Things are looking up for John Morad and not just because he works on the 27th floor.

Morad is getting his MBA from Harvard and teaches artificial intelligence and machine learning four times a year as a visiting instructor at Stanford. He also is founder and CEO of a new Tulsa company, iRecommend Software, that has offices in such faraway lands as London and Dubai.

But until he hooked up with i2E Inc., he admittedly was a visionary who lacked focus.

Image: http://www.tulsaworld.com

As an angel investor to startups, I’m still surprised to find entrepreneurs who expect investors to give them money, and assume no strings attached. Would you do that if it was your money? If the entrepreneur wants total control of their own venture, with no one looking over their shoulder, they should work within the limits of their own resources, a process called bootstrapping.

Angel and venture capital money always comes with ownership and management implications, starting with the obvious ones outlined in the term sheet for the deal. These normally include what percentage of the company the investor now owns, how and when tranches of money will be delivered, and even how and when you can sell your own shares (liquidation preferences).

A Californian startup has received $100 million in funding to take forward its all-electric passenger aircraft.

Joby Aviation is pioneering vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, which will offer alternative  transportation options to customers at a local and regional level. Its 5-seaters can fly 150 miles plus on a single charge, and are up to 100 times less noisy than typical aircraft.

Life can be strange.

When you take all the living creatures in the world and mix in a healthy dose of time (measured in millennia) along with a strong shot of evolution, you get some bizarre life forms. Of course, even strange things take on the air of the familiar with enough exposure, which is why the truly weird forms of life are the ones we never lay eyes on.

Image: Takashi Hososhima/flickr

If you drink moderately—say, a couple of glasses of wine per day—you may want to toast your glymphatic system. It helps clear your brain of metabolites, including the proteins that are associated with Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia. According to new research from the University of Rochester, the glymphatic system may work better if you consume low amounts of alcohol.

Forget to send that email? Return a call? Meet a deadline? If you chalk up memory mishaps to having too much to think about, you might be making excuses. “We all have a good memory; the problem is no one taught us how to use it,” says four-time USA Memory Champion Nelson Dellis.

Dellis says he always had a mediocre memory, and didn’t think he had championship-caliber memory potential. Today, he’s the record holder for remembering the most names, memorizing 201 in 15 minutes. He was inspired to train his memory after his grandmother passed away in 2009 with Alzheimer’s disease.

We often talk about happiness, yet rarely take the time to define it. And that’s probably because it is incredibly difficult — each scientific discipline has its own take on it.

From a philosophical perspective the concept of happiness is often related to living a “good life”, flourishing, virtue, and excellence, rather than to experiencing an emotion. To psychologists happiness is an emotional and mental state of well-being related to experiencing positive emotions but also to a sense of meaning and satisfaction from life. 

Image: http://bigthink.com

You likely already have plans for what you’ll be doing in 2018.

Maybe you’ve already bought tickets for an epic trip or committed yourself to getting fit this year. Sounds like fun!

But maybe 2018 is also the year that you should start the small business you’ve always been dreaming of.

Whether you know exactly what kind of business you want to open, or if you just long to be your own boss someday, you should know that 2018 is a particularly good year for starting a business.

Amazon made an announcement Tuesday that sent shockwaves through the health care industry and caused insurers’ stocks to plummet: The technology company is joining Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase to create an independent health care organization that will serve their employees.

While details are hard to come by right now, it’s already clear the move could have massive implications for how Americans access medical treatment down the road. Those in the industry have long speculated that Amazon would try to disrupt it.

Image: http://time.com

The traditional Silicon Valley model for startups, notably venture capital and private equity, may not work well when it comes to innovation in health care services, says James Stanford. He thinks the innovative ideas he ran across in the industry could best be developed by creating a new business model. That led him to launch Fitzroy Health Holdings, where he is managing director. Fitzroy scouts for promising health care-related ideas within universities, hospitals and elsewhere, negotiates an equity position while proving crucial leadership, and then brings them to a scalable level before taking a backseat. Stanford, who formerly was with McKinsey, discussed his business model with Knowledge@Wharton. (Listen to the podcast at the top of this page.)

