Not all entrepreneur days are the same, everybody’s perspective of how they utilize their day is different. Not everyone gets up at 6.00 am, goes for a jog before meditating and then record a vlog while drinking a wheatgrass smoothie, all by 8:00 am when it is time to head to the office. Some entrepreneurs have children and spend the morning getting them ready for school and others wake with their laptop on their lap responding to emails with one hand and holding a large cup of coffee in the other. Either way, their day is started with a ritual for getting motivated for what the day may bring.

As an entrepreneur, you wear many hats — visionary, technician and manager. But you must not let the hustle and bustle of your business steer you away from having a solid financial foundation. Showing discipline with your personal finances will strengthen your success with your business finances. A few basic initial steps can be taken when making the transition from employee to entrepreneur.

Amazon's plan to build a $2.5 billion headquarters in Arlington County is bringing with it major tech education expansions in Northern Virginia, including a new Virginia Tech campus two miles away in Alexandria.

The Virginia Tech Innovation Campus in Potomac Yard will cost an estimated $1 billion and include a one million-square-foot graduate campus aimed at driving technology education and research.

Image: A rendering of Virginia Tech's new planned innovation campus in Alexandria. Courtesy Va. Tech - https://www.insidenova.com

A growing talent pool and a deeper capital base have made the Tampa Bay area a better place for startup tech companies.

But the area still has a way to go to achieve its full potential, said Linda Olson, president and CEO of Tampa Bay Wave, a non-profit that services and houses growing companies.

“If we really want to be one of those hubs that’s truly competing on a national level for talent and capital we need to be thinking bigger. Much bigger, in terms of hundreds of millions of dollars going to startups annually. I don’t think we’re even close to that point right now,” Olson said at panel discussion on innovation in Florida.

Image: Kiki Roeder (left), chief product officer of Punctuate and co-founder of Startup Sisters USA, moderated the panel. Panelists were Linda Olson, Tampa Bay Wave; Michelle Bauer, Tampa Hillsborough EDC; Tammy Charles, Spark Tampa Bay; Marc Blumenthal, Florida Funders and Synapse; and Lakshmi Shenoy, Embarc Collective - https://stpetecatalyst.com

When you’re entering a mature market with lots of established players, you have to offer something different, something that changes the rules and appeals to an underserved segment of the market.

Contrary to popular opinion women are in charge of their investment portfolios and often feel neglected by wealth management firms, writes Kerry Hannon, a Forbes contributor. These firms are only recently waking up to the opportunity that women investors present. Over the next 30 to 40 years, $30 trillion in assets will pass from boomers to their heirs in the US, according to Accenture. Women will be the primary beneficiaries.

Image: Holly Ruxin, CEO & Founder MontcalmMONTCALM

The United States now has the top two most powerful supercomputers in the world, rankings show

America is once again leading the supercomputing arms race, and has pulled ahead of its arch rival, China.

Indeed, the Asian nation has now slipped into third position after the latest Top 500 supercomputer list placed two American machines in the top two positions.

Image: ORNL

Gen Z is entering the workforce at a rapid pace, with the eldest of them now 23. A far larger group than their millennial counterparts, youth and young adults born between the mid-1990s and late 2000s have aptly been named Gen Z. Employers should be excited as a flood of talent will be joining the workforce soon -- comprising 36 percent of the workforce by 2020 -- but be aware, they have short attention spans, even shorter than millennials, and expect a lot from their employers.

Don’t try to find them all in one single hero.

If you look up the phrase “leaders should find people who complement them”, Google may just show you results for “leaders should find people who compliment them”. Funny – or scary?

In our previous article, we explained how difficult it is for leaders to know themselves and described how our development tool, the X360, can assist them in this critical task. While leadership is about knowing who you are, it’s also about your actions and, ultimately, your impact.

Image: https://knowledge.insead.edu

Isn’t it amazing that some people you know always seem to be working hard, but never seem to get anything done? As an entrepreneur, you need to avoid partnering with these people, or hiring them into your startup. The challenge is to find people who get things done, as well as work hard. LinkedIn profiles and resumes still focus too much on responsibilities rather than results.

The best entrepreneurs never confuse motion with results. It’s easy to find people in every organization rushing around from one meeting to the next, often working overtime to generate more work for themselves and other people, but rarely taking the action to close an issue or contract. We all need more people around us who make every motion mean something.

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com

Emily English, CEO of Gemstone Biotherapeutics sits down with BioTalk host Rich Bendis to discuss company's history, the path to her role, and the evolution of their technology.

