As the founder and director of two entrepreneurship-focused programs at Stevens Institute of Technology, Launchpad and iSTEM, I have overseen the creation of 12 officially incorporated enterprises, with many more on the way. It took about three years to put our first company together, but now we launch a new company every three months. To maintain this efficiency, we need to identify the right students: the rulebreakers, risk-takers and obsessively passionate – like Kevin Barresi. 

Image: Kevin Barresi, a graduate of Stevens Institute of Technology and the founder of iUbble Source: Eliana Medina

Technology is a relentless rising tide that pushes us to adapt and revise how we live our lives. Whether in communications, mobility, energy, entertainment, health care, work, or even family life…all are being continually transformed by inventions and new ways of being that we often call innovation.

In March 2020, at the very moment I was leading a venture capital executive program right here [in Barcelona] at this fine University, we were hit by a tidal wave. The tidal wave of the Covid 19 pandemic. Like a tidal wave, it was not clear at first how significant or all-pervasive its impact would be. But as the weeks and months passed, as the significance of the changes wrought became clear, we all realized an increased dependence on innovations that had been emerging around us for years, in telecommunications, biotechnology, retail, banking, personal mobility and more.

What were once novel innovations, whether Zoom, home food delivery, or messenger RNA vaccine therapies, became essential utilities of day-to-day existence.

Good morning my dear friends, I trust you are well. It’s the weekend! Here’s hoping you are going to consume more sugar in the next few days than your doctor would approve of. After all, we all die in the end. And on that encouraging note, let’s get to work!

TechCrunch’s recurring coverage of venture capital trends has taken on an increasingly global tilt as the startup market has expanded to fill every geography. Hence our ramping coverage of India’s startup scene, not to mention our increasing focus on the startups coming out of the African continent.

Image: Image Credits: Nigel Sussman

Every startup founder knows implicitly that startup success is a long hard road. Yet we always dream that we are the exception to the rule. So once in a while it’s good to look at some facts to temper our imagination.

I was reading an old article written by marketing guru Seth Godin a while back where he mentions that “it takes about six years of hard work to become an overnight success”. Based on a small sample of household names from Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg, he is an optimist. Here is some data from Wikipedia:

New Enterprise Associates is raising a total of about $7 billion for a pair of funds, one for early-stage startup deals and another for later-stage rounds, according to people familiar with the situation. The effort represents a change to NEA’s longtime strategy of investing out of a single multistage fund.

The firm is looking to raise just under $3 billion for its early-stage strategy, New Enterprise Associates 18 LP, and about $4 billion for NEA 18 Venture Growth Equity LP, the people said. This represents a large step up...

Happy Friday, Term Sheet readers. Finance reporter Anne Sraders here, filling in for Lucinda (she’ll be back in your care on Monday). 

This week VC Twitter has been buzzing about one big announcement: Sequoia Capital, one of the most revered venture capital firms around, is shifting its model and creating The Sequoia Fund, an open-end fund (read: no 10-year fund cycle) for its U.S. and European investments. It will be an overarching fund composed of public stocks that will then feed capital into closed-end sub-funds that will make venture investments, according to the firm’s blog post.  

Several universities have merged in a bid to come up with creative innovation ideas that could assist graduates to curb the issues of unemployment in the country…the universities are aiming at coming up with creative innovative business ideas that will assist bridge the unemployment gap.

Even before the recent pandemic, when more people began working remotely, I noticed the dynamics changing in many workplaces, both between employee interaction with peers, and interactions with customers. People on both sides seem to have a shorter attention span, appear less tolerant, and less interested in building personal relationships related to business.

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com/

Based on my own experience in business, the best results come from a balance of vision and creativity, combined with a clear focus on logical problem solving and results. This balance is rare and often called “whole-brain” thinking, versus the traditional right-brain or left-brain orientation. Recent studies indicate that less than ten percent of business leaders show this balance today.

