You don’t often hear economists tout assistance programs for moderate-income families as spurs to entrepreneurship, but Gareth Olds of Harvard Business School found that government-funded safety nets can have the effect of “reducing the risks of business ownership and relaxing credit constraints.” One program providing health insurance to children in moderate-income families boosted the rate of new-business creation, raised new companies’ chances of survival, and increased the self-employment rate by 23%. Olds tells Working Knowledge: “What I was seeing was reproducible and scientifically valid. It also just happened to be personally valid for me."

Image: Free Digital Photos

Are you surrounding yourself with the right people?

Yes, your success depends on your own performance. But have you thought about how those around you affect your performance? Do they strengthen or weaken it? Help or hinder your progress?

In his insightful book It’s Not the How or the What but the Who (a phrase adapted from Amazon’s Jeff Bezos), renowned global talent management expert Claudio Fernández-Aráoz explains why people’s decisions–choices about friends, spouses, employees, partners, and mentors–are more important than any other.

Image: Free Digital Photos

The expansion of startup communities in states around the country is having an impact, a new report on entrepreneurship suggests. The analysis of gains and losses in the 2013 State Entrepreneurship Index by University of Nebraska’s at Lincoln’s Bureau of  Business Research highlighted some usual suspects such as California and New York. But the annual index, published since 2008, also drew attention to gains by states such as Kentucky, which shot up from 49 to four, Connecticut and New Jersey and significant setbacks, particularly for Pennsylvania.

Image: http://medcitynews.com

Given the current global startup environment, I believe a re-definition of the term bootstrapping is in order. I believe bootstrapping is more than just an adverb and should be viewed as a comprehensive strategy for tech startups.

What is bootstrapping?

Historically, bootstrapping has been a term used to describe the efforts made by individuals to overcome a nearly impossible obstacle or to improve oneself through self-sustaining efforts requiring no assistance from others.

Image: http://ventureburn.com

Just as there are five techniques of systematic innovation, there are six universal principles of persuasion. These principles help people know when it's appropriate to say 'yes' to a request. For innovators, creating great ideas is the first imperative. But then the hard part starts - how to align and convice others of the value of your idea.

Image: http://www.innovationinpractice.com

With the valuations of tech startups like Snapchat, Airbnb and Uber moving higher and higher, one question has been on the minds of investors lately: are we in a tech bubble? I recently sat down with Larry Bohn, managing director at Cambridge-based venture firm General Catalyst Partners, who gave me his opinion on the state of tech sector right now.

General Catalyst has invested in such companies as Airbnb and Snapchat, although Bohn's focus is on cloud-based computing and software-as-a-service businesses, including Black Duck Software and Demandware (Nasdaq: DWRE).

Image: Matthew Hakola Larry Bohn is managing director at venture firm General Catalyst Partners in Cambridge.

Fun and exciting projects are what Kickstarter and Indiegogo are all about. If the market isn’t meeting the demands of consumers, these crowdfunding sites allow your dollar to go to work in a direct democracy. Innovators, developers, and creators can post their works from making a potato salad to a video game, and consumers get to invest. But browsing these crowdfunding sites isn’t like window shopping on Amazon–your demands may not get met for various reasons.

As an angel investor and a mentor to aspiring entrepreneurs, I’m always disappointed to see founders who seem stressed out most of the time, and more annoyed than energized by the abundance of challenges they see in building their startup. The entrepreneurial lifestyle is a tough one under the best of circumstances, and it’s one you have to love in order to succeed.

Although there's four months left of 2014, humans have already exhausted the ecological space for this year. This means that there has been more consumption of resources than the planet can handle, and over-consumption is only getting worse, according to researchers.

Demand for renewable ecological resources and the services they provide is now equivalent to that of more than 1.5 Earths. This is the conclusion drawn by the researchers from the think tank Global Footprint Network, who calculated how much of the ecological resources have been spent. It's about things like soils, fish, forests, clean water and climate change.

Image: Air pollution, level 9. London, April 2014. (David Holt/Flickr)

The two largest trends in technology today are about to improve your career.

Fred Wilson recently spelled it out in an article about the sharing economy, "The Internet, mobile phones, native transaction systems and a global network that connects billions of people in real-time are changing a lot of things, and assets that sat wasting are now going to be activated."

Image: FLICKR, PAT (CLETCH) WILLIAMS

SCIENTIST Stephen Hawking has warned that the Higgs boson, the so-called God particle, could cause space and time to collapse. But there is time for lunch: It may take trillions of years to topple. The British professor said that at very high energy levels the Higgs boson – the subatomic particle which gives us our shape and size - could become so unstable that it would cause space and time to collapse.

Image: God particle ... The Higgs boson was discovered in 2012 by scientists at the Cern particle accelerator in Switzerland. Picture: AFP

It is no secret that most successful athletes become some sort of entrepreneur after their playing days are over. Some of them are already planting the seeds to grow a great empire while they are still playing.

Now not all of us can be professional athletes but all of us have played some sort of sport for an extended period of time. I have been playing sports my entire life, with football and basketball being my choice of poison for most of it. Whether it is high school football on Friday nights or intramural softball on Tuesday afternoons I have loved playing every minute of it. During that time I gained knowledge and habits that would benefit me for the rest of my life.  Below I will show you why former athletes, professional or Busch league, make great entrepreneurs.

As an Angel investor to startups, I’m still surprised to find entrepreneurs who expect investors to give them money, and then disappear into the sunset. Would you do that if it was your money? If the entrepreneur wants total control of their own venture, with no one looking over their shoulder, they should work within the limits of their own resources, a process called bootstrapping.

I’m seeing a renewed appreciation of culture and values in business these days. Maybe it’s just another example of nature abhorring a vacuum, but I prefer to think it’s a natural evolution of the pervasive social networking communities where people relate to, and expect to interact with businesses and products they like. They drive the market, rather than the other way around.

As Jonathan Davids, founder of influencer marketing platform Influicity recently explained to Small Business Trends contributor Brent Leary, YouTube is becoming an important place for brands to connect with customers. But it can also be an important place for small business owners and entrepreneurs to learn more about building and running their companies correctly.

As someone who usually covers software and cloud, I really perk up when wannabe startups pitch actual, physical products. Something you can see, touch, hold, even wear. Bearing that in mind, here are the pitches from Saturday’s MIT Global Founders Skills Accelerator Demo Day that grabbed me. Keep in mind these were very short pitches, not a ton of details provided, so I’ll be following up with some of these people to fill in the gaps.

Image: Barb Darrow 

I often get questions as to whether being an entrepreneur is the right pathway for someone. To be honest, if you’re asking that question, it might not be right—but, it might. What I am speaking about is a long-term entrepreneur. The kind who wants to build an enduring product and service. Not someone who starts something, and leaves.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

It’s not uncommon for established companies to lose touch with the do-or-die, innovate-or-else mentality of their early days. But this transition from startup mentality to corporate mindset, can sometimes be detrimental to a company's strategy.

It’s been a while since we heard from noted investor Tim Draper, who first told me he wanted to break California into six separate states last December. His advocacy organization, aptly named “Six Californias,” has since been pointing out reasons why California should be broken up.

Before diving into the findings of my ethnographic study at University of California, Berkeley, I’d like to disclose that I did not lie about my age or occupation during this entire experiment (OK, I may have said I was a “super senior” once in jest). This was strictly an attempt to push the envelope in my own design practices with the hopes of crafting a better product. Fortunately, the experience was insightful and integral to the success of my latest product.

Image: Eli Duke via Flickr