know when and how to say ‘no,’ and be good at delivering the message. All startup leaders are besieged with requests for their time, attention, talent, money, or influence, and sometimes even good requests won’t fit into the time and energy you have available.

Startups require focus, so you need to say ‘no’ to some things, in order to do the important things well. This is really the principle of displacement, which dictates that everything you do rules out other things that you don’t do. It’s impossible to do everything.

Living and working as I do in the venture capital innovation ecosystem, I spend a lot of time with executives in early stage companies. A big chunk of the CEO’s time, and many of the people who work at the C level, is laser focused on raising money from investors; so it is imperative to make this critical process effective and efficient. Here is a collection of stories about meetings with venture capitalists that can serve as good lessons on what not to do. So here goes:

Research – know the audience! If you get an appointment, find out who will be in the room for sure; but who else could pop in? Often a principal or associate can be the first screen but partners are known to drop in unannounced. I had a client who didn’t plan for this and only brought enough materials for 3 to review; he ended up with 5 in the meeting.

Until recently, entrepreneurship was relatively unheard of as a career path for graduate students and postdocs. Early-stage researchers were expected to remain in the laboratory, where producing results and publications was their priority. If the resultant technology had commercial potential, it was their supervisor who disclosed the invention to the university to patent and license, or left the university to start a company themselves. However, the traditional model for technology commercialization and entrepreneurship in universities is flawed in two ways. First, universities find that simply licensing patents to private companies yields poor results: either the licence fee is too high for the company, or the business is ill-equipped to fill the technological gap between the idea and its commercial success. Even the 1980 Bayh–Dole Act in the United States, which provided laws to facilitate commercialization, didn't help to generate the incentive and the tools needed.

Interesting piece at Tech Crunch by Wayne Sutton on 7 new educational startups. Some cool companies in here no matter the founders’ backgrounds. From Sutton at TechCrunch:

So where are all these startups hiding you ask? Well here are seven up-and-coming educational startups founded by minorities that I believe will have an significant impact in the educational space – not just for minorities but for anyone looking to learn online, current students and teachers alike.

Jabious Williams, 7, hustled for tips pumping gas at a self-service Exxon station. Anacostia, a violent suburb of southeast Washington, D.C., was his home. After school, Jabious walked a mile each way through gang territory to make $30 a day helping his single mom support her family. As a young black male growing up in America's inner city, his chances for survival were slim.

High school drop-out rates continue to soar in most urban centers of the United States. Almost 20 million young people under 17 live below the poverty line. Every nine seconds in America, a student drops out of school. Jabious and his younger brother came close to joining their ranks. Without a mentoring hand, their failure was imminent. The boys were in desperate need of support.

When I went to college in the mid-'80s, I honestly don’t remember any of my classmates starting a business (with the exception of the guy down the hall in the dorm who sold pot, or another who organized some off-campus parties). This was the age of Ronald Reagan, after all, a time when those of us at the tail end of the baby boom or the first years of Generation X still aspired to do what our parents did—climb a corporate ladder, build a long career in one place, and steadily march toward a comfortable retirement.

Much has been written about whether entrepreneurs are born or made, with no real consensus. My own opinion, which is anecdotal, is that entrepreneurs can be made — and that parents play a central role in making them.

I had a remarkable epiphany while producing Lemonade Stories, a documentary film about extraordinary entrepreneurs and their mothers. The film, which features Richard Branson (of Virgin), Russell Simmons (of Def Jam), Arthur Blank (of the Home Depot and owner of the Atlanta Falcons) and Tom Scott (of Nantucket Nectars), among others, examines the impact that mothers have on sparking creativity and entrepreneurial spirit in their children.

Don Rose has a front seat to watch many of the emerging life science companies around North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park.

Rose is executive director of Carolina KickStart, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill program that helps faculty turn their university research and discoveries into new companies. Each year, Carolina KickStart hosts its Emerging Companies Showcase, a chance for companies to pitch their companies before an audience of researchers, fellow entrepreneurs and potential investors. This year, the event grew so large that the event was split into two tracks, one for technology and another for scientific companies. Of the 14 companies that presented, eight were in the scientific track. Most of those companies are pursuing some type of medical device or medical technology.

Rose is himself a veteran of the Research Triangle life sciences community. He worked in research at Glaxo Wellcome and later held executive positions at several Triangle biopharmaceutical companies. Rose will be one of the speakers at MedCity Media’s Converge conference in July. Rose took a few moments to share some of his life sciences perspectives.

Healthcare venture capitalists are no fans of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the regulatory challenges the agency poses for medical startups and device companies.

They blame many of the problems besetting healthcare investing squarely on the agency as delays caused by reviewers push investor pay day further out.

