The landscape is changing, slowly but promisingly, for women entrepreneurs. Not only are more women starting businesses, including technology-enabled firms across multiple industries, but female entrepreneurs are gaining ground in running more profitable businesses and delivering higher returns to investors.

Even so, women still raise just 2% of venture capital dollars, and their company valuations remain lower than those run by men.

Image: “Fair or not, getting investor attention will require companies focused on female customers to develop a detailed case on the potential of their market.” - https://qz.com

Gov. Phil Murphy’s trade mission to Germany and Israel produced a number of agreements — and planted the seed for many more, administrations officials said.

Here’s a look at 10 things learned on the trip:

Murphy’s name still means a lot in Germany At least that was the word of Nicola Michels, who was formerly with German American Chamber of Commerce in New York.

Image: Governor's Office/Edwin J. Torres - Gov. Phil Murphy traveled to Germany and Israel on his trade mission.

Albert Einstein, Henry Ford, Marie Curie, Sigmund Freud…these are just a few of the critical thinkers who have shaped our modern lives. Critical thinkers think clearly and rationally, and make logical connections between ideas -- they are crucial to exploring and understanding the world we live in.

Critical thinking is more than just the accumulation of facts and knowledge; it’s a way of approaching whatever is presently occupying your mind so that you come to the best possible conclusion. Critical thinkers are focused on constantly upgrading their knowledge, and they engage in independent self-learning. They make some of the best leaders, because they can reach new planes of self-improvement and self-actualization.

For some millennials, entrepreneurship is in their blood and 9-to-5 jobs are inconceivable. That wasn’t me. Until I built a $50 million-dollar business. But I wasn’t born this way. I didn’t come out of the womb with the next big business idea. As a kid, I didn’t open a lemonade stand on my street, and I wasn’t designing apps in college. Yet these days, I get asked about my success by a lot of people, and I don't want to keep telling them it was an accident, but ... it was kind of an accident.

Part of being the head of a company — of being a leader in general — is having to disseminate information to others. In times of success, that communication can be like riding a wave of victory. In harder times, sharing tough choices or unfortunate events can bring heartache, as well as spark rumors, all of which can damage morale. So what is the best way to share information? To find out, we asked 12 leaders from Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) the following:

As a long-time advisor to aspiring entrepreneurs, and a technology fan myself, I still meet dozens of techies with great solutions who assume they don’t need marketing to change the world. They subscribe to the myth that “if we build it, they will come.” In fact, with today’s information overload, modern marketing is the key to raising even the most innovative solution above the crowd.

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com

ALBION, Calif. — Early on a gray summer Saturday, an unusual assemblage — commercial fishermen, recreational boaters, neoprene-clad divers — gathered for a mission at Albion Cove, a three-hour drive north of San Francisco.

“Our target today is the purple urchin,” said Josh Russo, a recreational fishing advocate who organized the event. “The evil purple urchin.”

Aging causes changes in our bodies and our cells. But a new study finds that the extent of these changes could be a lot greater than we previously thought.

Middle-age and elderly people have more mutant cells in their esophagus than they do normal cells, a group of researchers reported yesterday (Oct. 18) in the journal Science. Further, some of these mutations are associated with esophageal cancer.

The ability to understand and communicate about data is an increasingly important skill for the 21st-century citizen, for three reasons. First, data science and AI are affecting many industries globally, from healthcare and government to agriculture and finance. Second, much of the news is reported through the lenses of data and predictive models. And third, so much of our personal data is being used to define how we interact with the world.

SINGAPORE Academy of Law (SAL) and Singapore Venture Capital & Private Equity Association (SVCA) together launched a set of standard form documents, targeted at making the process of structuring a deal faster and more cost-efficient for startup founders and venture capitalists.

Venture Capital Investment Model Agreements (VIMA) are a pragmatic set of contracts tailored closely to the essential requirements of startups, investors and the legal industry, and balances the interests of both the investor and the startup, said the SAL and SVCA on the joint initiative that was rolled out on Tuesday.

