During one of the stops on the Amazon HQ2 roadshow, a team of officials visited Raleigh-Durham in North Carolina seeking to learn more about whether the area was a good fit for the sought-after $5 billion project. According to the Washington Post, one of the items on the agenda was House Bill 2, the 2016 “bathroom bill” decried by many tech companies.

We’ve probably all been to at least one networking event, those initially promising but inevitably awkward meet-ups where most people arrive hoping to meet new contacts that can further their career — but end up stirring their drink in the corner of the room chatting with someone they already knew.

I know you have your document sending tool to send your fund-raising deck to VCs and track who read your deck, which pages they read and how much time they spend on each page. I know that you can use an email system with this to track my open rate, whether I forwarded the email, the IP address where I read it, whether I was on a mobile device or a wired computer and you can tell who else read the document.

Image: https://bothsidesofthetable.com

Heard the news? Amazon has more than 100 million Prime members now, a milestone CEO Jeff Bezos announced last month in his annual letter to shareholders. That missive includes another detail that’s received comparatively less attention: A program Amazon calls Career Choice, an initiative it launched in 2012, has now benefited more than 16,000 associates, according to the company.

This white paper takes an in depth look at trends in the pharmaceutical industry that are anticipated to make a significant impact on the sector in 2018. Industry professionals can leverage this information to make the course adjustments that will give their companies a competitive edge in the market.

Europe has world-class research and a strong industrial base. But we must do better - much better - at turning that excellence into success. New megatrends, such as artificial intelligence and the circular economy, are going to bring profound changes to society and the economy. We need to act fast to be able to lead the new wave of innovation and set the standard for global competition

There's a common image of successful entrepreneurs in their early years: working out of a friend's basement, subsisting on a diet of ramen and pulling all-nighters until one day, just as they're about to exhaust their last resources, something turns. As romanticized as those success stories seem, there's a danger to perpetuating that image as the sole means to achieving our goals. I'm excited to share with you some realities of entrepreneurship as I've experienced them -- ramen optional.

Oklahoman subscribers log in and go ad-FREE. Anybody who's ever heard me talk about building out Oklahoma's innovation economy has heard me say that capital begets capital and deal flow begets deal flow.

The challenge is that it takes a predictable continuum of investment capital to build a robust pipeline of startups, and it takes a robust pipeline of startups to attract capital.

New Enterprise Associates, one of Silicon Valley’s largest venture-capital firms, plans to sell off a big chunk of its startup investments in response to a dearth of initial public offerings, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Israel's life sciences industry has experienced a 81% growth over the past decade, with around 130 companies founded every year on average, according to a new report, though half of that number ceased to operate. Most of the industry’s employees are divided between its largest companies, meaning 65% of Israel-based life science companies employ 10 people or less.

Vaksea from MARYLAND - Ed.

The Iowa AgriTech Accelerator in Des Moines announced on Thursday the five AgTech startups selected for the program’s 2018 cohort. The Iowa AgriTech Accelerator is a mentor-led accelerator focused on AgTech innovations. The Accelerator is led by innovators and leaders in several areas of agriculture, and seeks startups ready to change the status quo.

Image: Megan Vollstedt, Executive Director for The Accelerator  

Kavitha, a Canadian national, played tennis from a very early age. Her sporting skills and academic prowess earned her a place at Princeton and Oxford universities, as well as a spot on junior Grand Slam tournaments such as the U.S. Open and Wimbledon. Several years on the pro circuit brought her satisfaction but also pain and loneliness. After winning several championships, she decided to leverage her habits of hard work, persistence, resilience and discipline to transition towards the world of business.

It’s a fertile time for innovation policy globally, as a number of countries, particularly in Europe, have introduced new national innovation policies or strategies, many specially designed to boost competitiveness in advanced and emerging technology industries such as AI, autonomous driving, advanced manufacturing, clean energy, and innovative life sciences. Policymakers also are grappling with how to establish enabling regulatory environments that meet social needs such as safety or privacy while encouraging innovators to experiment and allowing new technologies to flourish.

Struggling to become analytics-driven? One or more of these issues is likely what’s holding your organization back.

How confident are you that your analytics initiative is delivering the value it’s supposed to?

You can’t give an effective presentation–or do much of anything at work, for that matter–without looking and sounding credible. And fortunately, there are many ways for presenters to appear confident and sound like they know their stuff.

Unfortunately, there are also many ways to do the opposite. And that can be as simple as saying the wrong thing. Here are three common phrases that can sap your credibility if you don’t make an effort to avoid them.

Image: NeONBRAND/Unsplash

If all goes according to plan, the annual flu shot protects about 60 percent of vaccinated people. This year’s inoculation, of course, fell far short of such expectations, safeguarding only one in four vaccinated people who encountered the dominant H3N2 strain. This shortfall injected further momentum into the push to create a universal vaccine that protects against many flu types over time.

Innovation is no longer optional for social sector organizations. In the face of constant fiscal pressures, growing demand, and a quickening pace of change, we all need to build innovation-ready cultures. A report commissioned by our organization, Alliance for Strong Families and Communities, looked at the financial data of more than 200,000 nonprofits in the United States and found that community-based, human-service organizations are in financial peril. Nearly one in eight human service nonprofits are technically insolvent, and nearly half have a negative operating margin over a three-year period.

Image: https://ssir.org/

Entrepreneurs who are lucky enough to receive funding from a Venture Capital firm are eligible for a double whammy: Venture Debt. This obscure form of funding isn’t even tracked by the National Venture Capital Association, which publishes market data and statistics on venture capital.

It can be draining to work with a perfectionist. While it’s great to work with colleagues who care about the quality of their work, perfectionists take it a step further. Their unrelenting standards can result in unnecessary stress, conflict, and missed deadlines due to a failure to prioritize the big picture over the details. If you try to remind them that “perfect is the enemy of finished,” they may see you as a corner-cutter. Perfectionism is common enough that we’ll all eventually encounter perfectionists in the workplace.

It’s been a slow climb, but after a decade of steady recovery, young graduates’ economic prospects overall are the brightest since 2007. Wages have been rising since 2012, and recently surpassed the benchmark set in 2000.

According to the Economic Policy Institute,  challenges still remain. Remember that the economy at the beginning of the recession was in freefall, and nothing compared to more prosperous times in the ’90s and early 2000s.