I was sitting on a panel discussion a few weeks back amongst VCs and Entrepreneurs where the topic of who to talk to within a VC firm came up.  One entrepreneur asked if he should waste his time talking with an associate or just try to work with a partner directly.  At the end of the day, it’s the partners who make the decision, he said.   Several of the VCs in the room made a case for why associates were a valuable part in the fund raising process.

At the time, I did not have a strong opinion either way.  Having raised over $10 million in venture capital in my career, I have seen both channels work.  Sometimes, an associate becomes an internal advocate for your start-up and convinces the partners to invest.  Other times, associates were either too young or inexperienced to make a good assessment of a start-ups value.

For innovative and high-tech startups that need financing, a worldwide drought is in the offing.

Coming shortage of equity investment

The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor reports a surge in early-stage entrepreneurial activity worldwide in 2011. Over 12 percent of US adults started a business in that year, compared to less than 8 percent in 2010. Entrepreneurship increased in three fourths of the developed countries GEM studied. Even in China and other countries where entrepreneurship was already high, entrepreneurial participation jumped 25% in 2011.

Hopkins has launched the China STEM program in partnership with Nanjing University, reports a Johns Hopkins University publication, The News-Letter.

Beginning in the summer of 2012, this eight-week long summer program will take place at the Hopkins-Nanjing University Center for Chinese and American Studies in Nanjing, and at Peking University in Beijing.

First proposed in 2009, the program will be led by program director Dr. Ninping Yu and be open to Hopkins students, students from other universities, and professionals.

Europe may still be in the grips of a financial crisis, but that hasn't stopped a number of countries investing in innovation and research and development.

An annual study by the European Commission, titled the Innovation Union Scoreboard (IUS) shows that in 2011, while some nations are lagging in their "innovation performance" (the state of R&D and innovation), 16 of the 34 European countries surveyed performed as well as or better than the EU average.

About three times each week, an enterprising researcher at the University of Maryland, College Park, takes a step toward patenting an invention. Each year, that results in the creation of about five new high-tech firms, the kinds of businesses often credited with creating good jobs.

That's a good start, but the school's goal is to double that rate in the next few years. With a small but smartly focused investment by the state, we can get there — and all Marylanders can benefit.

Gov.Martin O'Malley's proposed Maryland Innovation Initiative offers a significant advance to our state's tech-based economic development. It commits $6 million to boost commercialization of university research and creates incentives for statewide collaborations that will strengthen our high-tech sector. Additionally, through tax credits, InvestMaryland will raise $70 million to replenish the state's venture capital fund. This gives vital support to start-up firms.

A few quick impressions from last night’s FutureMed extravaganza put on by Singularity University at the Museum of Computer History, a stone’s throw from Google’s Mountain View headquarters.

The event featured an exhibition session where emerging digital health companies (with some others) demo’d their initial products, followed by a plenary session introduced by FutureMed Executive Director (and former MGH medicine colleague) Daniel Kraft, and featuring presentations to the packed house by several leading innovators – including one of the developers of IBM’s Watson, which is pivoting from Jeopardy to clinical medicine.

Due diligence should always be a two-way street. A while back, I published an article on “Startup Due Diligence Is Not a Mysterious Black Art,” describing what investors do to validate your startup before they invest. Here is the inverse, sometimes called reverse due diligence, describing what you should do to validate your investor before signing up for an equity partnership.

I’ve had startup founders tell me that it’s only about the color of the money, but I disagree. Particularly if you are desperate, keep in mind the person who finds a good-looking partner to take home from the bar at closing time, but then wakes up in the morning wondering “What did I just do?” Taking on an investor is like getting married – the relationship has to work at all levels.

Successful entrepreneurs are focused individuals who come up with a product or service idea, create a company around it and then do everything they can to make it successful. Most technology companies have started in this way.

One of the things entrepreneurs need is capital. They often look for people who have the resources to get them off the ground, get them to the next step or keep them from running aground from unexpected problems.

Pete DeComo -- chairman and CEO of ALung, and an entrepreneur who already has successfully launched several businesses that have returned millions of dollars to his investors -- says one of the 10 ways to tell if you're an entrepreneur is that "your rich friends wince every time you catch their eye."

Derek Gabbard wasn't dreaming of California when he sought to raise investment capital for his Baltimore-based cybersecurity firm.

But the CEO of Lookingglass Cyber Solutions lucked out with a connection to venture capitalists in the state that dwarfs all others in terms of venture capital. With a San Francisco investment firm taking the lead on the investment and a Maryland firm following, Gabbard recently raised $5 million.

Such deals, where Mid-Atlantic technology companies straddle both coasts for investors, have been cropping up lately, though the dynamics underlying them vary. Leaders of local companies hunting for early-stage financing have made pilgrimages to California and either returned with a big check — or advice to move to that state or New York City if they want to build their businesses.

You can’t read much about the venture capital industry before you start hearing about the so-called “valley of death” for early stage companies.

Conventional wisdom holds that young companies enter that valley, in which attracting investment capital becomes extremely difficult, at an early stage, typically between an initial round of angel funding and the company’s first institutional series A round.

Patience is one of the seven virtues, the lesser-known cousins of the seven sins.  And indeed, “patience is a virtue” – or so goes the saying.  But another saying states that “fortune favors the bold.” So which one is it?

