Nathaniel “Ned” David is sitting at a conference table in South San Francisco in blue jeans, a black T-shirt and Tevas, looking and sounding a lot like Keanu Reeves as he discusses his latest startup, Unity Biotechnology. The idea behind Unity—preventing aging—sounds crazy, but it’s backed by dozens of scientific papers, the key two in Nature. There are aging cells, called senescent cells, that build up throughout the body and contribute to what we think of as old age—things like achy joints, waning vision, even perhaps Alzheimer’s. Kill those senescent cells with drugs, David reasons, and people might be able to grow old without becoming infirm.

Image: Timothy Archibald for Forbes - Ned David’s colleagues joke that he doesn't seem to age. With his latest company, he's trying to develop drugs that will spare everyone the ravages of getting old.  

I once had a startup founder tell me that he was having a recurring nightmare about being in a small room where 4 law enforcement officers would aggressively interrogate him, and he would try in vain to keep up with their questions. Each night, the dream would change slightly—the interrogators would look different, though always faceless—until finally he realized what the dream was about: pitching his startup and the interrogators were potential investors.

Leading research universities have played a central role in America’s dominance of high-tech sector after high-tech sector. From software to biotech, the technology and talent streaming out of these universities have been crucial to the startups that have powered innovation and local economic growth in many regions.

Over 200 city and community leaders from twenty-five cities will in Durham from today (June 4) through Wednesday to discuss strategies for accelerating inclusive economic development at a conference hosted by Forward Cities, a national learning collaborative of cities committed to fostering inclusive growth, and InnovateNC, a similar state-wide learning collaborative in North Carolina.

The conference kicks off Monday afternoon at the Durham Hotel Rooftop with a meeting of North Carolina community leaders to discuss efforts to stimulate the state’s innovation economy in under-connected micropolitan, rural, and metro areas.

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Most technical entrepreneurs I know demand the discipline of a product specification or plan, and then assume that their great product will drive a great business. Serious investors, on the other hand, look for a professional business plan or summary first, and hardly ever look at the product plan. Is it any wonder why so few entrepreneurs ever find the professional investors they seek?

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Successful B2B sales teams strike the human-digital balance customers want in three core areas: speed, transparency, and expertise.

The CEO of a large industrial company recently posed a question: “My face-to-face sales force thinks everything should be analog. For years, they’ve successfully driven consultative sales relationships based on face-to-face conversations, and they think they should carry on. Meanwhile, my e-commerce business unit thinks we should convert everything to digital because that’s where the growth is. Who’s right?”

The National Institutes of Health on Monday announced a sweeping initiative to revamp the way it manages data in an effort to foster the adoption of artificial intelligence, supercomputing and other technologies poised to transform medical research.

The agency’s Strategic Plan for Data Science sheds light on a handful of challenges facing NIH as record amounts of data pour into the agency and outlines five broad areas where leaders plan to focus their efforts over the next five years:

As dialogs with peers become easier and more trusted via smartphones and the Internet, people are more willing to share their assets with others, and capitalize on the potential for a quick return for very little effort. This new sharing economy is rapidly becoming the new “online shopping” model, with major winners already including Airbnb (rooms), Uber (rides), and SnapGoods (stuff).

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Recently it seems like many entrepreneurs are simultaneously running funds and companies: Andy Dunn of Bonobos runs Red Swan Ventures, Bryan Johnson of BrainTree and Kernel runs OS Fund, Andrew Ng of Coursera and Landing.ai  is building AiFund, Naval Ravikant runs AngelList and invests in startups through the platform, even Jeff Bezos of Amazon has Bezos Expeditions. A lot of entrepreneurs swear that being an operator in a previous life helps current VCs be better VCs and empathize with founders; but the logical next question is does being a VC in the past or concurrently help you be a better entrepreneur? And does running a fund while running a company build on each other and increase the probability that the other is successful?

Managing economic development incentive programs is not easy. Here are five common mistakes we see in state and local incentive efforts across the country.

1. It is not clear what the incentive program is supposed to accomplish. Too many incentive programs are designed to “support economic development” or “assist businesses,” which can mean just about anything. As a result, it is extremely difficult to determine which programs are effective uses of taxpayer funds. Everyone wants to know if incentives are effective, but “effective at what?” remains an open question in many places.

