Large corporations and conglomerates, the engines of growth and vitality in the twentieth century, have lost their edge and their image. They have proven themselves unable to innovate, and they have lost more jobs than they create. My friends who “grew up” with lifetime careers in General Motors, Exxon Mobil, or even IBM, are now often too embarrassed to even mention it.

On the other hand, everyone wants to be an entrepreneur. We can all aspire to grow companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple, which have the aura of fun, while still improving your lifestyle and offering the dream of untold riches.

Although the traditional business of providing equity research faces challenges, it is still an attractive opportunity for players that can adapt to deliver what the buy side values.

The traditional business of providing equity research to asset managers has been under pressure in recent years, as managers, challenged to deliver alpha to their clients, seek new forms of research and asset owners turn increasingly to passive strategies. Now, new regulation—specifically, the advent of MiFID II in Europe in 2018—is about to escalate these pressures.

IVP, one of the original late-stage venture capital firms, is announcing its sixteenth fund. And at $1.5 billion, it’s the largest yet. This brings the group’s total committed capital to $7 billion.

With a slew of exits this year, including Snap, AppDynamics, MuleSoft and Yext, and a historical IRR of 43%, it was enough to convince LPs that they’re ready for a little more money. The last fund raised was $1.4 billion in 2015.

A “catastrophic sleep-loss epidemic” is causing a host of potentially fatal diseases, according to professor Matthew Walker, director of the Centre for Human Sleep Science at the University of California, Berkeley. In an interview with the Guardian, he warns that sleep deprivation is not being taken seriously enough by employers and everyday people alike — according to his research, there is a “powerful” link between a lack of sleep and cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, obesity, heart disease, and other conditions. "No aspect of our biology is left unscathed by sleep deprivation,” he says. “It sinks down into every possible nook and cranny. And yet no one is doing anything about it. Things have to change: in the workplace and our communities, our homes and families."

In my years of mentoring entrepreneurs, a problem I have seen too often is low self-esteem, and over-compensating through arrogance and ego. These entrepreneurs find it hard to respect customers or team members, and their ventures usually fail. As a team member, low self-esteem leads to low confidence, poor productivity, and no job satisfaction. Fortunately, both can be fixed.

Organizational change expert Paul Meshanko, in his classic book “The Respect Effect,” explores the human science behind these issues, confirming that people with a healthy self-esteem perform at their best and treat others with respect, getting their best. All of us shut down when disrespected. He assures us that anyone can train themselves to get on track to stay on track.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — The new Bechtel Innovation Design Center is aimed to become a “magnet” where Purdue University students, staff and faculty can move their ideas and innovations to real-world products and impact. Innovators will be able to use the facility to advance conceptual designs, execute capstone projects, build prototypes and conduct product testing as well as further develop softer business and life skills such as team building across multiple disciplines and acquire leadership acumen.  

Image: Purdue University students celebrate the opening of the $18.5 million Bechtel Innovation Design Center, where student, staff and faculty innovators can create prototypes and other creative designs using CNC tools, waterjet cutter, laser engraver, 3D plastic printing and other cutting-edge tools. (Purdue University/Rebecca Wilcox)

Every day between 5 p.m.m and 8 p.m., Entrepreneur Network partner Greg Rollett has reserved a time slot on his phone. During that time, he is home with his family.

It sounds a little cold at first. But, look at it another way. During that three-hour block, Rollett has made it clear that no one can schedule a call or work-related meeting with him. That way, when he's home, he's actually present at the dinner table or when he's playing with his kids. He isn't checking email or trying to set something up for the next day. 

Image: https://www.entrepreneur.com

Jerusalem’s life-sciences cluster includes three innovation centers and 140 biomedical companies. About two-thirds of those companies are involved in biopharma (making drugs from living sources rather than chemicals).

“Jerusalem has all the resources for becoming a successful bio-city. It has Israel’s top university (Hebrew University), leading hospitals, leading design center (Bezalel) and a very developed network of life-sciences and medical-engineering academic institutions,” says Joe van Zwaren, president of JLM-BioCity, created in 2012 as a networking group now boasting some 1,000 biomed professionals, entrepreneurs, scientists, doctors and investors.

Image: A worker in the labs of Teva Pharmaceuticals, Jerusalem. Photo by Nati Shohat/FLASH90

More women and a wider array of professionals are likely to fill future boards, while technology will play a bigger role in their work.

In February 2017, the Financial Times informed its readers of an unusual dual appointment – Jim Hagemann Snabe had been named chairman of AP Moller-Maersk, the Danish shipping conglomerate, and also nominated chair of Siemens. At only 51, Snabe, a former co-CEO of SAP, is much younger than his predecessors and, unlike many chairs of public companies, has not been CEO of a large firm for decades. He is an active member of the World Economic Forum, a director at Allianz and Bang & Olufsen and also teaches at Copenhagen Business School. The FT indicated Snabe’s expertise in digitalisation as the key reason for his appointments. Does he represent a new, emerging type of board leader?

