As an advisor to many entrepreneurs, I still hear frequently the irrational exuberance that crowdfunding is the quick alternative for startups that are passed over by overly demanding angels or venture capital investors. In reality, crowdfunding has become a major startup funding vehicle, with an estimated contribution of $30 billion in 2015, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy.

SAN FRANCISCO — The University of California has named a well-known Silicon Valley entrepreneur to lead a new venture capital fund aimed at bringing inventions based on faculty and student research to market.

UC President Janet Napolitano announced Tuesday that TIBCO Software founder Vivek Ranadivé would oversee the independent fund that will be launched with $250 million from the office that manages the university's investments.

Cressey & Co. partners expand interests into the early stages.

Former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and investing partner Bryan Cressey are hiring investment staff to handle their personal investments in healthcare technology and services companies, Fortune has learned.

The new effort will be separate from Cressey & Co., a healthcare-focused private equity firm in which both Frist and Cressey are (and will continue to be) partners.

Why do companies need to be more nimble? McKinsey’s Aaron De Smet and Chris Gagnon explain what’s driving organizational agility, why it matters, and what to do.

Rapidly changing business conditions are demanding more flexible organizations, say McKinsey principals Aaron De Smet, who coleads our organizational-design efforts, and Chris Gagnon, who oversees our Organizational Health Index (OHI) research. In this episode of the McKinsey Podcast, they talk with McKinsey Publishing executive editor Luke Collins about their work, explaining why agile companies outperform others, how organizations are reacting, and what leaders should do. An edited transcript of the conversation follows.

Business school graduates who gain an MBA can secure increased salaries and greatly improve their contacts and career prospects.

However, choosing where to study for an MBA is an increasingly difficult decision. Business Insider recently released its sixth-annual ranking of the best business schools in the world.

Image: C0mun1c4t10ns, Wikipedia

Business Insider recently released its sixth annual list of the best business schools in the world, and this year graduates' starting salaries were a crucial component of our ranking. Among the top-50 schools, there were 22 programs where students went on to earn an average base salary — before any bonuses or benefits — of $110,000 or more after graduation.

Image: Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth/Facebook Graduates of Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business earn an average starting salary of $123,900.

Entrepreneurs who make it onto a "Shark Tank" episode have the opportunity to introduce their company to a viewing audience of 7 million potential customers.

The companies that land a deal with one or more of the show's investors then have the chance to scale and, in some cases, become a nationally recognized brand.

Image: "Shark Tank"/ABC Breathometer founder Charles Yim meets with his team of "Shark Tank" investors.

Earning an MBA can provide business-school graduates with an increased salary, a vast network of industry contacts, and new opportunities, but the extent of these career benefits can vary significantly depending on the school.

For our sixth annual ranking of the best business schools, we looked at 60 perennially top-rated institutions that offer MBA programs and evaluated them based on the most recent data available on five metrics: reputation (determined through our annual reader survey); average starting salary after graduation; job-placement rate (the percentage of graduates employed within three months of graduation); average GMAT score; and tuition and fees.

Image: Samantha Lee/Business Insider

“When campaigning for vice president in 2012, Paul Ryan, now Speaker of the House of Representatives, was asked if he had run a marathon. He replied that he had completed one 26.2 mile race in less than three hours: ‘two hours and fifty something’. Unfortunately for him, the race, in 1990, was timed by computer and easily accessible on the internet. His time was actually over four hours.” Ole Holsti, Professor International Affairs, Emeritus, Duke University. Read in The Economist.

It may not be instinctual to link director Christopher Nolan and Looker founder Lloyd Tabb, but the two might view the world through a shared lens. A serial entrepreneur, Tabb has assembled development teams for his startups by classifying engineers by their superhero personas, rather than by standard roles. As Nolan created a reality that hinges on the counterbalance of heroes and antiheroes in The Dark Knight Trilogy, so does Tabb with his engineering team.

Eighteen months ago, the Supreme Court issued a decision in Alice v. CLS Bank that limited the kinds of software and business methods that can be patented. Few suspected this ruling would have such a profound impact not only on patent enforcement but on American innovation itself.

For what Alice did was make the highest-value new innovations in technology and service models that are increasingly driving margins today — cloud services, big data, machine learning, connectivity, mobility and location-based services, everything on-demand and anything-as-a-service — also the most difficult to patent.

During your next meeting, look around: Almost half of your employees would rather be waiting in line at the DMV or watching paint dry, according to a poll by software company Clarizen. U.S. employees spend about nine hours of each week preparing for or attending team meetings, and more than a third of them believe those meetings are a waste of time.

If you think innovation is only for genius inventors like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, you’re short-selling yourself. Anyone is capable of being innovative, and the concept is much broader than invention, says George E. L. Barbee, author of 63 Innovation Nuggets For Aspiring Innovators.

"The truth is that with increased confidence and direction, each one of us can excel innovatively well beyond what we give ourselves credit for," he says. "It’s well within anyone’s grasp."

Head over to Google and search for the term, "performance review," and you'll be instantly flooded by news stories on the latest companies to do away with it. My guess is that half the Fortune 500 will kill annual rankings and reviews by 2017.

But as that institution of performance management fades away, what's taking its place? To answer that, here's a look at six companies (and many more here) that have recently put in place some of the most forward-thinking alternatives to the dreaded annual review.

Running a business out of your house has many rewards: no commute, less time-sucking small talk, no missed time with your family.

But before you settle into the bliss of this heaven on Earth, remember that, in the end, you are still running a business. Working from home has all kinds of pitfalls that need to be avoided if you are to succeed.

A sea of ink and hours of video have been dedicated to the looming battle between humans and machines, often concluding that the machines win and human workers lose. It is a nearly irresistible narrative, which has been captured in books such as Martin Ford’s Rise of the Robots and The Second Machine Age, by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee. It has also has inspired scholarship by academics such as Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne of Oxford University, who estimate that 47% of occupations in the United States could be automated within 20 years, and David Autor of MIT, who argues that the ability of machines to take on human jobs is vastly overstated.

Warren Buffett is rightfully admired for his investment record as chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, which has outperformed the S&P 500 Index by more than 10% annually during his 50-year tenure.

Much less attention is paid, however, to the manner in which Buffett manages the company itself. This is somewhat surprising, given that his management system is very different from those of other publicly traded companies.

This past fall, I did a documentary with HBO, directed by Peter Berg and produced by Michael Strahan, called State of Play: Happiness. In the film, we explored how to create a positive culture in organizations where the culture or conditions make it difficult to talk about “happiness.” During the first half of the documentary, we examined the NFL to see how people create happiness in an organization where the average career is 3.3 years, where there’s a high potential for injury, where the competition is high, and where there’s a perceived culture of being too tough to talk about emotions. In the second half, we counterposed the NFL with the military, specifically the Navy SEALs. The conclusions that we drew from these case studies may surprise you. One of those conclusions was that stress actually made people feel more bonded to their organizations.

As a business owner, you may soon face a difficult decision: does it make sense for you to accept venture capital? While this may be the dream for some small business entrepreneurs (think Shark Tank), others are hesitant to forge this type of investor relationship.

Whether you're all-for venture capital (VC) investment, entirely against it, or somewhere in between; keeping an open mind lets you compare your options and make a confident decision. Before you take another step, get clear about whether venture capital makes sense for your small business by asking yourself the following questions.