An entrepreneur is someone who comes up with ideas, products or services to solve problems for the world. The path of entrepreneurship is built differently for every individual, but all successful entrepreneurs need to be prepared for failure and criticism, and they should constantly be learning and improving themselves.

Being a 21st-century entrepreneur is a demanding and exciting challenge. This is because the world is growing and changing so rapidly that it requires innovative thinking skills of an entrepreneur to stay ahead of their competitors. The 21st-century entrepreneur has to be highly organized and flexible. This means that a 21st-century entrepreneur is constantly thinking and planning. One way to do this is by creating and maintaining effective business plans. Furthermore, a good entrepreneur should also have excellent communication skills, leadership capability and the ability to lead others effectively.

TOKYO—As the world’s two biggest economies, the U.S. and China send scores of startups to the public markets—some at jaw-dropping valuations—yet Japan, at No. 3, has been lagging far behind.

The Japanese government wants to kick its startup scene into higher gear, but it won’t be easy.

The country’s star initial public offering in technology this year, and one of the biggest in recent years, is online marketing-tool developer Plaid Co., whose opening trade on Dec. 18 gave it a valuation of around $1.1 billion. Meanwhile, Airbnb Inc. opened this month at a valuation of $102 billion, the largest in a series of blockbuster U.S. listings, while China’s JD Health International Inc. made its debut in Hong Kong at a market capitalization of roughly $38 billion, capping a bumper year for IPOs there.

The American dream! Popularized by historian James Truslow Adams in his 1931 book The Epic of America, the term described “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone.” After World War II, the American dream evolved into homeownership, a happy family and summer vacations. Some people even aspired to get a degree. The G.I. Bill helped make the dream possible. That generation, known as the baby boomers, expected their children to do even better.

Is Texas the new Silicon Valley? This month Oracle said it was moving its headquarters to Austin after more than 40 years in California. Hewlett Packard Enterprise, descended from the Valley’s original garage start-up, is off to Houston. Elon Musk has moved to Texas, too, and has hinted that Tesla, the car company he co-founded and leads, may also relocate.

Or could Miami become the next Silicon Valley? That’s what Keith Rabois, a prominent Bay Area investor, has been proclaiming since his recent move there from San Francisco. In contrast to the anti-tech sentiment roiling San Francisco — whose Board of Supervisors recently passed a resolution condemning the renaming of the city’s general hospital after Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg — Mayor Francis Suarez of Miami has turned his Twitter feed into a nonstop pitch for tech entrepreneurs and investors to relocate to his city.

SACRAMENTO — Fed-up Californians have been trading their cramped, pricey apartments for affordable living in cheaper states for decades. Now, California’s businesses are making similar calculations after a monthslong remote work experiment triggered by the pandemic.

Back-to-back moves of iconic Silicon Valley firms' headquarters to Texas are raising fresh concerns about California's standing in the innovation economy. Business leaders worry that the successful shift to remote work — and the ability of many jobs to be performed from anywhere — will drive yet more companies out of the notoriously high-cost state.

On December 1st, Hewlett-Packard–which has been headquartered in Silicon Valley since 1939–announced that its corporate headquarters would move to Houston. On May 9, Elon Musk announced that Tesla was moving its headquarters to “either Texas or Nevada,” but on December 7, he revealed that he personally had moved to Austin. On December 11, Oracle announced that it was also moving its headquarters to Austin.

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COVID-19 has created a massive humanitarian challenge: millions ill and hundreds of thousands of lives lost; soaring unemployment rates in the world’s most robust economies; food banks stretched beyond capacity; governments straining to deliver critical services. The pandemic is also a challenge for businesses—and their CEOs—unlike any they have ever faced, forcing an abrupt dislocation of how employees work, how customers behave, how supply chains function, and even what ultimately constitutes business performance.

In its now-infamous "Black Swan" letter of warning to startup founders and CEOs in March about the coronavirus and its potential impact on the industry, Sequoia got a lot right about the pandemic.

Businesses would cut spending and headcount to offset a drop in sales. Supply chains would be disrupted. The Federal Reserve would slash rates. Software companies would be less exposed than, say, hardware companies.

But the storied VC firm was off on one count: that private financing "could soften significantly." With the benefit of hindsight and data, we now know that 2020 was in many respects a standout year for venture capital in the US.