By now, it’s not a surprise that doctors advise anyone who has had a heart attack or stroke to take a low-dose aspirin every day. But remembering to take a pill daily can be a challenge.

In a new study published Monday in the journal Circulation, researchers show just how risky stopping aspirin therapy can be. They followed more than 601,000 people who took low-dose aspirin (80mg) daily to prevent heart disease and stroke. Three years after the study began, people who stopped taking aspirin for whatever reason had a 37% higher rate of heart problems including heart attack and stroke, compared to those who continued regularly taking the drug.

Image: http://time.com

Equity crowdfunding appears to represent a simple solution for businesses – both start up and firmly established – that are looking to raise money to fund their vision. By allowing investors (and fans of the brand) to invest in their company online, companies view this funding mechanism as a way to bypass banks, brokers, and toxic financers. You file significantly reduced SEC-paperwork, throw a website up, and wait for your offering to go viral. Once the internet does its thing and your hyperlink is shared by e-mail as well as endless Facebook and Twitter accounts, the raise will be complete and you can begin planning the listing of your IPO.

The first step is to remember when you start a new business is that you’re not alone. As wonderful and charming as your entrepreneurial life can be, sometimes it just sucks. Some days it can feel as if moment after moment the universe is looking down and mocking you, laying into you, and ruining your day "just because." 

You know that feeling you get when you absolutely crush a sale? You connect with a prospect who’s excited about your offering, and you close a larger deal than you ever expected to. If these big successes feel random and unpredictable, it’s time to focus on a reliable sales presentation strategy that can help you crush more sales than ever before.

By following just a few simple steps, you can make any sales meeting a success. Are you ready to give the best sales presentation of your life? Check out these five steps to the perfect sales presentation, so you can start to crush your sales goals:

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration specializes in outer space and beyond. But a lot of its work way out there trickles back down to Earth and into the lives of everyday people.

That's because the government mandates that NASA pass on its work to the tax-paying public. The NASA Spinoff program is the division of scientists and engineers who take the technology NASA invents and figures out how it can be applied to terrestrial life. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who established NASA, thought the technology being developed for space travel should be repurposed for regular life.

You can actually catch a good mood or a bad mood from your friends, according to a recent study in the journal Royal Society Open Science. But that shouldn’t stop you from hanging out with pals who are down in the dumps, say the study authors: Thankfully, the effect isn’t large enough to push you into depression. The new study adds to a growing body of research suggesting that happiness and sadness—as well as lifestyle and behavioral factors like smoking, drinking, obesity, fitness habits and even the ability to concentrate—can spread across social networks, both online and in real life. But while many previous studies have only looked at friendship data at one point in time, this is one of the few that measured social and mood changes over time.

Image: http://time.com

You may already have heard the warnings: Don’t overcharge your mobile phone. Make sure you unplug it from the charger after it reaches 100%. Wait to charge your phone until it’s almost down to 0%. Don’t leave it charging overnight. Or else.

The direness implicit in those imperatives may be overblown, but they're not paranoid conspiracy dictums — you still shouldn't overcharge your phone. Here's why.

A new initiative to identify, fund and scale new ventures that harness technologies that could transform how the world tackles environmental challenges has been launched at the World Economic Forum Sustainable Development Impact Summit in New York.

The 4IR for the Earth initiative – in partnership with Stanford University and PwC and with funding from the Mava Foundation – will bring together technology entrepreneurs, environmental experts, policymakers and industry to identify and scale innovative new ventures, partnerships and finance and policy instruments that harness ‘fourth industrial revolution (4IR) innovations to tackle environmental challenges.

By now we’re all familiar with the “Internet of Things” and have accepted that anything that can be digitally linked through the endless expanse of the internet no doubt will be. But what happens when one of those things is your brain? In another example of “this used to be science fiction,” that’s where we’re going next: neural digitization, our brains becoming nodes on the net.

In the 1800s, London was the largest city in the world and at the heart of the beginnings of climate change: Emissions from burning coal, scaled up by the demands of the Industrial Revolution, caused smog so dense that it stopped trains and spiked crime rates on the worst days. A new data visualization shows the growth of those emissions–and how the rest of the world followed.

Image: https://www.fastcompany.com/

Changing technology, finding the most skilled workers, and maintaining a good work-life balance are going to be the fundamental challenges for CEOs in the coming years.

According to Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, Arianna Huffington, founder of The Huffington Post and Thrive Global, Bill George, longtime CEO of Medtronic and currently a leadership professor at Harvard Business School, and Ryan Holmes, CEO of HootSuite, there are four skills that top their list of leadership essentials (the group published these recommendations in a post on LinkedIn Learning today).