Recently, my business partner and I were discussing how to pivot — where we needed to focus our time and where we might need to leverage others. This got me thinking about entrepreneurship and the many misconceptions that exist about entrepreneurship. While being your own boss definitely has its advantages, it’s also a lot of work.

The words "entrepreneur" and "entrepreneurship" have become glorified terms. They're words associated with building your life on your own terms, setting your own schedule, being your own boss and doing work you love. All these things are true. However, there are some myths and misconceptions about entrepreneurship that I believe are important to dispel for aspiring entrepreneurs:

AstraZeneca said its vaccine candidate was up to 90 percent effective, suggesting that the world could eventually have at least three working vaccines. At the same time, the virus is accelerating across the U.S., and officials are imposing new restrictions to flatten the curve.

Image: A drive-through testing site in Oakland, Calif., on Thursday.Credit...Jim Wilson/The New York Times

SINGAPORE: COVID-19 has disrupted markets and economies around the world. Where this is disruption, however, there is also opportunity - and venture capital is helping tech firms in their journey to longevity.

Livspace is an e-commerce platform that brings together interior designers, contractors and vendors to help customers plan their home renovation in one place.

It is present in six major cities in India, as well as in Singapore. From the start, its founders aimed to disrupt a traditional business model.

SINGAPORE — Going public is expected to the be the main exit road for most start-ups in the near term as corporations are likely to put their merger and acquisition plans on hold due to the coronavirus pandemic, according to the CEO of Vertex Holdings.

Vertex is the venture capital arm of Singapore state investor Temasek Holdings and has more than $3 billion in assets under management as well as over 200 active portfolio companies. It has six network funds that invest in early-stage tech start-ups, health care start-ups and growth-stage companies spanning across places like the U.S., China, Israel, Southeast Asia and India.

Many promising new ventures struggle to get off the ground because their founders fail to cultivate a sense of collective ownership — a feeling that the venture idea is “ours,” and not just the founder’s — in their teams. When teams feel ownership of an idea, they are more collaborative, they take more risks, and they make more personal sacrifices to support the shared goal — and when there’s a lack of ownership, team members quickly become demotivated and unproductive. So what can founders do to foster that all-important sense of collective ownership?

From health care to finance, education to navigating space, agriculture to climate research, and from Hollywood to the Pentagon, innovation has been America’s lifeblood. Innovation is new or improved art, products, processes, services, business models, or technologies. In the 1950s, the United States invested heavily in revolutionary technology in order to block Soviet aggression. The internet, GPS, weather forecasting and space utilities all spread information globally and averted nuclear warfare, exposed the lies of authoritarian regimes, possibly ended the Cold War, and ushered in the digital age. 

Finally, we are nearing the end of the 2020 tunnel and seeing encouraging glimmers of light. While the pandemic is not yet under control, we do have promising vaccine news as 2021 approaches, and many countries in the Asia-Pacific region have returned to on-site work. We see stabilization in US government after months of uncertainty, and the beginning of commitment and action to address longstanding racial and social justice inequities. At a more granular level, these months of operating in survival mode have provided valuable insight into how organizations and people can truly move forward from this disruption and position themselves to navigate the future disruptions that are bound to occur. In short, we see a path toward thriving, not merely surviving.

European consumers discover the web via Google and use Chrome or web browsers from US firms. European consumers access mobile and apps through Apple and Google on Asian smartphones or iPhones. European consumers spend a massive amount of time interacting socially or getting entertained by the likes of Facebook, Google, Netflix, Snap, or TikTok. European consumers shop a lot on Amazon and pay through Mastercard or Visa.

European publishers and advertisers depend on Facebook and Google. European technology teams depend on US megaclouds and infrastructure. European startups depend on US investors or end up being acquired by US firms. European firms are slower to drive enterprisewide transformation than their US or Chinese counterparts.

American agribusiness Cargill announced plans Thursday to invest in Seventure Partners’ Health for Life Capital II fund to boost its presence in the microbiome and life sciences research and development space.

The venture capital fund invests in companies involved with digital technologies and life sciences, as well as firms focusing on microbiome solutions for health and nutrition. Several prominent companies, including Danone, Novartis, and Lesaffre, have already become investors.

I had a neat look into the world of mental health startup fundraising planned for this week, but after being slow-motion carpet-bombed by S-1s, that is now shoved off to Monday and we have to pause and talk about COVID-19.

The pandemic has been the most animating force for startups and venture capital in 2020, discounting the slow movement of global business into the digital realm. But COVID did more than that, as we all know. It crashed some companies as assuredly as it gave others a boost. For every Peloton there is probably a Toast, in other words.

