The venture capital world is dominated by men.

Female founders still get a fraction of the deals made, and dollars spent, despite making steady strides over the past decade. And it's no coincidence that women still only make up about 15% of all general partners at VC firms around the country. 

There's room for optimism though, according to a new report from Pitchbook.

While the pandemic hit startups with female founders harder than all-male teams, women began outpacing national trends at the end of 2020 and are already shattering records this year, according to Pitchbook's third annual report on female founders.

Image: Shelly Kapoor Collins is one of the women setting out to diversify the venture capital industry. Todd Johnson | San Francisco Business Times

Effective communication is an absolute requirement for successfully starting a business, but it doesn’t come naturally to many entrepreneurs. Communication is considered a social skill, and inventors and engineers, for example, are not known to be social butterflies.

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com

Venture capital firm Flagship Pioneering is best known for creating Moderna Therapeutics on whiteboards in its Cambridge, Massachusetts, office. Now it's seeking to leverage its own portfolio to treat cystic fibrosis, a genetic disorder that causes persistent lung infections and limited breathing ability.

Image: Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios

As COP26 continues this week, Good Morning Britain (GMB) and the University of Portsmouth have embarked on a groundbreaking investigation into microplastics.

For the very first time, the exclusive research looks at exactly what is in the air in people’s homes and the impact on health.

According to professor Anoop Jivan Chauhan MBE, respiratory specialist and director of research and innovation at Portsmouth Hospitals University NHS Trust, the results are 100 times higher than any other academic research has previously predicted.

Image: Reporter Michelle Morrison, of Good Morning Britain, talking to Dr Fay Couceiro, Reader in Environmental Pollution at the University of Portsmouth. Pic University of Portsmouth.

University of Saskatchewan chemical engineering PhD candidate Alivia Mukherjee from the College of Engineering is investigating how spent coffee grounds can be used to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and add value to an abundant Canadian waste product.

Image: Engineering graduate researcher Alivia Mukherjee investigates how to add value to organic waste products such as coffee grounds. (Submitted) jpg

Some aspiring entrepreneurs are so desperate for funding, or naïve, that they ignore the obvious signs of scams and rip-offs on the Internet, praying for a windfall. One would think that with all the sad stories and tools published over the past twenty years, this problem would be behind us. But people are still begging for more technology or laws, often to protect them from themselves.

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2am VC is a US domiciled India-focused venture fund for Gen Z entrepreneurs. “We are a sector-agnostic, Gen Z centric, ‘India Only’ early stage venture fund,” says Hershel Mehta, co-founder and partner, 2am VC. Brendan Rogers is the other co-founder and partner in this venture. “The Indian Gen Z is a force to be reckoned with. They are digital-first, have great national pride and identity, and are huge in number. This segment is the next big thing, and missing it would be the mistake of the millennium,” he tells Sudhir Chowdhary in a recent interaction. Excerpts:

What do you think about the US venture ecosystem? And how has been your journey? T

he US ecosystem is operating at an all-time high in terms of micro funds and angel capital available. Covid-19 transformed popular investors’ belief as they now firmly state that great companies can be built anywhere, not just in Silicon Valley.

Image: HERSHEL MEHTA, Co-founder & Partner, 2AM VC

One-third of all businesses in the U.S. do not have a website, according to the Small Business Administration. If yours is one of them, you are likely missing out on attracting new customers, retaining existing clients and otherwise growing your organization. Because, according to Statista, almost one in three U.S. consumers with Internet access search for local businesses daily. A further 16% look for this type of information several times each week.

DOVER AIR FORCE BASE, Del. -- Representatives from the T-Mobile customer discovery team met with Team Dover Airmen to discuss new and innovative ways to enhance mission effectiveness and accelerate meaningful change on Dover Air Force Base, Delaware, Oct. 20, 2021.

During the event, the T-Mobile team discussed their capabilities and demonstrated new technologies which are ready off-the-shelf or currently in development.

“The T-Mobile visit was an engagement aimed to educate Dover Airmen and identify areas where new technologies can potentially advance Dover AFB’s rapid global mobility mission,” said Maj. James Nichol, 436th Airlift Wing chief of innovation at Bedrock Innovation Lab.

Image: Photo By Senior Airman Marco Gomez | Team Dover Airmen and the T-Mobile customer discovery team tour the Isochronal Maintenance Dock on Dover Air Force Base, Delaware, Oct. 20, 2021. The T-Mobile team met with Dover AFB Airmen to discuss new innovative ways to enhance mission effectiveness and accelerate change in meaningful ways. (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Marco A. Gomez) 

In the 20 months since the COVID-19 pandemic began, technological innovations have gone from futuristic to familiar. These days it’s hard to be out in the world without encountering QR-coded menus or supplying digital vaccine passports.