Companies pursuing revenue synergies can’t take them for granted. Leaders need a clear grasp of where those synergies lie—and the persistence to capture them.

The intense M&A activity of recent years shows no sign of letting up. Nor does the pressure to extract maximum value from every deal. As one M&A leader commented, “The cost of money has never been lower, the competition for deals has never been higher, and revenue synergies are playing a more significant role in the acquisition rationale.” But though their importance may be growing, revenue synergies are proving elusive to capture.

More than a quarter of Mississippi children ages 10 to 17 are obese, giving the state the nation’s highest rate of youth obesity, according to new data.

Nationwide, nearly 16% of kids ages 10 to 17 have obesity, according to a report released Wednesday by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and based on data from the 2016-2017 National Survey of Children’s Health (NSCH). But rates varied significantly from state to state, ranging from Mississippi’s 26.1% to Utah’s 8.7%.

Warby Parker is known for being a wonderful place to work. Here, Co-founder Dave Gilboa breaks down exactly how they've constructed this culture.

In the book, The Dead Toad Scrolls, Kilroy J. Oldster writes that "examination of our past is never time-wasting. Reverberations from the past provide learning rubrics for living today."

It’s an excellent quote that stresses the importance of learning from our past. And there’s no better education on our history as humans – and as a planet – than in the halls of museums.

But not all museums are alike. The collections at museums are often unique and hold artifacts that are either rare or one-of-a-kind. Every museum experience is different, so if you’re interested in learning about a particular era or a specific artist, you should plan your museum visits ahead of time.

There are few organizations that don’t wish to innovate, but whilst most aspire to develop creative new products, services and processes, the evidence is mixed as to their ability to do so successfully.  A big contributor to this gap is the cost of innovation.

A recent study from the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research highlighted the growing costs involved in innovation. The research shows that companies are investing far more than their historic peers to achieve the same results. Organizations today are devoting approximately 20 times as many people to R&D as their peers did in 1930, but the output from all of this endeavor is not rising in unison.

A wide network of relatives, professors, and people already working in a field offer career advice to white undergraduates who are likely to pursue an advanced degree, and those white students are more likely than their black, Hispanic, and Asian peers to have received such guidance. That finding, released on Tuesday as part of a Gallup survey commissioned by two law-school associations, was one of several that suggested universities should attempt to widen access to advising so that all students who could excel in postgraduate study are encouraged to do so.

If you are a business leader, you are probably thinking about radical change. New industrial platforms, geopolitical shifts, global competition, and changing consumer demand are reshaping your world. You face upstart competitors with high valuations encroaching on your business, and activist investors looking for targets. Meanwhile, you have your own aspirations for your company: to be a profitable innovator, to seize opportunities, to lead and dominate your industry, to attract highly committed talent, and to carve out a socially responsible role in which your organization makes a difference. You also probably want to clear away the deadwood in your legacy system: practices, structures, technologies, and cultural habits that hold your company back.

Image: Illustration by Miguel Montaner

Steve Woods had been in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ont. less than two days when he found himself seated at a table apprehensively sipping wine with half a dozen of the town’s business leaders. He had been invited there the day before by Communitech’s CEO Iain Klugman, who insisted over the phone—with an urgency Woods thought was odd—that they meet as soon as possible.

If you aren’t willing to take some risk as an entrepreneur, then don’t expect any gain. Yet everyone has limits, and every investor implicitly has similar limits on what makes a startup investable, or one to avoid at all costs. If you need investors, it’s important that you understand their filters, and even if you are funding your own efforts, you need to recognize the red flags.

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com

According to recent research done by Harvard Business School, women are less than 10 percent of the entrepreneurial and venture-capital labor pool, Hispanics have been around 2 percent and African Americans have been less than 1 percent.

Empowering entrepreneurial equality is just one of the many reasons Kendrick Nguyen started Republic, an equity crowdfunding platform. The Republic CEO believes equity crowdfunding can overcome many of the challenges women and minorities have historically faced when it comes to raising venture capital for their startups.