But at the MedTechInvesting Conference in Minneapolis on Monday, moderator Bill Harrington, managing partner at Osage University Partners, half jokingly cautioned that there will be no whining on the matter.

What makes immigrants twice as likely to launch a high-tech startup, compared with their native born peers? Consider the rise of Christian Gheorghe, an entrepreneur who started life in Romania and now is thriving as a Silicon Valley CEO.

Gheorghe’s latest company, Tidemark Systems, is in the spotlight this month. The Redwood City, Calif., maker of business-analytics applications is featured in the May 21 issue of FORBES as a part of a new breed of software companies that are holding down costs and speeding up innovation by building their businesses in the Internet cloud.  That’s news; so is Gheorghe’s path to the top.

People living in a group of mostly Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic U.S. states are more likely than the average American to improve their economic status. But southerners are largely falling behind, according to a study released Thursday (May 10) by the Pew Center on the States, Stateline’s parent organization.  

The study, which tracked economic mobility over a 10-year period in the 50 states and the District of Columbia, found that residents of Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Utah have “better” mobility. That means their earnings were more likely to grow over time and improve relative to their peers. 

Starting a business baby, starting a business. It can be a wild ride. Sylvia Gruber co-Founder and CEO of Rubybox broke down her experiences with Rubybox into eight, bite-sized tips for burgeoning startups.

Gruber is big on keeping things basic and personal, simplicity is key — often the most difficult and the most important aspect to get right.

Rubybox is a monthly beauty box subscription service that provides its subscribers with beauty product samples. The service allows for business-to-business opportunities by being a conduit for beauty product companies, to push out product samples into the market, for research and promotion. It’s a big business, about 500 beauty products get launched in South Africa annually.

Steve Jobs’s business feats were legendary long before he died in October 2011. Apple Inc., considered a niche player for much of its history, is the most valuable company in the world by market capitalization as of this writing. Most business leaders would be thrilled to achieve Jobs’s level of market success, but should they aspire to lead like him? Before doing so, they should dig into his management style. Jobs the leader was at once dynamic and controversial, and his success relied heavily on the genius of Jobs the innovator.

Many other prominent leaders leave legacies that become clear only with time; however, we can evaluate Jobs’s leadership with tremendous clarity already today. This is thanks to Walter Isaacson’s masterful, eponymous biography of the entrepreneur (Simon & Schuster, 2011), a 600-page account that rarely feels flabby or boring. Jobs pursued Isaacson, a former CEO of CNN and managing editor of Time, for five years (the first of many examples of Jobs’s persistence in the book), and then gave him a free hand (a much rarer occurrence), promising: “It’s your book. I won’t even read it.”

Student-run venture accelerator IDEA has added another pitch round over the summer, and more funding to its program.

Created by a group of students at Northeastern University, IDEA will now offer another opportunity for current undergraduate and graduate students and alumni to bring their ventures out of the dorm room and in front of investors.

The summer round so that more entrepreneurs can pitch their ventures was added because of high demand for the program, according to IDEA CEO Christopher Wolfel and Faculty Advisor Daniel Gregory.

For some 30 years, scientists have debated what sealed the fate of the dinosaurs. Was an asteroid impact more or less solely responsible for the catastrophic mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous geological period, 65 million years ago? Or were the dinosaurs already undergoing a long-term decline, and the asteroid was merely the coup de grâce?

This post appeared on the Fortune Magazine Site here and was adapted from my new book, The Business Model Innovation Factory.

Collaborators are everywhere. You will find them in the gray areas between silos. Just look up from your current business model. Seek out difference and gather often across boundaries, disciplines, and sectors. Be open and be curious. Beware of random collisions with unusual suspects. Unless, of course, if you want to learn something new. In that case seek out innovators from across every imaginable silo and listen, really listen, to their stories. New ideas, perspectives, and the value creating opportunities are in the gray areas between the unusual suspects. And yet we spend most of our time with the usual suspects in our respective silos. We need to get out of our silos more.

It is human nature to surround ourselves with people who are exactly like us. We connect and spend time with people who share a common world-view, look the same, enjoy the same activities, and speak the same language. We join clubs to be with others like us. The club most worth belonging to is the non-club club. The most valuable tribe is a tribe of unusual suspects who can challenge your world-view, expose you to new ideas, and teach you something new. A tribe of unusual suspects can change the world if it is connected in purposeful ways.

First Round Capital wants to stay the course.

The firm has closed a $135 million fourth fund. The amount is the same as First Round Capital III (which closed in 2010), the LP base is the same and so is the focus.

 “All we focus on is seed-stage,” First Round Partner Josh Koppelman wrote on his blog.  “We believe that the first 18-24 months of a company’s life are a special time–where the DNA of a company gets established.  And seed-stage is the only place we play.  It’s what we know.  It’s what we love. “