It’s easy to associate delivering presentations with standing in front of an audience and gesturing toward projected slides. However, many meetings or pitches involve fewer than ten participants in a room, where everyone remains seated and walks through the same slide deck together. This is quite a different scenario with greater constraints on the presenter and fewer tools to engage the audience. But thoughtful planning and awareness of nonverbal cues can make these “non-presentations” successful.

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As an entrepreneur, it's beneficial to put together a smart, invested board of advisors to help get you through your beginning years and beyond. That's why we asked 12 startup founders from Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) what is most important when choosing your board. 

Vest Their Equity Over Time

It is extremely difficult to find the right advisers for your business. You need to make sure they have a strong work ethic, sufficient spare time to commit to the company and that they can provide solid advice and resources to your business.

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It's been a little while since I've written about growth hacking and I wanted to write about my experience with growth hacking since going through Y Combinator with One Month.

Y Combinator is known as an accelerator for a very good reason: it accelerates the growth of your startup tremendously.

So what are the things that Y Combinator does to make its startups grow so fast?

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When it comes to attracting the hip and cool, Southern California, long a cultural trendsetter, appears to be falling behind – at least in the view of the national media. Articles about where millennials are, or should be, going rarely mention anywhere in this region as a top choice.

Rather than hang out at the beach or enjoy poolside ambience, the conventional wisdom is that the millennial generation – those born after 1983 – would rather go anywhere else. Southern California is not on a list of the top 12 regions (although San Diego gets a mention) for millennials, published in the Huffington Post. Other “best” lists and similar compilations invariably highlight New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Austin, Texas, Raleigh, N.C., and Boston, but rarely SoCal.

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The calls of many animals, from whales to wolves, might contain more language-like structure than previously thought, according to a study that raises new questions about the evolutionary origins of human language.

The study was led by Arik Kershenbaum, a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis at UT.

By understanding the secret of how lizards regenerate their tails, researchers may be able to develop ways to stimulate the regeneration of limbs in humans. Now, a team of researchers from Arizona State University is one step closer to solving that mystery. The scientists have discovered the genetic “recipe” for lizard tail regeneration, which may come down to using genetic ingredients in just the right mixture and amounts.

Creating a startup company takes a lot of time and effort. It also takes money, which is something that entrepreneurs like Henry Schwartz know all too well.

Schwartz is co-founder and president of MobCraft Beer, a craft brewery in Madison, Wisconsin. His company recently became the first in his state to get approval from regulators to use crowdfunding to raise money from a large number of small investors online. It’s allowed under a new state law aimed at helping startup ventures.

Image: Matthew Marcus works at his desk in the basement of Kansas City Startup Village in Kansas City, Kansas. Kansas is one of a dozen states that have made it easier for startups to use crowdfunding to raise money from investors. (AP) 

Sharing the Wealth...  

For over 2 decades, leaders within the ENTOVATION Network have played a major role in advancing the innovation agenda locally, regionally and globally. What have emerged are significant (oftentimes annual) events to coalesce talent. It is our eco-system – operating as a holonomy – to which we have contributed and from which we have learned. It has served as my own intelligence system; and it has been so for many of you.  

Many members have been able to participate in one or more of the E100 Roundtables convened in New York, Helsinki, Monterrey (MX), Barcelona, Muscat (Oman) and Boston. They have taken advantage of the interaction and many have leveraged one another. Wise ones have used the progress of others as their own inspiration.

Over at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, Ted Kupper and Jon Perry recently hosted a Review the Future podcast that examined their nominations for the top (living) futurists today. Their conversation is definitely worth a listen and offered a lot of ideas to explore about leadership in foresight, prediction, trends, innovation and the rapid face of change we are facing today.

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The University of Minnesota said Tuesday that it’s scrapping plans for two venture capital funds worth $70 million and instead adopting a smaller program aimed at providing seed financing to start-up technology companies born on the university campus.

The U’s new Discovery Capital Investment Program will provide early-stage funding to help transfer university-created technologies to the commercial market.

Net migration of people to or from metro areas is reported annually by the Census Bureau and widely discussed.  Less well known is that their American Community Survey (ACS) provides migration figures broken down by characteristics such as race, age, income, and educational attainment. This lets us drill into finer grained details about who is moving where.

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Knowledge@Wharton: Investing for a Lifetime: Managing Wealth for the “New Normal” has made a bit of a splash. It received a really good review in The New York Times. The book is about retirement, a subset of personal investing. One would have thought there wasn’t that much new under the sun in personal investing, but you come along and show that’s not the case. Let’s just start with the title where you talk about the “new normal.” What do you mean by that? 

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — If there’s one thing Silicon Valley is very good at, it’s figuring out a way to take the pain out of just about any “regular life” task or nuisance with the simple tap of a button, usually in an app on your smartphone.

Whether some of these services are solving “hard problems” is debatable, but we thought we’d share the Y Combinator Summer 2014 startups working to make your life that much easier.

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The idea that my career would have something to do with water and art was a no brainer from a very early age. I loved to swim, I was obsessed with learning about ocean inhabitants and my fisher price camera was a constant companion, this was all at the ripe old age of nine. When I made the connection that it was someone’s job to hold the camera for the underwater natural history shows, I had my job title and an answer to the obligatory question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I never looked back.

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When you’re hiring, how do you know when someone is right for the job? Is it an intuitive decision, or based solely on the facts of their experience?

It’s not so cut and dry, these leaders say.

“The one piece of advice that I would tell young people getting into the tech industry today is to surround yourself with smart people you can learn from,” says Jess Lee, CEO of Polyvore. When having inspiring comrades around means handpicking them from a crowd of applicants, the process of assembling your all-stars can be overwhelming.

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I’ve had a few email exchanges in the past with startup founders struggling with an idea. Often they’ve been working on their idea for a while, and they have found some things haven’t played out as they had imagined they would.

When we’re in the early stages of the startup, the valley of death, we will often find ourselves questioning our ideas many times. This is great, as we need to validate our assumptions, but it also means we can find the lizard brain kicking in and persuading us we should give up.

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The workplace today is much different from the workplace of 30, 20, and even 10 years ago. Open office designs, in-house baristas, and for many organizations bosses managing from across the country are now the norm. Between video conferencing, email, and instant messaging, physical proximity to the office is no longer a requirement. Companies are hiring based on talent and fit, not if someone can be in their chair 24/7. This change has led to entire teams being spread across time zones, states, and even countries. While it can be tricky to report to a remote manager, I’m here to tell you it’s possible.

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As a professional public speaker on innovation, I’ve often wondered why people seem so attached to the idea of ending keynotes with a Q&A session. Most Q&A sessions are mediocre experiences at best: an instantly forgettable interlude before the coffee break. The very format, I’d argue, is a dysfunctional relic of the past, unthinkingly added to agendas everywhere, and I believe we need to rethink it.

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If you’re reading this while on a conference call — perhaps even in the loo — you’re not alone. It turns out many U.S. employees would rather do just about anything rather than listen intently to their coworkers from a remote location.

According to InterCall, the world’s largest conference call company — it’s used by 85% of Fortune 100 firms — the percentage of people using mobile phones to dial into conference calls has been rising steadily over the past three years, from 19.4% of all calls in 2011 to 21.2% in 2013.

That first mile—where an innovation moves from an idea into the market—is often plagued by failure. In fact, less than 1% of ideas launched inside organizations have any real impact on the bottom line.

The ideas aren’t the problem. It’s the process.

In his new book, The First Mile: A Launch Manual for Getting Great Ideas Into the Market, innovation expert Scott Anthony has created a road map to improve the process and the chances of success.