Truth be told, unlike some of my founder peers, I had not invested in other startups when I was a part of Urban Ladder. It’s been only 6 months since I have actively started evaluating early-stage startups and made some promising investments as part of Antler. Nevertheless, as I start my years in venture capital, I want to reflect on my early learnings that are shaping the way I think about this space, my transition, and how I leverage my experience as a founder to now being an investor.

Does your business have a visible positive strategy, or do your customers and employees still see your primary focus as closing more sales and killing competitors? Certainly that has been the strategy of many companies, and has worked in the past, but today’s customers and workers are looking for more. They want relationships, positive experiences, and a win-win for society.

Recruiters reviewing hundreds of resumes for highly coveted roles in private equity and venture capital will often see candidates with backgrounds in banking and investing. This training and experience provides candidates with excellent skills to bring to the role.

However, HBS alumni like Joshua Mbanusi (MBA 2021) and Morgan Sheil (MBA 2021), who came to business school from nonprofit and chemical engineering backgrounds respectively, prove that experience outside of investing can also be highly transferable and valuable to the field. Their stories showcase different pathways into PE/VC as well as the breadth and depth of talent at HBS.

When we think about limited resources in agriculture, water is normally the first that springs to mind. The bad news is that just like water, soil is a finite resource that is fast deteriorating as a result of human activity. The good news: research is providing farmers, landowners and policymakers with new tools to turn the tide.

Digitalisation is a game changer in many sectors – and agriculture is no exception. For years, technological innovations have been helping farmers work more efficiently and sustainably. Now data-driven insights can also guide them to improve the health of soil – the most critical part of successful agriculture.

Nueces county saw its first case of the COVID-19 strain on March 21, 2020.

A little more than a year and a half later, we're still living through the pandemic.

Vaccines to help control the novel coronavirus have been available in the Coastal Bend since January, and new case counts slowly began to trend downward as more people were immunized. However, the Delta variant brought a resurgence in July that is just now beginning to abate.

In my experience mentoring new entrepreneurs and aspiring business leaders, I see far too many who seem to be driven by all the wrong reasons. Everyone seems to espouse extrinsic motivations, such as getting rich, having power, and fulfilling parent dreams, when in fact a focus on satisfying internal interests and desires will likely lead to more success, as well as satisfaction.

Image: Image Credits: Nigel Sussman

The capital market for startups has perhaps never been more attractive than it is today. Not only are venture capitalists raising more capital than ever, but new methods of financing startup activity are maturing. The result is a capital market that is increasingly competitive for startup attention, and business, which may lead to better prices for founders and their startups.

Venture debt is not new, but twists on this model are taking new prominence in how startups pay for their growth, for example.

Image: Image Credits: Nigel Sussman

On the heels of the development of a history-making novel coronavirus vaccine, University of Pennsylvania is investing $100 million into a new center of precision engineering for health-related research.

Penn’s Center for Precision Engineering for Health inside the School of Engineering and Applied Science will be formed over the next several years, the university announced this week. The Center is focusing on precision-engineered biomaterials, Penn Engineering Dean Vijay Kumar told Technical.ly in an email, because they are “key” to vaccines, pharmaceuticals and antibiotics, particularly for personalized medicines.

Life science and healthcare companies have many avenues available to raise capital at various stages, each with its own benefits and considerations. Savvy founders and startup leaders should understand which asset class can offer the best opportunity to advance and support their company’s success. Across all sectors - therapeutics, diagnostics, tools, medical devices and digital health - the approach you take today to create your syndicate of investors will impact all future funding rounds.

Sophie archon Is the founder of Archon immigration law Winner of the “Law Firm of the Year in California for Entrepreneur Immigration Services” in Silicon Valley and the 2019 Global Law Experts Awards. She connects people with businesses and opportunities that expand their lives.

Image: https://californianewstimes.com

Montréal-based healthtech and artificial intelligence (AI) startup Aifred Health today won second place at the final round of the IBM Watson AI XPRIZE competition and will take home a $1 million USD prize for its digital health software.

Aifred Health offers clinical solutions for mental health treatments using AI. The startup’s second-place win comes five years after it entered the XPRIZE competition along with 150 other applicants. Aifred Health was the only Canadian startup to make it to the finals of this global competition.

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Today, EDA announced that 50 organizations — including nonprofits, institutions of higher education, state government agencies, and other entrepreneurship-focused organizations — from 26 states will receive grants totaling $36.5 million to support programs that fuel innovation and tech-based economic development. (Read full press release)

The grants are part of the “Build to Scale” program, which is administered annually by EDA. The program aims to accelerate technology entrepreneurship by increasing inclusive access to business support and startup capital.

