With new-age entrepreneurship potentially breaking barriers as far as leading to the development of actual solutions to issues, not too long ago considered unsolvable, it is only imminent that the entrepreneur; especially the first-timers; master smart techniques so as to minimize wastage of resources whilst maximizing entrepreneurial potential.

You don’t have to be a Silicon Valley venture capitalist to invest in the hot new technology startups.

Individuals interested in startups can invest through angel groups or online platforms for early-stage investors like AngelList and Propel(x). Or they can invest in later-stage, but still young, companies through publicly traded funds that hold stakes in companies already backed by venture capitalists.

Understanding the size of the gig economy is so complicated, you couldn't ask gig economists to do it. The Treasury Department had one estimate of 0.7 percent last year after poring through administrative tax records. Last week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said 1.3 percent, 1.6 percent, and 3.8 percent over three estimates, and the Federal Reserve Bank said 30 percent.

With answers like these, why bother to ask the question?

University of California Davis Chancellor Gary May said that the university’s “To Boldly Go” strategic growth plan will include a variety of partnerships in the Sacramento area.

Image: UC Davis Chancellor Gary May - DENNIS MCCOY | SACRAMENTO BUSINESS JOURNAL

With its mix of old brick walls and soaring glass towers, the MaRS Discovery District is often singled out as a critical element in Toronto’s emergence as a leading innovation hub – and Ilse Treurnicht played a key role in making it all happen.

Treurnicht, who received an honorary Doctor of Laws, honoris causa, from the University of Toronto on Tuesday, was named MaRS's CEO in 2005 just as the innovation complex was set to open its doors at the corner of College Street and University Avenue. 

Image: Ilse Treurnicht received an honorary Doctor of Laws, honoris causa, from the University of Toronto on Tuesday (photo by Steve Frost)

Most entrepreneurs are jacks-of-all-trades who are equipped with the knowledge and abilities to solve business problems as they arise, but there are some obstacles that require a more specialized industry-centric approach. These are the challenges that keep business owners up at night because they don’t have the in-house expertise or resources necessary to develop a solution. 

SEATTLE and NEW YORK and SAN FRANCISCO and LONDON, June 14, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- PitchBook, the premier data provider for the private and public equity markets, today released fund performance data through 3Q 2017 from its stand-alone performance measurement product, PitchBook Benchmarks. The comprehensive performance data is designed to help limited partners (LPs) and general partners (GPs) better understand private market fund performance relative to broader asset classes and other PE and VC strategies. Since last quarter, PitchBook has added more than 140 private capital funds to the Benchmarks data set, which now includes nearly 4,000 private market funds. In this edition, PitchBook examines performance persistence across active PE and VC fund managers and finds strong performance persistence between funds, and that the level of persistence rises as a firm raises additional funds. In aggregate, funds that deliver top-quartile performance are followed by a top-quartile successor fund 39% and 34% of the time for PE and VC, respectively.

New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy rarely misses an opportunity to point out the Garden State once was a hub for innovation — where Thomas Edison invented the phonograph and the incandescent light-bulb, and the birthplace of the transistor that paved the way for modern computers.

“This is a state that was a Silicon Valley before there was a Silicon Valley,” Murphy told a crowd of entrepreneurs at Propelify, a tech festival on the Hoboken Pier in May.

If you are an entrepreneur and a seeker of expert mentorship whilst being desirous of raising venture capital (VC) funds; but with mentoring as the key focus; then it is worth your time to know that even today’s investors are seekers. In this regard, to decode what investors and mentors seek in your innovative ventures, Entrepreneur India spoke to Alok Goyal who is Partner at Stellaris Venture Capital – a Bengaluru-based venture capital firm with a portfolio of having mentored ventures harnessing technology to solve societal issues. He is also a veteran entrepreneur.

The state’s Biotechnology Task Force released a 44-page report of recommendations to the state that could help New Jersey reinvigorate its life sciences sector.

Many of the themes from the report echo comments from the Biotechnology Innovation Organization’s annual conference in Boston recently.

