Want to be a venture investor? The best way to learn is to start investing and learn on the job. Wonder where you could do that? Check out Venture University.

Founded by investor Skyler Fernandes, Venture University is an alternative MBA. It’s a trade school for people interested in venture capital and private equity.

Image: https://www.forbes.com

The Agriculture Department’s IT modernization push and partnership with the General Services Administration’s Centers of Excellence are changing its very culture, its chief information officer said Tuesday.

Agriculture CIO Gary Washington said the department is seeing renewed energy in its modernization efforts, as well as a change in strategic thinking from the top down. During a panel at the 2018 CFO/CIO Summit hosted by the Association of Government Accountants and the Association for Federal Information Resources Management, he credited this transformation to the department’s work with the Centers of Excellence.

Earlier this year, Tesla shareholders approved what is likely the largest compensation package ever awarded to a CEO — for a CEO who clearly doesn’t need the money. Elon Musk is already incredibly rich, and also doesn’t seem particularly motivated by further wealth. The psychologist Daniel Pink describes the primary sources of human motivation for people who have covered their most basic needs, such as food and shelter, as being autonomy, mastery, and purpose — and Musk seems like a prototypical example of that. He enjoys the autonomy to pursue moon shot projects, constantly strives for mastery in what he does, and has a strong sense of purpose. And yet this contradiction of motivations has mostly been absent from discussion of Musk’s pay.

NEW YORK, May 02, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- HC2 Holdings, Inc. (“HC2”) (NYSE:HCHC), a diversified holding company, announced today that BeneVir Biopharm, Inc. (“BeneVir”), a privately-held biotechnology company developing oncolytic immunotherapies for the treatment of cancer, has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by Janssen Biotech, Inc. (“Janssen”).

BeneVir is a portfolio company within HC2’s Pansend Life Sciences (“Pansend”) subsidiary. Pansend is led by David A. Present M.D., Founder and General Partner, and Cherine Eldumiati Plumaker, Founder and General Partner.  HC2 made its initial investment in BeneVir in 2014, and currently owns approximately 76 percent of the company’s equity.  

Money may be at the heart of the gap between first and second-tier centers of venture capital, but something else works against the industry’s wannabe cities and states: culture. A study from the University of Toronto found that the nation’s ...

Image: https://www.pehub.com

You've heard the word "blockchain" many times now, but probably not quite as many as you've heard the word "bitcoin." Yet you surely have a sense that the referents of those two words have a connection, and even if you haven't yet been interested in either, you may well know that blockchain, a technology, makes Bitcoin, a currency, possible in the first place.

On a rainy afternoon in 2016, I was leading a workshop to advance local development in Colombia; the meeting was one result of new peace accords that had ended 52 years of civil war. The atmosphere was tense and alert, as you might expect when leaders who bitterly opposed one another have gathered to work on their most crucial and difficult mutual problems.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos isn't a fan of the phrase "work-life balance."

At a recent awards event hosted by Axel Springer and Business Insider US editor in chief Alyson Shontell, Bezos revealed the counterintuitive advice he offers new Amazon employees.

Bezos believes that his new hires should stop attempting to achieve "balance" within their professional and personal lives, since that implies a strict trade-off between the two. Instead, Bezos envisions a more holistic relationship between work and life outside the office.

Image: Michael Seto/Business Insider

WASHINGTON, D.C.- Today, U.S. Undersecretary of Energy Mark Menezes announced up to $23 million for innovative technologies to reduce capital costs and shorten deployment timelines of marine energy devices.The Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) will fund research and evaluation of next-generation wave and tidal/current systems; support early-stage design of power take off (PTO) and controls integration; and allow for more efficient consideration of any potential environmental impacts from marine renewable energy development.

It’s baaaaack, that reputation-shredding, stock-moving fight to the death over key CRISPR patents. On Monday morning in Washington, D.C., the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit will hear oral arguments in University of California v. Broad Institute. Questions?

Greg, a top executive at a large financial institution, enjoyed the status that came with his job. He liked receiving attention and having people defer to him. He also relished rubbing shoulders with others in power. At the yearly meetings of the World Economic Forum in Davos, he always experienced a high from exchanging ideas with people he read about in the press. To Greg, power and money was what life was all about. This made losing his job all the more of a blow.

Last week I posted an article talking about the maturity curve, or the lifecycle arc from incubation to growth to maturity to decline that applies to so many things. And this weekend my review of Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak’s book The New Localism was published in the New York Times Book Review. These two items are related.

Image: http://www.newgeography.com

Making five healthy lifestyle choices could prolong your life by longer than 10 years, according to a new study.

The habits are recognizable — eating a healthy diet, exercising regularly, drinking only in moderation, not smoking and maintaining a healthy body weight — but the study sought to quantify the exact extent to which they could impact a person’s health and longevity. The findings, published in the journal Circulation, suggest that adhering to these five behaviors could extend a woman’s life expectancy at age 50 by 14 years, and a man’s by 12.

Image: http://time.com

The Toronto-Waterloo corridor ranks as one of the world’s top 20 startup ecosystems thanks in part to leading computer science and engineering research at the University of Toronto and the University of Waterloo, a recent Silicon Valley think tank report says.

Image: https://www.utoronto.ca

MADISON, Wis. – Wisconsin has a surplus of new ideas and entrepreneurial ambitions, but professional expertise is needed to turn those dreams into reality, say Arjun Sanga, president of WiSys, and Zach Halmstad, co-founder of a software corporation in Eau Claire.

Their essay is titled “Tapping into the creativity of our students for the good of Wisconsin: Contributions to the Wisconsin Idea across generations.” It is the latest in a new online series featuring more than 20 prominent leaders on the topic of innovation.

Angel investors provide $25B to 70,000 companies annually—90% of outside equity for startups – but very little is known about angels themselves. From the world’s most in depth dataset on individual angel investors, The American Angel study confirmed some assumptions about angels and found some surprises. More at www.theamericanangel.org.

The phrase “passive income” has been so overused that it may provoke somewhat negative feelings. You’ve probably seen Facebook ads portraying the “laptop” lifestyle from entrepreneurs trying to sell you on one of their programs. You see what they’re offering and understand that the way they travel and make an income is through people buying their course.

“The aging process brings social and emotional changes, and also loss into people’s lives,” says Keren Etkin. But the gerontologist, a lead researcher hired as employee number one at Intuition Robotics, believes that artificial intelligence can ease these transitions for our elders.

Image: courtesy of EllieQ

For a few days at the end of April, around 250 venture capitalists from around the world, part of the Kauffman Fellowship, visited Israel, many of them for the first time. The Kauffman Fellows, a global network of VCs across 42 countries, was set up by the Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City. The Fellows came to Israel at the invitation of their Israeli colleagues, who wanted to show them the vibrant and powerful Israeli innovation ecosystem.

Do you procrastinate on big decisions? You might be too much of an A student, according to entrepreneur Taylor Pearson, author of “The End of Jobs.”

To be truly successful, you only need to make the right decision about 70 percent of the time, he says. He calls it the “70 percent rule.”