Over the past five years, there have been a series of high-profile cases of vehicles misinterpreting the driving environment while using Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems (ADAS). Most recently in July, algorithms inside of Tesla’s TSLA -0.3% Full Self-Driving (FSD) system-initiated slowdowns for the yellowish-moon since sensors were accidentally interpreting the distant orb as a traffic signal. Another blockbuster-yet-slightly-humorous story was when a second Tesla vehicle crashed within a week, but the latter accident was with a parked police vehicle (March, 2021). Or sometimes, as in the cases of Tesla vehicles in Delray Beach (2019) and Williston (2016), the vision system’s miss of a semi-trailer resulted in two separate, unfunny crashes killing both drivers.

As Amazon’s executives took the stage one after another yesterday to introduce the world to the company’s “next big leaps forward,” a sense of deja vu crept up on me. It only grew stronger as the event progressed, with many new Amazon products seeming incredibly familiar. The company has been criticized in the past for borrowing designs of popular goods and selling them for a lot cheaper.

That’s not an uncommon practice of course — massive retailers all over America like Walmart and Costco have offered lower-cost store-brand lines forever. But none of them stage flashy keynotes to tout their products as “innovations.” While Amazon has indeed brought certain unique technologies to the world in the past, this year the company’s “innovations” seemed to be more of it doing what it does best: undercutting the rest.

Entrepreneurs are the people who start and run new businesses. They have a vision for something that doesn't exist yet, and they take action to make it happen. They're not afraid of taking risks or working hard to achieve their goals. Entrepreneurship is about having ideas, taking risks, and turning those ideas into reality through hard work.

The most successful entrepreneurs are the ones who take the most educated and calculated risks. Otherwise, you run the risk of being one of the 60 percent of all startups that fail in their first year of operation in Australia. 

Barbara Schilberg retiring as Managing Director and CEO;
Shahram Hejazi, Ph.D., appointed as Managing Director and CEO

Philadelphia, PA, September 29, 2021 – BioAdvance, a $70 million early-stage life sciences fund with a focus in the mid-Atlantic region, announced today that it has added six new companies to its portfolio in the last 18 months and has made follow-on investments in eight of its existing companies. Combined, these investments represent a commitment of $6.875 million to the success and growth of life science companies in the region. BioAdvance also announced a transition in leadership with long-time Managing Director and CEO Barbara Schilberg retiring and Shahram Hejazi, Ph.D., appointed as incoming Managing Director and CEO effective October 1, 2021.

“Like many investors, when the COVID pandemic began, we focused on helping our existing companies survive the various disruptions to product development and product sales,” said Schilberg, outgoing CEO of BioAdvance. “Within six months, we were able to resume investing in new companies and also have a robust pipeline of opportunities in active diligence.”

Every year, Gallup asks a sample of American adults what might seem to be a rather loaded question: How much do you like your job? The results may surprise you. The portion who say they are “completely satisfied” at work has risen dramatically over the past two decades, from 41 percent in 2001 to 55 percent in 2019. In 2020, despite the fact that millions of Americans had shifted to remote work, 89 percent said they were either “completely” or “somewhat” satisfied.

I teach graduate students who have carefully envisioned their ideal career, many of whom are training to enter jobs in business or government. They find this statistic surprising because, like so many of us, they generally assume that to be satisfied, you must hold your dream job—one where your skills meet your passions, you make good money, and you are excited to get to work each day. No way 89 percent of people have this, right?

In my experience as an employee, up to an executive, in large companies as well as small, I’ve found that people who are consistently negative and complain are a big constraint on productivity, as well as the most difficult management problem that most business leaders face. The challenge is to get negative people to see themselves as part of the problem, rather than the solution.

If you are one of these people, you probably also don’t realize that for you personally, negativity has serious consequences for your mental and physical health, as well as the health of your company. Perhaps you just see it as "venting," and rationalize that by getting your emotions out, you will feel better, and everyone else will finally see you as the victim of the real problem.

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My client, let’s call him Karl, was struggling to motivate his team. Karl came across as mildly stern even when smiling, and his presentational style in team meetings was clinical and measured. One-on-one, Karl was known to be a good listener and thoughtful boss, but in large forums, he tended to freeze, defaulting to offering quick solutions or doubling down on the company line when presented with complicated questions instead of taking time to share his own perspective. The result? His audience felt he was formal and lacked authenticity, and his employees gave him low marks for his ability to inspire.

When running a business, you invariably come across decisions that will define your trajectory. Should you launch a new product? Should you partner or acquire a competitor? Or should you make new hires?

Oftentimes these decisions aren’t black or white, which makes them so hard to make. So how can you best evaluate all the critical decisions you’ll have to make to ensure you’re putting your best foot forward. Here are three questions any entrepreneur should ask to help them think through opportunities.