“Over the last two decades, the pharmaceutical footprint in New Jersey has contracted, affected by the patent cliff, the recession, mergers and acquisitions, research and manufacturing moving away from the state,” the report said. “The concentration of biopharmaceuticals has helped the state retain its position as a global hub for the medical sciences, but there is strong competition with other states and countries for startups and job creation.”

Earth-orbiting satellites are watching Antarctica thaw. 

Eighty scientists from over 40 earth sciences agencies, including NASA and the European Space Agency, used satellite data from between 1992 to 2017 to find that Antarctica has lost three trillion tons of ice to the oceans over this 25-year period.

Their research, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, confirms a troubling trend, as much of the world's fresh water is frozen away in Antarctica. It's accelerating melt will likely play a primary role in swelling Earth's oceans two or three feet higher this century, or perhaps as much as six feet.

Consumers choose a brand for a host of different reasons, and the new survey carried out by GraphicSprings.com asked international passengers which airline they would like to fly based just on the logo. And not surprisingly, depending on how you look at it, one of the best airlines in the world, Etihad was first. Remember this was just based on the logo of the company. This result highlights why it is important for companies to put their best effort into all of their customer-facing products, whether it is a logo or something else.

Savvy entrepreneurs start testing their ideas on potential customers even before the concept is fully cooked. They have enough confidence in their ability to deliver that they don’t worry about someone stealing the idea to get there first, and they don’t forget to listen carefully to critical feedback. They become walking public relations machines for themselves, as well as their idea.

So far, the digital revolution has mostly been a disappointment in health care. Doctors stare at their screens instead of us. Specialists and emergency rooms still don’t have all our records.

But artificial intelligence, big data analytics and deep learning are converging on health care in a big way, information technology experts insist. The changes have already begun. And if and when they really take off, such convergence of biology and technology should bring about a complete transformation of medical care.

Image: http://www.wbur.org

Most of us have experienced the futility of job interviews, or at least had to answer some of these dreadful questions. Yet it’s virtually impossible to get a job without going through an interview–and usually more than one.

But the trouble is that interviews aren’t as useful as employers think. Indeed, organizations can still make great (and arguably better) hiring decisions without them. What would happen if we all agreed to scrap job interviews tomorrow, and focused instead on other indicators of career potential?

Here is today’s reality: The average large firm reorganizes every 2-3 years and it takes over 18 months. With technology advances changing everything, wait and see isn’t an option.

Those who get it right are creating adaptive, fast-moving organizations that respond quickly and flexibly to opportunities and challenges. They move intelligent decision-making to the front lines. Their process functions more like a network and less like a chain of command. Gone is the standard, “safer” modus operandi.

Image: https://www.mckinsey.com

As a startup investor, I often see business proposals looking for funding that really look like expensive hobbies looking for donations. I recognize that entrepreneurs tend to substitute vision and passion for formal processes, but using no discipline or process in building something new is a sure way to spend money, rather than see any return and build a self-sustaining business.

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com

X-ray vision has long seemed like a far-fetched sci-fi fantasy, but over the last decade a team led by Professor Dina Katabi from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) has continually gotten us closer to seeing through walls.

Their latest project, “RF-Pose,” uses artificial intelligence (AI) to teach wireless devices to sense people’s postures and movement, even from the other side of a wall.

Image: https://scienceblog.com

Vermont, like many states, is suffering from demographic challenges. It has the fourth slowest population growth of any state since 2000. It has the lowest share of its population who are children under 18 (if you exclude the District of Columbia, a “city-state” from the figures). Vermont is also impeccably progressive, has many quaint cities and towns, and is known for natural beauty. None of these factors has driven population growth there. Population growth is not the only metric, but the situation in much of New England is not looking healthy to me, especially northern New England.

Image: http://www.newgeography.com

The leadership at Coinbase, Lyft, Checkr and other high-flying startups are grateful that their coach, Khalid Halim, didn’t skip out on a class called Military Science as an undergrad at UCLA. What he thought was a throwaway course delivered one of his most valuable insights:

“I started noticing patterns in startups — which I’ve validated with executives and VCs over the years — that how companies scale and break matches military groupings. So, the most efficient group in the military is a group of three, then a group of eight, and then three groups of eight, so 24,” says Halim.