Jeff Sutton led the corporate IT team at Box for four years, as the online file-sharing company grew from 50 employees to more than 1,000. He joined Box from IBM, making about $95,000 a year—forgoing the higher salary somebody with his decade of experience in systems administration could have made so he could collect stock options, roughly 21,000 in all.

It’s easy to declare yourself an entrepreneur, but it’s not so easy to convince investors, your team and customers that you are that special one to fund and follow. If you don’t consistently display the right entrepreneur mindset traits, people won’t follow and business success will likely elude you. And don’t even think you can fake the important attributes once the going gets tough.

There has been a big debate over the last few years over whether the Series A crunch is real or not.

What everyone can agree on, though, is that there are definitely more seed and early stage funds now than ever before, and more people willing to give money to young companies looking to make it big.

But just who are these funds and venture capitalists that run them? What kinds of investments do they like making, and how do they see themselves in the VC landscape?

Image: http://vator.tv

Seeking out venture capital for your business is rarely easy -- especially if you’re doing it for the first time. Entrepreneurs may be specialists in their niche, but attracting and weighing different funding offers requires an entirely new skill set and can prove overwhelming. It was for me.

2015 will go down in start-up history as one of the most active, colorful, and well deserving of its own Hollywood movie starring unicorns dancing in the cloud surrounded by bubbles with lots of gold at the end of the rainbow.

In 2015, we saw wearable technology reach the next level, online lending and marketplaces take center stage, and virtual reality come out of the shadows to give us a peek into the future.

In April, one enterprising senior or team of graduates-to-be at the University of Pennsylvania will be named the inaugural President’s Innovation Prize winners. The award comes with $100,000 in seed money and a $50,000 living stipend per team member. And that is just the start.

The President’s Innovation Prize launched by Penn President Amy Gutmann in October is among the largest opportunities in higher education for undergraduate students to pursue innovation and entrepreneurship outside the classroom.

More than 1,000 companies now have corporate venture arms, according to GCV Analytics, a nearly 80% increase over 2011, and that number continues to grow.

More than 250 of these companies sent people to a conference in Sonoma, Calif., this week to learn to get better at finding and investing in new technologies, which are evolving faster than ever. Here are some excerpts of what they were discussing at the Global Corporate Venturing and Innovation Summit.

Image: Caterpillar Ventures in May invested in Yard Club Inc., a San Francisco-based startup that lets contractors rent idle equipment to each other. LUKE SHARRETT/BLOOMBERG NEWS

In business, the only thing that counts is results, not how hard people work or how many hours they put in. Have you noticed in your startup or around your office that some people are always at work and busy, but others seems to consistently get more done? Studies of software teams, for example, show differences as great as ten to one in productivity between working team members.

Brazil is latching onto a novel, if controversial, approach to fight the spread Zika virus: genetically modified mosquitoes.

Zika virus is transmitted to humans primarily through the bite of an infected Aedes species, such as Aedes aegypti, the yellow fever mosquito.

No vaccine or treatment exists to combat the infection, which public health officials are worried may be linked to a brain defect in infants and a rare neurological syndrome that could cause paralysis in adults.

Image: Authorities have confirmed more than 30 cases of Zika virus in the United States. Here's what you need to know. (Gillian Brockell/The Washington Post)

5 years ago I sat at our annual meeting bored beyond belief. It wasn’t just that I have ADD making boring meetings excruciatingly painful – it was that the format was tired, unimaginative, uninspiring and not very useful. We did what many VC funds did – we presented our annual results, we stood up and talked about our portfolio companies, we invited a few to also present and then we had dinner & drinks at some posh restaurant.

Steve Case’s bus tour, dubbed “The Rise of the Rest,” showcases how entrepreneurs are coming up with new products and technologies all across the country, not just in the Bay Area. Of course, while innovation does occur everywhere, new data suggest access to the venture capital needed to support innovation has become more, not less, concentrated in the Bay Area.

Image: http://www.brookings.edu

While fourth-quarter venture capital funding slid in most industries amid fears of an economic slowdown, biotechnology investment sprinted ahead. The question is how long the run can last.

Total U.S. venture funding reached $72.30 billion in 2015, its highest level since 2000, despite fourth-quarter investment declines in consumer services, information technology, and other markets, according to industry tracker Dow Jones VentureSource.

Just when you thought micro venture capital funds in India had run their course, a whole new wave may be starting to take shape.

Last Tuesday, Mukul Singhal and Rohit Jain, the duo that led seed investments at Gurgaon-based venture capital firm SAIF Partners, joined a small tribe of local venture capitalists eager to give micro venture capital another spin

We know that two-thirds of large scale transformation efforts fail. But that’s not a terribly helpful piece of information―unless we’re looking for confirmation that this is hard, really hard. What is useful is to understand what leaders can do to substantially increase the odds that their companies won’t be among the two-thirds of those that fail. From my research and work with companies around the world leading large-scale transformation initiatives, here are the four things I’ve found that virtually all successful change leaders do really well:

Looking for a job is like dating. If you’re not careful, you could end up with a dud.

Just think, eight hours a day (or more!) of sheer misery could be yours should you choose poorly. But you won’t because you’re smarter than that.

FTM. SAHD. NAK. GOAT.* Are you lost yet? If you don’t understand these acronyms it may be because they have been cultivated by a select group of people. Like the cats who popularized cheezeburgers and LOLs or the shiba inu’s "dogespeak," which is heavy on the wows, much, and such, parents communicating on the web have created their own slang, replete with abbreviations and hashtags.

Job-hunting website Glassdoor has produced a ranking of the 20 best companies in the UK for work/life balance, based on data from anonymous employees who have left reviews.

Image: Glassdoor/Cornerstone OnDemand A juice bike in Cornerstone OnDemand's London office. - http://www.businessinsider.com

What is blockchain?

At a very high level, the blockchain is a decentralized ledger, or list, of all transactions across a peer-to-peer network. This is the technology underlying Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, and it has the potential to disrupt a wide variety of business processes.

Not Your Grandfather’s Manufacturing wasn’t the title of Wednesday’s Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce event on manufacturing.

But it could have been, given the panelists on stage at the Hyatt at the Bellevue.

Give up the image of “dark, dirty, dangerous, and underpaid,” with “rows of people doing menial tasks,” said panelist Evan Malone, founder of NextFab, the hardware technology incubator and product development services company in South Philadelphia.

Image: Evan Malone, president of NextFab, with a Pick and Place Machine, which assembles such things as circuit boards. ANDREW THAYER / Staff

Most entrepreneurs aren’t thinking about taxes when they set up online crowdfunding campaigns to raise funds. But as the dollars for some of these campaigns get bigger, it’s an issue that entrepreneurs ignore at their peril.

Last week, for example, I wrote about how wireless earbud maker Phazon asked for $80,000 on Indiegogo and ended up with $1.5 million and counting. And it’s not alone: On Kickstarter, 152 campaigns have raised at least $1 million, and another 2,559 have brought in at least $100,000.