Your boss has left the organization and you’re named interim replacement. Congrats! Well, sort of. It’s not a given that you’ll become the permanent replacement. What’s the best way to maximize the chances that you’ll get the full-time job? How should you manage the team so they respect your authority and support your candidacy? And how do you handle the stress of feeling like you’re on a constant job interview?

GET Cities is proud to work in Chicago—a city with a growing tech sector, strong academic institutions, and vibrant entrepreneurial and venture ecosystem, where one in three startups are run by women.

Billionaire Warren Buffett encouraged investors to maintain their faith in America's economy and the businesses his Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate owns in a reassuring letter to his shareholders Saturday.

Image: Warren Buffett, Chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. (AP) 

Would you be excited if your boss started a meeting saying: “I want to remind you that you’re a cog in a machine whose primary purpose is to hit our financial targets”?

It’s hard to imagine that you would feel much joy or pride of ownership in your work if your contribution was reduced to your financial output. While this specific wording may be a bit exaggerated, it’s not a far departure from the message that many employees hear on a daily basis.

The IBM Institute for Business Value and Oxford Economics conducted a study called ‘Entrepreneurial India’ which found out that 90% of Indian startups will fail in the first five years of their establishment. 

The study included interviews of 600 startup entrepreneurs of which 300 were Indian; 100 government leaders along with 100 venture capitalists, 1500 leaders of established companies, and 22 educational institutions.

I often say that starting a company is like jumping off a cliff and building an airplane on the way down. It’s a vivid metaphor that contains a lot of truths. First, you’ll need courage and optimism. You have to believe you can pull it off. Next, you’ll need ingenuity. Assembling a plane takes talent and skill, even under calm circumstances. In the chaotic rush of a death- defying plunge, you need agility. You need to react quickly. You need to be calm under pressure. You need to find the plunge exhilarating.

Image: Image credit: Viktor Koen

It's no secret that the venture capital industry is too male-dominated, which is a result of many factors - unconscious biases, stereotypes, the 'motherhood penalty', not recruiting enough candidates from non-traditional paths, and many more.

According to a 2020 report from Women in VC - the world’s largest community for female investors, only 4.9% of VC partners in the U.S. are female. Of that percentage, the majority are still white. Just 0.2% of VC partners are Latinx women and 0.2% are Black women. We need to do more and do better to change this. The diversity numbers for founding women partners also require significant improvement - only 0.8% are women of color, which is less than 1% of all VC partners in the U.S. But, it's not all that grim - this research has found that over the last five years, the number of women-led funds has nearly quadrupled, and there is evidence this rise is accelerating.

Image: https://www.forbes.com

For most entrepreneurs, their current business is not where they intend to stay until they die. At the right time, they all intend to make a graceful exit, and leave while still perceived to be on top of their game. The challenge is how to know and exit gracefully when the right time has come, without trauma to either the company or themselves.

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com

Coming out of the pandemic, if the Biden Administration can hone its economic policies, the United States may see a golden age of entrepreneurship. There are already signs a growing number of students are considering entrepreneurship as a career path.

Gen Z grew up in an era when entrepreneurs were put on pedestals, and business leaders like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos hold a disproportionate mindshare of the U.S. public. Entrepreneurs have a new prestige factor. The number of entrepreneurship programs is exploding, too, and now numbers at more than 250 across the country.

Alexandria Venture Investments Senior Associate, Conley Jones, virtually sits down with Rich Bendis on BioTalk to discuss Venture Trends, Investment Goals, and their National Footprint

A little over 40 years ago, in the waning days of his presidency, Jimmy Carter signed the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act launching a transformation in the pursuit and purpose of science in the United States. Before 1980, federally funded science was largely focused on meeting the Cold War defence needs of a nation in a science and technology race with the Soviet Union.

California aerospace startup Archer Aviation Inc. has a multibillion-dollar vision of flying people around town in autonomous electric helicopter-like vehicles. It doesn’t have revenue or a vehicle ready for passengers, but that hasn’t slowed the three-year-old company.

Image: An electric aircraft made by Archer Aviation, which thanks to a SPAC is going public with a valuation of $2.7 billion. PHOTO: ARCHER AVIATION/REUTERS

COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy persists, even among healthcare workers, and this presents a major barrier to stemming this pandemic, particularly amidst the emergence of more transmissible and potentially more virulent COVID-19 variants.

OSU trustees are aligning their committee structure with a new umbrella office for innovation in the administration of President Kristina Johnson.

Image: The Ohio State seal displayed at an entrance to campus. DOUG BUCHANAN

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) small business programs, which include the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and the Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs, are the largest source of early stage capital for life sciences startups in the United States.  The grant money helps startups accelerate their discoveries and put their discoveries into clinical trials.  The grants awarded are just that, a grant and not a loan; there is no requirement to pay back the money. The NIH grants $1.2 billion dollars every year in the combined SBIR and STTR programs.

The most powerful lever President Joe Biden can pull to catalyze entrepreneurship in the U.S. is immigration reform.

That’s according to two experts from the venture capital community who spoke at a virtual discussion co-hosted by GeekWire and Lane Powell about the Biden administration and the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Image: President Joe Biden looks over his notes as he walks through the Rose Garden of the White House Monday, Feb. 8, 2021, en route to the Residence. (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)

The internet has created an abundance of information and entertainment, and it’s great.

But we don’t yet have perfect ways to find movies, books, music, information and activities that we might like — and especially those that push us out of our comfort zones.

Cracking the best ways to discover new things in our online abundance is a technology challenge — but also a human one. It requires us to want to expose ourselves to ideas and entertainment that don’t necessarily fit with our status quo.

Image: https://www.nytimes.com - Ard Su

According to a recently published report by the British venture capital firm, Atomico, European tech companies raised investments totaling a projected $41 billion in 2020. That makes 2020 a record year for European tech despite the pandemic and all the economic hardship it has caused. Last year alone, the value of European tech companies rose by 46%.

As any family doctor can tell you, the greatest potential for improving health care isn’t discovering new treatments for disease, it’s getting patients to do the things we already know work—exercising, quitting smoking, eating right, and taking medications regularly. Despite astounding success in highly technical areas such as immunotherapy, genome editing, and surgical robotics, medicine has been unable to solve the most basic challenge of helping patients make good decisions for themselves. This challenge lies at the heart of the nation’s most pervasive health problems: diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease, depression, chronic pain, and many cancers.

Georgetown University ranks second among the nation’s colleges and universities in graduating women who go on to lead venture capital firms, according to a report published by the investment company Different Funds. 

The April 2019 report, which was included in a recent MSB press release, compares the backgrounds of general partners at emerging venture capital firms. The report finds close to 4.5% of female general partners are graduates from Georgetown, ranking second behind Harvard University with close to 5% of general partners. The report featured graduates from over 100 different universities with undergraduate programs. 

Image: https://thehoya.com