Image: https://smartincentives.org

As every entrepreneur will know, securing that first round of seed capital is often the most crucial step in getting any business off the ground.

And for their part, seed investors play a crucial role as tech influencers or tastemakers, often backing a trend years before it becomes mainstream.

But what do these European tech tastemakers of today think is coming tomorrow?

Image: https://www.forbes.com

An entrepreneur is bound to make several mistakes throughout his or her journey.  However, the lessons a leader can learn from a mistake are often invaluable. We make plenty of bad decisions – decisions related to hiring, investing in wrong projects, overspending, taking on more work than we can handle. The list is long. However, once a mistake is made, we should ensure that we take every step necessary so that the mistake isn’t repeated.

Today’s world gives everyone the special opportunity to create: unlike in other times when the mechanism of creation resided within large enterprises, today any individual has the power to innovate and build companies. Before the advent of technology innovation required a large capital budget because it required physical space. Technology, on the other hand, has moved the world to a virtual space -  thus lifting the constraints of space and allowing companies to reach millions of users, without owning real-estate. This advent of technology brought innovation to the masses, now anyone has the power come up with an exceptional idea and send it out for millions of people to use from the comfort of their bedroom.

Each year, the Churchill Club, a 32-year-old thought-leadership organization based in Silicon Valley, hosts a debate among some of the leading, and most opinionated, tech and business luminaries. This year, five venture capitalists from Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, and other top firms laid out their predictions for which nonobvious tech trends would emerge with the potential for explosive growth around 2021.

Whether we’re conscious of it or not, every management decision is motivated by a desire to find universal answers to very specific questions. People who succeed in organizations tend to be pragmatic problem solvers. They have to be, because of the myriad challenges they face. How to grow the enterprise. How to get work done. How to find customers. How to be themselves in the workplace. And so on. Because there are no easy answers to these complex problems, they test the answers by starting a company, launching a project, or making a move. As they succeed and fail, the most attentive of them learn from the results. The history of business is thus the story of entrepreneurs, executives, leaders, and employees, lurching from one experimental answer to another. They gain expertise and acumen, and profits and revenues, and, along the way, add to the theory of management.

Whether your meeting ended early or that project didn’t take as long as you thought, chances are you’ve got some found time on your hands at some point during the day. If you’re like most people, you default to checking email. If you had a system in place, however, you could use those unexpected minutes to get something done, says productivity consultant Leslie Shreve, founder and CEO of Productive Day.

Ron Conway, one of the tech industry's most prominent and powerful startup investors who had early stakes in Facebook, Twitter, and Airbnb, said in a Medium post on Thursday that his early-stage investment firm, SV Angel, would not be raising a new fund.

Conway, considered the "Godfather of Silicon Valley," and his son Topher, who also manages the fund, said they would continue to use the SV Angel brand and cut checks — but in smaller amounts and as angel investors.

Image: By Joi Ito from Inbamura, Japan - Ron Conway, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3277162

Most business managers preach that the key to success is holding employees accountable for actions, but I have found that successful entrepreneurs are all about holding themselves accountable. They skip the blame and complain game, and make things happen despite major obstacles. As a startup investor, I view any evidence of a victim mentality as the kiss of death.

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This week, Boston will play host to two major gatherings: more than 16,000 biotech and pharma executives attending the annual BIO International Convention, which officially opens Monday, and approximately 250 US city mayors, who are taking part in the US Conference of Mayors, starting Friday.

What might I tell a biotech entrepreneur from Berlin, or a mayor from Missouri, about the things that make Boston’s innovation economy work — and some of the things that could still use improvement?

Image: https://www.bostonglobe.com

PHOENIX--(BUSINESS WIRE)--President and CEO Steven G. Zylstra of the Arizona Technology Council and Sandra Watson, president and CEO of the Arizona Commerce Authority, were recently nominated by Arizona Governor Doug Ducey to attend the first-of-its-kind State-Federal Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) Education Summit hosted by The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) on June 25-26, 2018, in Washington, D.C.