As the tourism industry—which logged a billion fewer international arrivals in 2020 than 2019—sputters back to life, masks may begin to disappear, but many pandemic-era tech tools will continue to factor into your trips.

Image: A robot designed to help passengers navigate Seoul’s Incheon International Airport was introduced in 2018. As the COVID-19 pandemic recedes, surprising travel technologies will continue to influence our journeys PHOTOGRAPH BY BRUNO ARBESU, REA/REDUX

In Part I of this series, readers met Geoff Chapin, the founder of C-Combinator, a climate-tech startup that removes rotting, methane-emitting seaweed from Caribbean beaches and turns it into sustainable products. Chapin considered funding his company through traditional venture capital, but ultimately took other routes.

Image: VC has cancelled itself. IJ - https://observer.com

“Venture capital funding breaks records—and fuels bubble concerns.” Headlines like these abound these days. When reading the tech press, you would think that entrepreneurs are drowning in capital. But while this may be true in some sectors, the reality for the vast majority of founders throughout America is very different.

Image: Stephen Monroe/Unsplash; Carter PapeWikimedia Commons

No two entrepreneurs have the same story. Some were born with “the gene,” and started lemonade stands early. Others found it later in life and leveraged the success and connections they built earlier in their careers to start new ventures. Then there are those who, like myself, started their first businesses out of their college dorm rooms.  

Although aspiring entrepreneurs can take classes in business administration, accounting, and other essential disciplines, many of the most important lessons are learned on the job -- trying and failing and trying again.

As Merck and regulators around the world race to get molnupiravir approved for the treatment of COVID-19  - a U.S. Food and Drug Administration expert panel will deliberate its fate on November 30 – it may be important to look at just how this potential “miracle drug” came to be.

Emory University has a program called DRIVE LLC, which stands for Drug Innovation Ventures at Emory. It operates as a not-for-profit biotech company and is dedicated to developing drugs and vaccines that have limited applications. In March 2020, DRIVE partnered with Ridgeback Biotherapeutics to further develop a promising oral COVID-19 treatment (then known as EIDD-2801). Two months later, Merck joined the development party when it entered into a collaborative agreement with Ridgeback to develop the drug that would later become known as molnupiravir.

As distributed teams become more common, the question for those planning for the next crisis is what to do should the grid go down, as we saw over several days in Texas in February 2021, or should digital workflow tools become suddenly unavailable, as we saw when Facebook and its related platforms were offline for several hours in October 2021. Such outages, on a massive scale, are what keep preparedness and response professionals awake at night. Their experience reveals that, whether your concern is a disruption of hours, weeks, or months, there are practical, prudent steps to take now that can enhance day-to-day business performance while fostering robustness and resilience. The authors present several steps within the following three pillars of crisis readiness: technology, structure and processes, and most important, humanity.

Starting and building a company is all about leadership – formulating an idea, building a unique plan based on vision and experience, and forging a path over and through all obstacles. Yet the image of leadership in business is at an all-time low, according to national leadership experts, considering the political debacles, recent business scandals, and executive fraud cases.

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The COVID pandemic has changed many aspects of doing businesses across the globe, with many companies moving to virtual meetings and events and enabling numerous employees to telework. And in a time when workers can do their job from most anywhere, Maryland is well positioned to benefit from this growing trend.

Offering an outstanding quality of life, a strategic location, and significant upgrades in broadband service across the state, Maryland is making it easy to achieve the work-life balance.

Image: https://www.expansionsolutionsmagazine.com

It used to be that digital innovation didn’t need to be a cornerstone of every brand’s business strategy. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, that changed almost overnight. Many businesses were forced to try and implement a digital-first strategy, which left them struggling to understand how to effectively use the digital tools they adopted. 

Clean energy programs at Temple, Drexel and Penn all likely gave Philadelphia a boost in the rankings.

Dr. Fang Liangzhou, Vice President and CMO of Huawei Digital Power, spoke at COP26 today. At the session "System Change and Climate Innovation in the Technology Industry" hosted by the UNFCCC Global Innovation Hub, Fang virtually delivered a keynote address on "Building a Low-Carbon Smart Society." Fang described how Huawei Digital Power integrates digital and power electronics technologies to help industries save energy and reduce emissions from both power generation and consumption. Digitalization of power can cut waste in energy consumption, sharply boost power generation from renewables, and make transportation and cities green. Fang called for joint efforts to build a low carbon smart society together.

Image: Fang Liangzhou, Vice President and CMO of Huawei Digital Power, delivered a speech at COP26