Willingness to take a risk is the hallmark of a serious entrepreneur. That’s why one of the first questions that potential investors ask is “How much of your own money, and friends and family, have you put into the new business?” If you won’t risk yours, you won’t get investors to risk theirs.

A while back I read the classic book “When Turtles Fly” by Nikki Stone, an Olympic champion, which explains this well. She provides many examples of success stories from entrepreneurs to Olympians. She proclaims that if you want to be successful, you need to be soft on the inside, have a hard shell, and willing to stick your neck out (“Turtle Effect”).

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com

Marcia Kilgore revels in the fact that she's never had a "real" job--at least, if one doesn't consider building five successful companies over nearly three decades to be hard work. In 1991, the former aesthetician founded her first company, Bliss Spa, out of a single room in downtown New York City. Eight years later, LVMH bought a majority stake for $30 million. In 2006, the Saskatchewan native launched Soap and Glory, which reportedly sold for $50 million to the British drugstore giant Boots.

The biggest proposed IPO in biotech history just got even bigger.

Cambridge-based Moderna Therapeutics disclosed Wednesday that it's hoping to raise up to $600 million in an initial public offering, an increase from the $500 million maximum it proposed earlier this month. Either sum would shatter the previous record for a life sciences IPO, both in biotech-rich Massachusetts and nationwide.

Image: A scientist works in one of Moderna's labs. COURTESY PHOTO

There’s no way to sugar coat it: innovation cannot be confined within the four walls of your organization. To survive in the digital era, you must tap into as many resources as possible from inside and outside your company.

The value of employee-driven innovation cannot be overstated, but sourcing and developing innovative ideas must be augmented by a strong external ecosystem to thrive in today’s interdependent world.

Jaclyn Johnson didn’t set out to run two startups at the same time. In fact, she never planned to launch one.

The first came from necessity. At 23, after an unexpected layoff, Johnson took on freelance marketing projects to pay her bills. When her workload got big enough, she formed No Subject marketing agency, counting L’Oréal and Microsoft as clients. And there it was: company #1.

At some point in our professional lives, we all need to present information. For some, it’s a keynote speech at a conference while for others it may be a presentation at your team meeting. Public speaking is a nerve-wracking experience for many, but it doesn’t have to be. Here, we’re tackling the top reasons people fail when making speeches and how you can fix them:

Higher education R&D expenditures (HERD) grew by 38.9 percent from 2008 to 2017, an increase of more than $21 billion, according to an SSTI analysis of recently released data from the National Science Foundation’s National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics. From 2016 to 2017, HERD grew by $3.8 billion, the largest year-over-year increase since 2010-2011. Higher education R&D expenditures grew the fastest in Connecticut (66.2 percent), Massachusetts (63.9 percent), and Wyoming (63.0 percent) over the 10-year period, while New York ($2.3 billion increase), California ($2.0 billion), and Massachusetts ($1.6 billion) saw the largest absolute gains during this time.

Traditional marketing says you have to “push” your message out to customers, over and over again, to get you remembered. A more effective approach in today’s Internet and interactive culture is to use “pull” technology to bring customers and clients to your story. You pull people in by providing new content with real value on your website at least every few days.

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com

When it comes to describing their dream job, Americans are dreaming big. MidAmerica Nazarene University surveyed 2,000 people and found that 41% dream of being business owners–but only if that meant working less than 60 hours per. They dream of having 52 days off per year, a one-hour lunch, 38-hour workweeks, and the ability to work remotely 11 days a month.

Surprisingly, few dream of climbing the corporate ladder as just 12% of the survey participants wanted C-suite titles and 23% said they want a mid-level management role.

Togo imports an estimated 500,000 tonnes of e-waste a year, some of it can be a health hazard, but it also inspires local innovators and provides jobs.

It looks like a spider and it moves like one, but this robot creature cannot just be dismissed as a toy.

It is also a symbol of the digital revolution brewing in one of West Africa's smallest countries.

"I made this from a (discarded) 3D printer," Ousia Foli-Bebe says, pointing as his robotic arachnid.

