Millions of workers have thought about changing and quitting their jobs in recent months, and some Americans even have unretired. People who are currently thinking about joining the Great Resignation or taking on new opportunities may want to consider jobs that have quickly grown over the last couple of years.

LinkedIn recently published its annual "Jobs on the Rise" list for the US, based on the company's internal data on jobs started by the career networking site's users. This year's list shows the fastest-growing job titles using growth rates from January 2017 through July 2021.

Despite the ongoing impacts of the pandemic, 2021 saw US VC activity begin with a bang and end on a high note.

The Q4 2021 PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor, sponsored by Insperity, explores the data in detail, painting a dramatic picture of the US venture industry and depicting how the year toppled previous records for dealmaking, public listings, fundraising and more. Here's a breakdown of several noteworthy trends in the industry during 2021.

Autonomous vehicles, drones and eVTOL aircraft are innovations with the potential to transform people’s lives. But if hastily adopted and not correctly regulated, new technology can be dangerous—and even lead to tragedy, as in 2018 when a self-driving Uber test car killed a pedestrian. So how can companies be encouraged to push the boundaries while minimising the risks?

Big science projects increase knowledge about phenomena that are fundamentally important for humankind. Projects such as CERN, ITER, the international fusion project in France, the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope in Australia and South Africa, and the International Space Station advance scientific understanding with the potential for solving existential threats to humanity. Collectively they have budgets of hundreds of billions of dollars and produce major benefits for industry.

Image: Big science projects advance scientific understanding with the potential for solving existential threats to humanity. Image: UNSPLASH/Ryo Tanaka

The 14th annual SXSW Pitch will take place at the Hilton Austin Downtown on Saturday, March 12 and Sunday, March 13. A live audience, as well as a panel of expert judges, will discover advancements in various sectors of emerging technology. The best part – product demonstrations by the most ambitious talents in the world with the creative new ideas to change it. Catch a glimpse of the industry’s future, with a guided tour by our emcees and judges.

Image: SXSW Pitch Presented by Cyndx – 2019 – Photo by Beverly Schulze

Bellevue’s Suburban General Hospital, located just outside the city on Pittsburgh’s west side, closed its doors in 2010. Now a partnership between Allegheny Health Network (a major nonprofit healthcare system) and Innovation Works (a major seed-stage investor) has brought the 230,000-square-foot facility back to life as a healthcare powerhouse, with a twist. 

Even as the venture capital industry shattered all records last year, it also continued to see significant changes to how it operates and its place in the startup ecosystem.

Last year saw seismic changes brought about by the likes of large hedge funds such as Tiger Global and Coatue pouring money into venture-backed startups and spiking valuations. It also saw some legacy players change the way they play the venture game, including Sequoia Capital’s plans to change its fund structure.

The pandemic has forced entrepreneurs to adapt to change faster than ever. Whether it’s pivoting your businesses’ product offerings to meet consumer demands, figuring out how the latest COVID-19 restrictions affect you or developing an online and social media presence to reach your audience—there’s an endless to-do list when it comes to running a small business. 

We are living in a time of exciting technological innovations. Digital technologies are driving transformative change. Economic paradigms are shifting. The new technologies are reshaping product and factor markets and profoundly altering business and work. The latest advances in artificial intelligence and related innovations are expanding the frontiers of the digital revolution. Digital transformation is accelerating in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The future is arriving faster than expected.

Dr. Amesh Adalja, Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security senior scholar, discusses returning to activities as Covid-19 becomes endemic. The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health is supported by Michael R. Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg LP and Bloomberg Philanthropies. (Source: Bloomberg)

It’s a paradoxical time in the arc of the Covid-19 pandemic.

On the one hand, record numbers of people, including on college campuses, are being infected. Hospitals are once again overwhelmed. Death counts, too, are rising nationwide.

On the other hand, many colleges have highly vaccinated populations. The risk that those people will become severely ill with Covid is lower now, broadly speaking, than it was before the advent of vaccines.

Image: ILLUSTRATION BY THE CHRONICLE

The concept of startup incubators might not be new, but the newfound interest in these centres continues to grow. Just like parents help a child learn how to walk, startup incubation centres enable a startup to nurture its idea and make it into a reality.

Much has been written about the potential for entrepreneurship to spur economic growth — and yet time and time again, we’ve seen business-driven revitalization programs fail to make a real, lasting impact on their local communities. What will it take to foster ventures that actually revive the economies in which they’re founded? The authors discuss the results of an eight-year investigation into two organizations that took opposing approaches to supporting entrepreneurs in Detroit.

A question that I still hear debated often is whether a new online platform startup growth strategy should focus on user count or profits. First of all, the glory days of “dot.coms” are gone, when investors “didn’t care” about profitability, and all the big money was focused on user count growth.

1. Believe in yourself

2. Doing the right thing is never the wrong thing

3. All people are different people

4. See good in others

5. Forgive first

...

Image: https://www.linkedin.com/

Veteran investors have been nervous on and off for several years about the risk of a potential bubble forming in the venture capital markets. That anxiety has been especially pronounced among VCs who saw their portfolio companies obliterated in the dot-com crash of March 2000.

Today those same industry veterans are increasingly vocal about the heightened risk of the market going through yet another sharp correction, drawing comparisons between 2000 and a hawkish Fed and the new wave of hyper-driven valuation increases.

Today, Noubar Afayan, founder of Flagship Pioneering, published the venture capital firm’s 2022 Annual Letter, and in it, outlined what he sees as the four top forces shaping the future of biotech.

Earlier this week, a Flagship-backed company, Generate Bio, inked an almost $2 billion deal for protein therapeutics with Amgen. That deal is just one example of Flagship’s success in identifying and helping launch and invest in life science companies. 

Johns Hopkins University is revising its safety protocols ahead of the start of the spring semester as it prepares to resume a broad range of in-person academic, research, and other activities as safely as possible amid the surge in COVID-19 cases caused by the omicron variant, university leaders said Friday.

When the University of Maryland Medical Center announced the first successful transplant of a heart that was grown in a genetically altered pig earlier this week, it notched a big win for one of America’s wealthiest self-made women.

Revivicor, a subsidiary of United Therapeutics–founded and led by Martine Rothblatt – supplied the heart that made the surgery possible. A former communications satellite lawyer who went on to cofound Sirius Satellite Radio, Rothblatt, 67,  has  been on a long journey to biotechnology success.  

Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martine_Rothblatt

If you are a business owner today, and not using social media to promote your business, you are missing out on a huge opportunity. But, contrary to what most people preach, it isn’t entirely free. Most social media outlets don’t require a subscription charge, but they certainly always require an investment, sometimes large, in people, in technology, your reputation, and your time.

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com