Emily English, CEO of Gemstone Biotherapeutics sits down with BioTalk host Rich Bendis to discuss company's history, the path to her role, and the evolution of their technology. Emily P. English, Ph.D., is the Chief Executive Officer of Gemstone Biotherapeutics, LLC. Dr. English is a proven innovator and manager with a passion for transitioning early-stage technologies to operational capabilities and commercial products. In her current role, she is guiding the commercialization of Gemstone’s innovative biomaterials technology, with a goal of bringing solutions for scar-free skin regeneration to market. Prior to joining Gemstone, Dr. English spent eight years at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, where she was the Global Communications Program Manager and led a team of 35 scientists and engineers. She holds a Bachelor’s degree, Magna cum laude, in chemistry from the University of Maryland, College Park, and a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Outside of work, Dr. English enjoys spending time with her family, and she is an avid curler.

A couple of folks had interesting counterpoints to the superstar effect. Neil Strickland gave me permission to post the following email he sent:

I wonder if you’ve read, or if I’ve referred to, the Santa Fe Institute’s highly cited 2007 paper in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) called “Growth, Innovation, Scaling, and the pace of life in cities.” Its work was in “deriving growth equations which quantify the dramatic difference between growth fueled by innovation versus that driven by economies of scale. This difference suggests that, as population grows, major innovation cycles must be generated at a continually accelerating rate to sustain growth and avoid stagnation or collapse.”

Image: http://www.newgeography.com

In the age of iPhones, Slack notifications, and burritos delivered to our door, we all long for adventure. Call it unplugging, or #vanlife. But as it turns out, escaping the grind of the 9 to 5 is big business unto itself.

For the past five years, Airstream–yes, the 86-year-old company that makes those gleaming aluminum trailers–has celebrated a new golden age of growth. With sales up 218% over that time, the company has been operating at full production capacity, building 110 trailers a week for months; it’s now expanding to a 750,000-square-foot production facility in its home town of Jackson Center, Ohio, which will open in 2019. Already a hit with millennials who want to work on the road, the company is releasing two smaller, lower-cost models to continue wooing these younger customers, and looking to partner with designers and companies that can help it evolve.

Image: https://www.fastcompany.com

Looking for a wave of fresh ideas? Not every innovation has to come from the top down. Your work family is probably brimming with potential and thoughtful new ways to work. However, they might not feel like they have a mouthpiece or a channel to share what they've come up with. Here are 10 suggestions for encouraging innovation in your employees and helping them feel heard.

It has been a fast ride for Mexico City-based startup Grin Inc., which wants to bring shared electric scooters to market throughout Latin America.

Grin incorporated in April and launched its operations in July while at the Silicon Valley startup boot camp Y Combinator, where investors swooped in to give it a $20 million check. By October, it had raised $25 million more.

The rapid fundraising has been “amazing, as a founder,” says Grin co-founder Sergio Romo, who says the investments valued the company at $182 million. “We knew if we wanted to be competitive in the space and move fast, we needed to raise a big round.”

Cincinnati’s startup community is starting to gain ground on the coasts, where the bastions of venture capital traditionally operate. That’s what Mike Venerable, CEO of seed-capital investor CincyTech, told me on Tuesday at the company’s annual Big Breakfast.

Image: Mike Venerable is CEO of CincyTech. DAVID KALONICK | COURIER

For most of us, the notion of surviving a near-death experience, whether it be personal or professional, is terrifying. If we’re “lucky,” we may experience it once.

Hal Elrod has experienced it three times.

At the age of 20, Hal was pronounced clinically dead for six minutes when he was hit head-on by a drunk driver going 70 miles per hour. When he woke from a coma, he was told by doctors that he would never walk again. Over the next six days, Elrod had seven surgeries to repair 11 broken bones, a ruptured spleen and severed nerves. He flatlined twice during surgery.

The average American looks at their phone 52 times a day, up from 47 times last year. That’s one of the findings from the Deloitte 2018 Global Mobile Consumer Survey …

Deloitte also found that almost two-thirds want to reduce that number, reports CNET.

US businesses are getting old. Literally.

According to recently released data from the US Census, almost exactly half of US businesses are more than 10 years old in 2016. It’s a dramatic change from two decades ago, when fewer than 40% of businesses were over 10.

Image: https://qz.com

In today’s digital age, becoming a smart city is vital for attracting business, residents, tourists, and talent, and for ultimately fostering growth and prosperity. But the path to a smart city future is often unclear to urban leaders, who require a deeper grasp of the approaches that will drive the best results.

SAN FRANCISCO – Of the 20 cities that made the second round of Amazon's beauty pageant for its second headquarters, 18 didn't make the cut. Here are some of the negatives that may have worked against the cities that lost out to New York City and Northern Virginia, the two areas Amazon chose to place $5 billion in investment and 50,000 jobs.