To launch and scale your business; you need to leverage the right actions, tools and mindset. Actions lead to outcomes, tools increase efficiency and mindset is crucial to overcoming the challenges you’ll encounter along the way. 

But, if you’ve invested in technology to grow your business, you know how confusing - and potentially costly - the process can be. Fortunately, Matt Gartland is here to help. He’s the Co-Founder of SPI Media (the company behind Smart Passive Income), FuseBox and advises several tech startups. Matt is an expert when it comes to operations, finance, pricing, product development, and customer experience as well as empowering marketing and sales. 

IC technology is a fundamental enabler of our 21st century, digital lifestyles. It is the secret sauce behind cutting-edge innovations such as the Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning and cloud computing applications. But it is also an essential component of countless 'everyday' objects. Think of cars, washing machines, smartphones, etc.

Image: The news SSTS program combines imec’s insights in infrastructure, technology and machinery to help the complete IC value chain reduce its ecological footprint.

What inspired you to become an engineer?

I was inspired by seeing problems and how engineering and technology could meaningfully solve them. This was a range of challenges, whether it was finding solutions for threats to human health, advancing energy technology, or changing the paradigms of how businesses compete and grow our economy. It was inspiring to see how engineers and innovators could always seem to come up with a different solution and a way to change how things are done! There are so many ways engineering can serve people. 

Looking at the general history of business, positions such as CIO, CTO and director-level titles are still relatively new. The truth of the matter is, businesses have operated for decades without the presence of technology as we know it today, let alone tech executives to lead the charge. However, enforcing that mindset today is hazardous and could be the silent killer of your business or organization. Non-technical executives often resort to keeping a tech presence distanced from the decision process for various ill-advised reasons. The most common is the idea that "we’ve never needed one before."

In 2017 I published one of my most important investment strategy pieces that I called The Technology Super Cycle.

You can see a 2018 video and article version via that link, where I answer this burning puzzle: why is inflation absent and productivity "hidden?"

The two main solutions to that puzzle are still very relevant to what you see happening in the most important sector of the economy.

In the thesis, I said you had to be a buyer of NVIDIA NVDA for the future they were building with GPU platforms and CUDA stacks of software capabilities that digital engineers, data analysts, and scientists had to have.

Over the past two years, tech execs have been challenged like never before as they guide their companies through the pandemic. The most successful execs drove customer and employee transformations, accelerating creativity and innovation faster than we thought possible. However, a large number of firms fell further behind during the pandemic. 

CHANDLER, AZ — Waymo. Have you taken a ride yet?

The company behind the fully autonomous vehicles has been test-driving people around the Valley for a full year, a significant milestone for the up-and-coming technology.

Sure, some may be hesitant to give autonomous vehicles a try, but ABC15 talked to a mom in Chandler who loves the technology so much that it's now part of her weekly routine.

Image: https://www.abc15.com - From Video

On this week's episode of Elevator Pitch, our panel of investors is done being polite. They go toe-to-toe in battle over businesses they want — and don't have a lot of patience for a group of entrepreneurs who are oddly tight-lipped about the financial details of their company. Watch as a usually mild-mannered Marc Randolph, co-founder of Netflix, snaps and declares their pitch "a complete waste of time."

I’ll admit it. I’m a business school dropout. But as it turns out, my decision to drop out of business school may have been one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. It set me on a path toward paving my own road in the business world by being in the trenches, making mistakes and testing what works and what doesn’t. Had I not dropped out of business school, I might have never founded and built up Pure Green into what it is today.

"The fourth industrial age is here," says Daniel Kraft, a health care futurist and medical doctor. "It's transforming how we get our digital banking done, how we stream movies. But health care is still stuck in the third--or maybe the second--industrial age, with fax machines and CD-ROMs."

Venture capital funds garnered $582.5 billion from exiting their investments through the end of September. The value realized is more than double the $289 billion for all of last year. The average exit value has climbed since 2015, rising to $506 million from $71.1 million during that span.