Image: https://pitchbook.com

As health agencies across the US rush to distribute the first round of COVID-19 vaccines, a new online tool aims to track their progress.

A dashboard hosted by Johns Hopkins University shows how many doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered across the US, according to publicly available data published by state health agencies and aggregated by the Centers for Civic Impact.

Image: https://www.businessinsider.com

Welcome to COVID Questions, TIME’s advice column. We’re trying to make living through the pandemic a little easier, with expert-backed answers to your toughest coronavirus-related dilemmas. While we can’t and don’t offer medical or legal advice—those questions should go to your doctor or lawyer—we hope this column will help you sort through this stressful and confusing time. Got a question? Write to us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

A mass exodus has commenced in Silicon Valley. Last month alone, Oracle Corporation, Tesla Inc., Charles Schwab Corporation, SpaceX and Hewlett-Packard Company announced relocation plans. Amid the pandemic, companies and their employees realized that remote work offered an opportunity to improve their competitiveness and quality of life elsewhere. But they are not coming to Canada. Instead, they are moving to jurisdictions that actively recruited their entrepreneurs and employees.

Image: Chris Albinson is the Founder & Managing Director of BreakawayGrowth, a Venture capital firm with investments in Canada and the U.S. HANDOUT - https://www.theglobeandmail.com

Most of us are familiar with the concept of being an entrepreneur. It can be a challenging path, and understandably, not everyone wants to take on that responsibility. But what if we could encourage that entrepreneurial spirit in our employees? The situation is potentially win-win – for the employee and for the company.

As an advisor to many entrepreneurs, I still hear frequently the irrational exuberance that crowdfunding is the quick alternative for startups that are passed over by overly demanding angels or venture capital investors. In reality, crowdfunding has become a major startup funding vehicle, expected to reach $114 billion globally by 2021, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy.

Over the past year, the humble blank-check IPO has risen from a disreputable relic of the 1980s into a bona fide financial trend. And biotech has been among the most ardent practitioners.

In 2020, 33 health care-focused blank-check firms have gone public, raising $6.3 billion from investors, according to SPAC Research. That outstrips the roughly $4 billion drug companies raised through traditional IPOs in all of 2019 (but falls well short of the $16 billion raised by biotech IPOs in 2020). As of Dec. 21, another eight health care blank-check firms are lined up to go public, and if they succeed, they’d add $1.4 billion more to the year’s tally.

In normal times organizations face numerous uncertainties of varying consequence. Managers deal with challenges by relying on established structures and processes. These are designed to reduce uncertainty and support calculated bets to manage the residual risks. In a serious crisis, however, uncertainty can reach extreme levels, and the normal way of working becomes overstrained. At such times traditional management operating models rarely prove adequate, and organizations with inadequate processes can quickly find themselves facing existential threats.

Happy Holidays from Rich Bendis and the Innovation America Team!

With lockdowns closing schools and offices around the world, it’s become commonplace to see dogs and kids barge into business meetings as the boundaries between work and life have blurred. A seamless balance is impossible. We have to do both – work plus managing our lives, our spouses, kids, pets and home – all at once.

Doing both depends on our ability to adopt a paradox mindset, to consider the world with a “both/and” approach instead of an “either/or” one. In times like these, times of change, uncertainty and scarcity, we need to do many tasks together. And people need to feel comfort with discomfort – these hurdles aren’t going away.

Too many companies don’t take the 360-degree feedback process seriously enough. Often it goes like this: After shopping around and deciding on a 360-degree feedback instrument, talent professionals administer it to the colleagues of each participant. After aggregating the data, those same professionals send a summary report to the leader, who then reads through the report with some interest and puts it away. Sometimes, it’s never discussed again.

Every year, marketers are faced with new and exciting challenges to somehow, some way, get our attention—and not only get our attention, but hold it, then somehow use it to persuade us into action. Buy our product! Love our brand! Just like us, please like us.

This is a tough mission in the best of times, but 2020 has been a year when a pandemic, a cultural reckoning with systemic racism, and an American presidential election have made our already thin patience with advertising and other brand shenanigans even slimmer. But brands are still a part of our culture, and the best are able to use that status to contribute something meaningful to either the culture, our lives, or both. Or at least make us laugh and temporarily forget the hell of 2020, even if just for 30 seconds at a time.

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