Getting venture capital financing for your start-up is never easy . . . and it’s much, much tougher if you’re a female entrepreneur.

As reported by Fortune Magazine, a study conducted by venture capital database publisher PitchBook this week found that, in 2017, companies with all-women management teams took in just $1.9 billion of the total $85 billion, or just 2.2 percent, raised from venture capital firms as compared to 91 percent raised by all-male or mixed management teams (the researchers were unable to determine the make up of management teams for the remaining amounts raised).

“I really became a robot,” a manager at an accounting firm explained. She and her colleagues worked extraordinarily long hours, but, she said, “I thought it was normal. It’s like brainwashing. You are in a kind of mental system where you are under increasing demands, and you say to yourself that it doesn’t matter, that you will rest afterwards, but that moment never comes.”

The Senate this week held a hearing titled “One Year Later: The American Innovation and Competitiveness Act,” with National Science Foundation (NSF) Director Dr. France Cordova and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Director Dr. Walter Copan testifying.

The American Innovation and Competitiveness Act (AICA), signed into law in January 2017, reauthorized NSF and NIST for the first time in six years. As the law’s original sponsor, Senator Cory Gardner (R-CO) chaired the hearing and asked Director Cordova to discuss the impacts of increasing U.S. contributions to research and development from 0.7 percent of GDP to 2 percent. Director Cordova responded that a significant increase would be “tremendous horsepower for the nation,” citing the prospects of medical advances, new discoveries and remaining competitive with China.

Entrepreneurship is so much more than just a job. It's a way of life. Year after year, the very concept of starting a business gets a little more interesting. There is always a list of amazing success stories to learn from, as well as cautionary tales.

In my opinion, one of the most fascinating aspects of entrepreneurship is that it requires an incredibly wide range of skills and virtues. This includes people skills, financial management, situational judgement, foresight, and so much more. Launching a startup is a time when you put everything you have learned throughout your life to the test.

Asuka Kamiya believes the rough-edged but unique ideas of young inventors could bring innovation to society. She would say that. She's a 14-year-old inventor and already the president of her own company.

Asuka established the company, Yakunitatsumono Tsukuro, in autumn last year and its aim is to help elementary and junior high school children turn their revolutionary ideas into commercial realities.

The firm was capitalized at 150,000 yen ($1,350), funded entirely by Asuka's "otoshidama" New Year’s gift money she has received since she was 1.

Image: Asuka Kamiya, an inventor and company president, is a junior high school student. (Tomoko Adachi)

Innovation is a word often associated with the Googles, Facebooks and Apples of the world. But while small businesses might not have the budget to take the risks that big businesses have, innovation is just as important to staying competitive, attracting customers and recruiting top talent. Coming up with new ideas, however, is easier said than done.

There’s a lesson to be learned from Detroit’s failure to make the 20-city short list for Amazon’s “HQ2” project: Let’s not do this any more.

The national frenzy over Amazon’s second headquarters should teach us it’s time to stop being one of 50 states or one of 200-plus cities getting played against each other by giant companies. Rather, let’s opt out of the corporate welfare hustle altogether, stop our politicians and bureaucrats from trying to micromanage the economy and make them put the money back into our communities where it came from in the first place.

When good policy doesn’t work, it’s often because of bad plumbing, rather than bad economics.

There is a long list of sensible economic policies that have failed in practice because of poor implementation. In both the developed and developing world, when insufficient thought is given to how to put a policy into practice, it can lead to frustration and even disillusionment with the original idea, which could have been economically sound.

In October, 17 product managers sat around a table at First Round’s New York Office, ready to learn something new. They’d been hand-picked out of 800+ applicants for the First Round Product Program — the first seminar series of its kind for rising star PMs destined to shape the industry for years to come. Instructors included recent product luminaries ranging from Viacom SVP Product Mike Berkley to Ellevest CPO Alexandria Stried to Kit Founder Camille Hearst. But no one knew what to expect.