Image: https://www.bbc.com

While many legendary Silicon Valley companies were founded by teams of two, partnerships aren't without their problems, states venture capitalist Mark Suster. Disagreements arise based on personal life changes, business strategies, and roles within the company. Suster prefers to avoid playing the role of co-founder "marriage counselor" by working with a strong, individual entrepreneur.

Image: https://ecorner.stanford.edu

Machine learning may be hyped as the way of the future, but as a forecasting method, it works best when combined with standard algorithms.

Just about every business depends on accurate forecasting. A classic example is a manager forecasting the amount of goods to produce or the level of inventories to keep. In the case of Uber, the ride-hailing firm requires sophisticated models to predict ride supply-and-demand, as well as how much personnel is needed for its customer service and support systems. Even hardware requirements can be predicted: Under-provisioning may lead to outages, but over-provisioning can be very costly. Forecasting can help find the sweet spot.

There are those in the real-world Silicon Valley who think that HBO's "Silicon Valley," the network's long-running satire, is too critical of the tech industry.

But in a new blog entry, no less than Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates has a message for those people: lighten up.

"I have friends in Silicon Valley who refuse to watch the show because they think it's just making fun of them," writes Gates. "I always tell them: 'You really should watch it, because they don't make any more fun of us than we deserve.'"

Image: Bill Gates in 1992 — well after Microsoft would be considered a startup, but before it became the tremendously powerful global force it is today.AP Photo

If your goal is to build a successful business, you’ve got to keep yourself motivated and your spirits high to win the game. But there are other factors that are just as valuable, and that’s exactly what we’ll cover in this article. As an entrepreneur, self-confidence and motivation can only go so far. You need to be book-smart and street-smart.

Young women will need entrepreneurial skills along with technology skills to achieve workplace gender equality.

A report on The Power of Next Generation Women published by Girls With Impact, an entrepreneurship program that provides girls with a business education foundation, said that educators and the corporate world need to promote STEEM, adding entrepreneurship to science, technology, engineering and math, not just STEM, to drive gender equity in business.

There are a lot of great lessons you can learn in business school. It emphasizes planning and strategic decision-making. Ideally, it shows you how to take academic theories and apply them to real-world problems. But no matter how brilliant the professors or how well designed the curriculum, no school can teach you everything you need to know.

There’s a lot you’re going to have to figure out on your own, through trial and error. Some of the most important lessons you’ll ever learn about how to be successful in business (and in life, for that matter) comes from getting out there and doing it.

What comes to mind when you think about your body?

Most people might imagine an intricate network of blood vessels or the complex neural circuits of the brain. Or we might picture diagrams from the iconic medical textbook, Gray’s Anatomy.

Today’s visualization puts a unique spin on all of these ideas – interpreting human anatomy in the style of London’s transit system. Created by Jonathan Simmonds M.D., a resident physician at Tufts Medical Center, it’s a simple yet beautifully intuitive demonstration of how efficiently our bodies work.

Can an incubator of life-science startups in the heart of the San Francisco tech scene work at the "move fast and break things" pace of its Silicon Valley neighbours?

IndieBio made that bet in 2015. Its office has all the trappings: industrial-chic design, a Blue Bottle Coffee down the block, and a sign reading "Revolution Workspace" above the front desk. Twitter and Uber are nearby. The newest addition to the skyline, the Salesforce tower, looms large above it all.

Starting Monday, businesses in Ohio will be able to pay their taxes in bitcoin — making the state that’s high in the middle and round on both ends the first in the nation to accept cryptocurrency officially.

Companies that want to take part in the program simply need to go to OhioCrypto.com and register to pay in crypto whatever taxes their corporate hearts desire. It could be anything from cigarette sales taxes to employee withholding taxes, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal, which first noted the initiative.

Image: https://techcrunch.com

When I was preparing to speak with a group of senior executives at Wharton’s recent CEO Academy in New York on what it takes to do their jobs, I was worried that my remarks would amount to nothing more than a litany of leadership clichés. Then it struck me, why not turn some time-tested truisms on their head?

Here are three popular clichés from the leadership playbook that can get you into trouble, and my reformulations to help make your leadership more effective.