On this episode of Heads Up students across the campus debate and discuss entrepreneurship and the opportunities it brings to them and what basically draws them towards entrepreneurship. Thousands of students graduate from B-schools and colleges every year. But, only a few of them are able to make their college entrepreneurial ideas take flight. Why? What skill gap needs to be plugged? To find out, we speak to the students.

As a startup mentor, I’m always amazed that some entrepreneurs seem to be an immediate hit with investors, while others struggle to get any attention at all. Finally I realized that Venture Capital and Angel investors are actually humans, despite some views to the contrary. As with most business and personal interactions, first impressions tend to become lasting ones.

2014 is almost over and entrepreneurs still cannot access funds under Title III of the April 2012 Jumpstart our Business Startups (JOBS) Act’s equity crowdfunding provisions. The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has not released the final rules however, the rest of the industry is exploding!

Each year, MaRS conducts a survey of our “ventures,” the startups we support with venture services.

As part of Data Catalyst’s work trying to discover trends and patterns in the innovation economy, we thought the MaRS venture survey results would provide an interesting window into the startup ecosystem in Toronto and surrounding region.

Austin is poised to become a global center of innovation, especially in the field of life sciences and medical research, but there are some big hurdles to overcome and potential threats that could knock the city off its trajectory, if it’s not careful.

Image: Sen. Kirk Watson speaking at the Austin Chamber’s Innovation Summit, photo by Susan Lahey

Marketing is everything these days. You can have the best technology, but if customers don’t know you exist, or they don’t know how your technology solves a real problem for them, your startup will fail. Yet I see many technology entrepreneurs that focus on the basics of marketing too little and too late.

You worked for months building your crowdfunding campaign. You made your prototype, shot a video, wrote your pitch, practiced your spiel, and designed your website. The campaign finally goes live -- and your friends and family immediately back you. But after a quick start, you're left wondering how to gain more momentum. After all, campaigns go viral on Indiegogo and Kickstarter all the time. How do you wake up to 1,000 backers and an over-funded campaign?

Most New Yorkers will agree that waiting for the infamous L train is a special kind of hell.

So to ease commuter tensions while passing time on the subway platform, occasional entertainment and busking is permitted.

Generally, disgruntled New Yorker's will watch along without much interaction, unwilling to let loose, but subway entertainment can sometimes create an intimate moment between strangers — especially when one brave soul really feels the music, and starts to dance.

David Smith, CEO of High Brew Coffee, built his business in the most unusual of places—while sailing on the high seas. After selling Sweet Leaf Tea, the company he spent 12 years growing, the entrepreneur decided to take a break from the hustle-bustle of the business world and embraced his second passion: sailing.

"My wife and I long dreamed of taking a sailing trip with our children," says Smith. "We both sailed frequently growing up and it was a passion of ours. We always thought sailing would be a great way to connect with our children and show them that lifestyle."

 

I loved reading this Forbes article by Erica Dhawan, founder and CEO of Cotential, a global innovation firm in New York City.

It touched upon a discussion NJBIZ colleague Andrew Sheldon and I often have when coming up with ideas for Millennial Minded: Is it really still about “what millennials want” or how to “understand millennials”?

Building a regional life science ecosystem requires venture capital. And San Antonio has a shortage of venture capital, said John Kerr with Texas Next Capital. “The critical factor, I don’t care whether you’re in San Antonio or Timbuktu, for all of these companies, is access to capital,” Kerr said. “These are ventures that are heavily dependent on capital.”

Image: http://www.siliconhillsnews.com

The latest Census numbers show Americans aged 18 to 34 struggling worse than their parents did in the '80s

MORE 10 Million Americans Switched Their Race or Ethnicity for the Census U.S. Census Bureau Shows More People Living in Areas of Poverty 4 Key Takeaways from New Census Data Millennials make less money, are more likely to live in poverty and have lower rates of employment than their parents did at their ages 20 and 30 years ago.

What would YouTube look like if it was launched today instead of in 2005?

That’s the question New York entrepreneurs Jordan Urbach and Jonathan Swerdlin pondered one night in 2012 as they shared their frustration of having nowhere to post the videos they took on their phones.

Office parties are so last year. Companies looking to do more to honor their employees are stepping out of the box and coming up with more meaningful, creative ways to show recognition to hard working staff over the holiday season.

Many companies are finding that younger workers, in particular, aren’t as interested in the standard holiday fare—office parties with egg nog and trinket gifts. Rather than blowing budgets on traditional holiday parties, they’re sponsoring shopping sprees and cruises to celebrate the end of the year. Others are tapping into the giving spirit of the season and sponsoring volunteer activities that they say are not only fun for employees but good for business as well.

It feels like every day, we hear another story of a 22-year-old who sold his app for millions. But the truth about entrepreneurs may be very different. In fact, if you look at the official data, entrepreneurship in the U.S. has been in decline for over thirty years.

We talked to Ben Casselman, the chief economics writer for FiveThirtyEight, about how to reconcile the swelling of entrepreneurial spirit with the apparent decline of actual startups across the country.

If you retired tomorrow, what would you do? 

For most, the answer is simple: I would travel the world!

At the age of 27, I retired from the corporate world and immediately did exactly that: I traveled around the world.

For 8 months, I covered 56 stops across 5 countries taking my total count up to 25 countries now. Along the way, I’ve covered some of the richest countries in the world, as well as some of the poorest.

Works by Bach, Brahms, Mozart
 and others are effective aids that improve sleep patterns and reduce stress, studies find

As the season of cramming and finals approaches, Trojans can get help with a healthy, easily accessible study aid — classical music.

Mashable hosted its second #BizChats Twitter chat on Wednesday, Dec. 2, featuring finance experts @MrMoneyMustache, @BudgetsAreSexy and @ClubThrifty.

The conversation encompassed a variety of topics related to Mashable business editor Todd Wasserman's piece on how to turn your finances around in 2015.

Health startup founders have one more day to get their applications in to be a part of DreamIt Health’s second Baltimore cohort.

The deadline is Friday for the new group of health startups. Get to it.

Image: (Photo by Flickr user Ted Eytan, used under a Creative Commons license)

United Nations leaders have worried for decades about the pace of population growth. A few years ago leading calculations had global population peaking at nine billion by 2070 and then easing to 8.4 billion by 2100. Currently it stands at 7.2 billion. Recently the U.N. revised these numbers steeply upward: the population is now expected to rise to 9.6 billion by 2050 and continue to 10.9 billion by 2100 (black line, below). What caused this drastic revision? Almost all the increase comes from Africa (pink line). Earlier models “had anticipated that fertility rates in Africa would drop quickly, but they haven’t,” says Adrian Raftery, a statistician at the University of Washington, who assessed the revised estimates. How the world will feed a few billion more people is the question of the day.  

Image: http://www.scientificamerican.com