Whether you are trying to motivate your team, close a deal with a customer, or get funding from an investor, a casual conversation is usually a waste of your valuable time. These result is a founder who is always “too busy,” but never seems to get the business done and the team moving. All real business is conversations focused on creating results.

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Over the years, I've heard my fair share of ridiculous one liners from wannabe entrepreneurs. These people might read some news item about a startup that raised a monster round of financing or about a founder that sold her company for billions and they reach the conclusion that entrepreneurship is all fun and games. 

There are signs that someone is not cut out for entrepreneurship and here are five examples of phrases that give it away. 

You're currently reading a written article. But how many written articles have you read in the past week? How does that compare with the other forms of content you've consumed, such as videos you've watched, podcasts you've heard, and even social media conversations you've been apart of?

What’s the true failure rate of small businesses? Well, it depends on who you ask and whether it includes pandemic closures or not. Or, if there were economic or political drivers that worsened the closures. And frankly, it depends on who is counting and how they’re counting. It is arguable that the mistakes that make or break small businesses are similar across industries and geography. Whether it’s focusing attention on places that don’t produce income or build relationships, not setting boundaries or ignoring their online reputation, I’ve watched small businesses make these mistakes that make or break them.

For decades, we’ve needed passwords to do things online. New forms of authentication will finally let us get rid of them for good. Instead, we’ll use a link sent via email, a push notification, or a biometric scan. Not only are these methods easier—you don’t have to remember your face—but they tend to be more secure.

The entrepreneur’s challenge is to effectively communicate their value proposition, not only to customers, but also to vendors, partners, investors, and their own team. Especially for technical founders, this is normally all about presenting impressive facts. But in reality facts only go so far. Stories often work better, because humans don’t always make rational decisions.

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Many of the entrepreneurs and innovators who visit our Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series talk about how they're guided by their sense of mission, or purpose, or North Star. 

So it's very fitting that Harvard Business School professor Ranjay Gulati is kicking off our spring ETL lineup. 

MANILA, Philippines — Philippine startups raised over $1 billion for funding  in 2021, a 179 percent increase from the previous year, according to the Philippine Venture Capital Report 2022.

The report, a joint effort by venture capital fund Foxmont Capital Partners (FCP) and global management consulting firm Boston Consulting Group, showed the total capital raised by Philippine startups or innovation-driven companies involved in technology reached $1.03 billion in 2021, higher than the $369 million in 2020.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — NASA kicked off a critical countdown test Friday for its new moon rocket, a 30-story behemoth that could make its first lunar test flight by summer.

The two-day demonstration — the final major milestone before liftoff to the moon — will culminate Sunday as teams load nearly 1 million gallons of super-cold fuel into the rocket on the pad. The countdown will halt at the 9-second mark before engines ignite.

2022 will continue to bring increased focus on sustainability and social accountability requirements and practices for the fashion, apparel and beauty sector up-and-down the supply chain.

Some of this increased focus will undoubtedly come from state and federal lawmakers and governmental agencies, as new or proposed legislation and regulations are being actively considered or are planned to be rolled out in the coming year. 

Customer experience (CX) Champions gain better returns from their CX tech investments than competitors by managing CX across the enterprise through cross-functional teams, clearly defined workflows, and extensive use of analytics and AI.

This is according to a new global research report from MIT Sloan Management Review (SMR) Connections, “Delivering Experiences That Win Business and Build Loyalty: CX Champions Share Their Strategies”, sponsored by SAS.

London, March 30 – AI-powered app development platform Builder.ai on Wednesday announced an investment of $100 million in a Series C funding round led by Insight Partners, a New York-based global venture capital and private equity firm.

The round, which brings the company’s total funding to $195 million across three total rounds, includes participation from existing investors such as Singapore-based Jungle Ventures, in combination with new individual and institutional names that include the IFC and Jeffrey Katezenberg’s WndrCo.

ATLANTA, March 31, 2022 - Geek+, the global leader in AMR technology, and top market intelligence firm Interact Analysis have jointly released a new white paper, The Future of Warehouse Robotics, that examines where the industry is at the beginning of 2022 and the new approaches made possible by AMR technology.

Jack Dongarra, an innovator in computational software development who holds joint appointments at the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, will receive the 2021 A M Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery.

The award recognises his pioneering contributions to numerical algorithms and libraries that enabled high-performance computational software to keep pace with exponential hardware improvements for over four decades.

Considering that the retail industry is so competitive, a retailer’s (in)ability to automate is often an indicator of their success or failure.

By James Bayhack, sub-Saharan Africa director at CM.com

And, even though retailers realise the importance of providing a seamless self-help experience and that it should be a top priority, getting it right still seems to present a challenge for some retailers. In certain cases, retailers exhibit a lack of awareness in how they deploy chatbots by either devoting too much time to repetitive, laborious tasks (such as returns and answering customer queries), or leaving the customer without a solution, which requires them to go through more steps to contact their support team.

The first audio recordings on Mars reveal a quiet planet with occasional gusts of wind where two different speeds of sound would have a strange delayed effect on hearing, scientists said Friday.

After NASA's Perseverance rover landed on Mars in February last year, its two microphones started recording, allowing scientists to hear what it is like on the Red Planet for the first time.

Image: The planet Mars (AFP)

What does it mean to receive venture capital versus an angel investment? Entrepreneurs new to these financial terms sometimes get these two types of funding mixed up. Both provide small businesses with much-needed capital, but the difference is in which types of startups they financially back and how much goes in each investment.

PASADENA, Calif., March 31, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Alexandria Venture Investments, the strategic venture capital platform of Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc. (NYSE: ARE), an urban office REIT and the first, longest-tenured and pioneering owner, operator and developer uniquely focused on collaborative life science, agtech and technology campuses in AAA innovation cluster locations, today announced that it was recognized by AgFunder in its "2022 AgriFoodTech Investment Report" as one of the top five most active U.S. investors in agrifoodtech by number of companies in which it invested (2021) for the second consecutive year. This significant recognition demonstrates Alexandria's leadership in venture activity that supports the next generation of companies in agrifoodtech. These impactful companies are accelerating and scaling technological innovation and broader transformations in the agrifoodtech sector, which are critical for the long-term health, accessibility, sustainability and resilience of the global food supply. Since 2000, Alexandria has diligently invested in and provided state-of-the-art infrastructure for innovative agrifoodtech companies advancing novel approaches with vast potential to address challenges related to sustainability, agriculture, food and nutrition.

When the coronavirus first hit the U.S. two years ago, hospitals quickly realized that the pandemic would play havoc not only with their care capabilities, but also with their bottom lines.

As hospital systems became overwhelmed with patients sick with COVID-19, lucrative inpatient volumes plummeted, and many operators have yet to fully recover. To compensate for oscillating revenue, some hospitals have shifted their focus to outpatient service lines and alternative revenue sources, including investments.

Image: Adeline Kon/Healthcare Dive/Healthcare Dive

Labels such as “sustainable”, “eco-friendly” and “green” have long been an easy sell. “Circular economy” joined their ranks when it debuted on the world stage at the World Economic Forum 2012. Even though related concepts have been discussed as early as in the 1970s, claims by the consulting world that a transition to a circular economy could bring economic benefit to both manufacturers and consumers caught the attention of businesses and policymakers.

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