Image: Image Credits: Nigel Sussman

Every year, TIME highlights inventions that are making the world better, smarter and even a bit more fun. (See last year’s list here.) To assemble our 2020 list, we solicited nominations both from our editors and correspondents around the world, and through an online application process. We then evaluated each contender on key factors, including originality, creativity, effectiveness, ambition and impact.

Image: Photographs by Jessica Pettway for TIME; Prop styling by Stephanie L. Yeh

Finding your sweet spot as an entrepreneur needs to start with a meaningful personal purpose that is also a business opportunity. Some people are so passionate about a cause that they forget to consider the lack of business potential, while others are so enamored with profit that they jeopardize their ethics. Both ends of this spectrum fail to bring long-term satisfaction or success.

Many entrepreneurs are finding their “secret sauce” these days by combining a strong purpose with a good business opportunity. For example, the handmade-item platform Etsy sponsors free entrepreneurship courses for underemployed and unemployed people, including assistance in setting up a store on Etsy, thus adding more artists and artisan sellers to their platform.

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com

INDIANAPOLIS - BioCrossroads has released a report it says highlights the technology transfer efforts among Indiana's top research universities. The state's life sciences initiative says the report also reveals the increasing role of incubators and graduation facilities at research universities.

Patricia Martin, chief executive officer of BioCrossroads, says the state's three R1 research institutions, Indiana University, Purdue University, and the University of Notre Dame, give Indiana "critical assets necessary to drive innovation."

There are undeniable perks to entrepreneurship. Whether you are just beginning to nurse an idea through the nascent stages of a business or you’ve already launched your own endeavor, it’s important to recognize that entrepreneurship is also really hard. 

Consider this quote from Jeff Bezos, “All overnight success takes about 10 years.” Right. Even those entrepreneurs that seemed to have caught lightning in a bottle labored for years to get their business off the ground and thriving. Before you decide to rethink the risk vs. reward of launching a start-up, let’s unpack a few important truths that may help set a more realistic (and successful!) course. 

World Health Organization panel is now recommending against the use of the antiviral remdesivir in hospitalized Covid-19 patients, saying there is no evidence that the drug — which U.S. regulators have approved for the treatment of the coronavirus — improves mortality.

In a revised guidance issued Thursday night, the WHO’s Guideline Development Group said that it now has a “weak or conditional recommendation against” using remdesivir in hospitalized patients because of clinical trial data that showed the drug did not increase survival. The group’s review also found the drug had no meaningful effect on whether patients would need to be put on ventilators.

Image: A vial of remdesivir GILEAD SCIENCES VIA AP

With the advent of COVID-19 more and more Americans are ever more reliant on the internet. From working from home to online shopping to even taking classes, or just simply staying connected the internet seems to be the go-to place. But internet users in some states are getting a much better deal than others.

According to the survey by HighSpeedInternet, users in the state of Wyoming on average pay $7.84 Megabits per second (Mbps) making it the most expensive in the USA. While internet users in Rhode Island pay on average $0.63 per Mbps.

The stories we tell about our innovations hold the potential to “make or break” the adoption, success, or failure of innovation initiatives. Yet the techniques, skills, and systems required to successfully communicate innovations — both internally and externally — are often not taught or prioritized among innovation teams.

There is increasing interest in innovation storytelling: the art and science of communicating new product developments, systems improvements, and groundbreaking new thinking. However, there is little empirical evidence to reveal the role storytelling plays in the innovation process.

The Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center was called “2020’s Go-To Data Source” by the magazine. The dashboard, which reported Wednesday the U.S. recorded 250,000 coronavirus deaths, has tracked the spread of coronavirus around the world.

The annual list, which was announced Thursday, recognized 100 groundbreaking inventions that “are making the world better, smarter and even a bit more fun.”

Image: Credit: TIME  

Neil Patel, the co-founder of KISSmetrics and CrazyEgg, is a New York Times bestselling author and is heralded as one of the world’s top marketers and entrepreneurs. Called a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 30 by President Obama and a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 35 by the United Nations, Neil has also helped companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Airbnb, Google, NBC, and Zappos boost their marketing.

Image: https://neilpatel.com/

“You must manage human capital as wisely as financial capital.” This is the exhortation of the influential business book Talent Wins.1 As the authors argue, talent is a critical business input—and companies should deploy analytical rigour to assess, segment, invest in and reallocate human capital, just as they would with financial capital.

In this article, we present the findings of our analysis of talent in the United Kingdom, and show that there is a strong economic case for reskilling current employees or promising new hires. We define reskilling in a broad sense, including both upskilling—advancing workers’ current skills—and retraining, the provision of new skills to enable a change in role.