Well, here’s the thing.  Yes, life is a marathon, but whether you define success by recognition, respect, money, power or fame – success is subjective, relative and fluid and boils down to Ambition, Vision, Determination, Execution, Luck and Timing.

I was doing a radio interview recently when the host asked a most interesting question:

"Can anybody become an entrepreneur?"

Great question, and one that I had to think about for a second before answering. The short answer is that anybody can, but quite honestly, not everybody should. I responded that way because I have learned that becoming an entrepreneur has less to do with what you know and what your experiences are, and everything to do with what you are willing to do to succeed.

Connecticut Innovations (CI), the state’s quasi-public authority responsible for technology-based economic development, today announced it has launched the Connecticut Innovation Ecosystem (Innovation Ecosystem) initiative and issued two requests for qualifications (RFQs) for entities to assist with implementation of this initiative. The Innovation Ecosystem is one of several new initiatives being launched by CI under its recently announced plan to deploy $250 million over the next five years, including $125 million in new funding from the State of Connecticut. The Innovation Ecosystem will be supported with $4.8 million in the first year from this pool of new State funding.

In the U.S., the majority of net job creation comes from young companies. The purpose of the Innovation Ecosystem is to help scalable young companies start and grow in Connecticut, improving the pipeline of potential investments for local investors, including CI.

“We want Connecticut’s entrepreneurship support system to function like an ecosystem—a dynamic, vibrant business environment where young ventures can grow and succeed,” said Catherine Smith, chair of CI and commissioner of the Department of Economic and Community Development (DECD). “This effort seeks to help entrepreneurs and economic development leaders make Connecticut one of the best places in the country to start and grow a company.

Many professionals in business, from startups to multi-nationals, assume that team leader or executive is an appointed position, and the skills come with the title. In reality, leadership is best demonstrated while not in a position of authority, and is a skill that must be sharpened every day of your life.

Most experts agree that leadership, as perceived by people around you, is more about behavior than it is about specific skills or knowledge. Darryl Rosen, in his new book “Table for Three?” illustrates this with humor for each of fifty dumb mistakes that smart managers don’t make. The leadership one is setting a poor example by your own actions (“Do as I say, not as I do.”)

Very few company founders start out with management experience, so they tend to make it up as they go along. Sometimes they try to reinvent management from first principles. More often than not, they manage their startups the way that they’ve seen management work on TV and in movies. I’ll bet more entrepreneurs model their behavior on Captain Picard from Star Trek than any nonfiction human.

Most TV management is of the “command and control” variety. The CEO makes a decision, and tells his lieutenants. They convey this important decision to the teams, who execute on the CEO’s decision. It’s top-down management. All authority and power and decisions flow from the top. How could it work any other way?

Join FasterCures and the leadership team of the newly created National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) at the NIH for a virtual town hall meeting on February 27, 2012, 1:00 – 2:00 p.m. Eastern. Moderated by FasterCures executive director Margaret Anderson, this web event—NCATS: What it is and what it isn’t—will address the Center’s priorities and program areas, including its efforts to reduce, remove, or bypass translational pipeline bottlenecks. Dedicated to saving time in the way we pursue and conduct medical research and development across disease areas, the creation of NCATS demonstrates our strong national commitment to medical research by ensuring advances achieved in basic science are translated into new therapies, better prevention strategies, and cures more efficiently.

When entrepreneur Cavanaugh L. Gray set out to pursue his own small business dreams he didn’t realize the impact it would have on helping others achieve their own dreams. In the spring of 2004, The Entrepreneur Cafe, LLC founder did the unthinkable. He scheduled a meeting with his supervisor, picked out his best suite, walked into his corporate job and fired himself. Given current unemployment rates and a tight lending market this might be considered absurd by today’s standards.

“I grew up with an entrepreneurial driven spirit and learned how to build business ideas easily and quickly,” says Gray. But years later he would find himself in a position he wasn’t wired for and knew that if he wanted a different future it would require a big leap of faith.

Email delivery is a highly important consideration; after all, nobody can click on a link in an email they never see. Unfortunately though, there are a number of obstacles each email must overcome before reaching its intended destination, ideally avoiding the spam folder of course.

According to Return Path‘s Global Email Deliverability Benchmark Report for 2011, only 81% of global email reaches the inbox. Email deliverability in the Unites States is the highest with about 86% of emails making it to the intended recipient, but marketers can still move the needle a lot higher by understanding the process and by taking responsibility for where emails land.

New data released yesterday (7 February) by the European Commission show that almost all 27 EU countries have improved their innovation performance but have not managed to close the consistent gap with global innovation leaders like the United States, Japan and South Korea.

Antonio Tajani, European commissioner for Industry and Entrepreneurship, said the results of the scorecard were “a clear warning that more efforts to boost innovation are needed. If we want to close the gap with our main economic partners and to overcome the current crisis, innovation deserves all our attention.”

We conducted a Q&A with billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban.

He's a judge on ABC's Shark Tank and he is an angel investor, so he has seen a lot of startup pitches.

We asked Cuban about the worst pitch he's ever seen. He replied, "Tons have started, 'I have a great idea, can you help me?' or 'I don't know where to start.' Those are an immediate no."