As the business economy is expected to rebound from the pandemic, many entrepreneurs are thinking that life will soon get easier, and their opportunity can only grow. In reality, the business world gets tougher every day, with new entrants, new technology, and competitors more easily entering the fray from around the globe.

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With COVID-19 cases spiking, the President of the United States tweeting false information about voting, and tens of millions of us casting ballots by mail for the first time, it’s already turning out to be a wild and woolly election season. But don’t worry, we’ve got your back. TIME staff has assembled a list of some of your most pressing questions about how to vote in-person and by mail, how to navigate the process amidst a pandemic, and what to do if the unexpected happens in this ever-so-unexpected year.

Image: Illustrations by Molly Jacques for TIME

BOSTON, Oct. 21, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- RA Capital Management, LP (“RA Capital”) has held a first and final closing of its second venture fund, RA Capital Nexus Fund II, L.P. (“Nexus II”), raising $461 million. 

“We deeply appreciate the continued support of our existing limited partners and new institutions in this endeavor. Together, we share in the optimism that there is so much more good that biotechnology can do for humanity,” said RA Capital co-founder and Portfolio Manager Rajeev Shah.

The additional capital increases RA Capital’s private deal capacity to over $1.3 billion and total assets under management to approximately $6.8 billion. RA Capital’s inaugural venture fund, RA Capital Nexus Fund, L.P. (“Nexus I”) closed in July 2019 with approximately $300 million of capital. In its first 15 months, Nexus I has called 80% of its capital, invested across 18 distinct therapeutic areas, and funded 59 companies, 15 of which have IPO’d or have been acquired.

Similar to Nexus I, Nexus II is expected to participate in substantially all investments in private companies made by RA Capital from its evergreen fund, which invests per the firm’s primary investment strategy in both public and private biotech companies.

SAN FRANCISCO — For years, they weren’t much to look at. The Silicon Valley tech companies famously started in garages eventually upgraded to low, beige office parks that bloated outward as more employees were hired. Bland on the outside, lucrative and increasingly crammed with college-like perks on the inside, they were the standard tech headquarters for years.

Over the past decade, however, tech giants have invested in real estate and proper headquarters. The kind of buildings and campuses that draw attention and lure thousands of employees to commute five days a week to work inside their open floor plans. Generous on-site benefits give those workers little reason to leave for a meal, a trip to the bank or even to get dry cleaning.

Image: (Adela Kang for The Washington Post)

The last time I met with Ivy Ross was at the top-secret design lab that she built for Google, where the company has given technology a soft, living room-friendly touch with products such as the cloth-covered Nest Mini assistant and the knit-wrapped Pixel phones. But today, as the two of us connect on Zoom from our respective homes, it’s clear a lot has changed during this year of COVID-19.

Ross just hosted a small, socially distanced backyard wedding for her daughter and reports going into the lab just three to four times in the last several months when absolutely essential. “I’m staying creative from a laptop . . .we are 98% productive,” says Ross of her team. “We’re making physical stuff, which is really hard. Sometimes there’s no substitute; we have to be around a table holding something.”

Image: Ivy Ross (Photo: Google)

“More than 50% of our founders still are in their current jobs,” said John Vrionis, co-founder of seed-stage fund Unusual Ventures.

The fund, which closed a $400 million investment vehicle in November 2019, has noticed that more and more startup employees are thinking about entrepreneurship as the pandemic has shown how much room there is for new innovation. To gain a competitive advantage, Unusual is investing small checks into founders before they’re full-time.

For those closely watching the development of Covid-19 vaccines, Thursday is a crucial date.

Nothing extraordinary is expected to happen when a committee of outside experts — known as the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, or VRBPAC — meets for the first time to consider Covid-19 vaccines.

Image: Paul Offit, a professor of pediatrics and well-known vaccines advocate, is a member of the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, or VRBPAC. MATT ROURKE/AP

Change is often driven by necessity, and in the short time since the outbreak of Covid-19, we have witnessed the potential of technology to transform healthcare delivery and save lives.  From patient appointments using online chat services, to AI-powered robots protecting healthcare workers by delivering medicine in Covid-19 surge clinics; and rapid remote analysis of cardiac images helping with the triage of high-risk patients*.  

The task ahead is to make sure that we don’t forget the value and impact of what we have seen technology, and particularly AI can do — and the resulting benefits of easing the ongoing pressure on healthcare providers, while giving patients the best possible chance of living a healthy life. 

Tech entrepreneurs of color often struggle to attract early-stage funding for their startups. But that may be starting to change—thanks in part to investors of color.

Professional networks have formed in cities such as Chicago, Detroit and Miami in recent months to identify and recruit Black, Latino and other angel investors of color to fund tech entrepreneurs. At the same time, venture firms founded by women as well as racial and ethnic minorities are growing their profiles in raising funds to inject capital into startups.

Every dark cloud has a silver lining. Driven by the current pandemic, smart entrepreneurs of all ages are jumping into the fray with new ideas, new recovery strategies, and discarding outmoded business models. I see it most in the newest generation of entrepreneurs (Gen-Y), who were shocked out of entitlement into action by an economic downturn.

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TOPEKA, Kan. (WIBW) - Topeka’s new animal health accelerator program is aiming to bring innovative startups from around the world to Kansas.

Companies from Australia, Spain, the United Kingdom and several U.S. states are vying to be the first in the new Plug and Play Topeka campus. The business accelerator pairs Silicon Valley technology with Kansas' research, development and startup entrepreneurs.

“This is a truly great day for Topeka and the Animal Health Corridor," said Katrin Bridges, SVP of Innovation for Go Topeka. "We are now a part of a global network of innovators.”

Image: https://www.wibw.com - from video

America’s long-term economic growth demands a stepped-up commitment to promoting the innovation impact of the nation’s top-tier universities and otherresearch institutions.

For research institutions themselves, this commitment means prioritizing research, empowering great researchers, building efficient and outcomes-focused technology transfer operations, instilling cultures of innovation and entrepreneurship, and engaging with surrounding business and innovation communities. For America as a whole, it means funding more research resources and paying more attention to the worldwide competition for human talent, including high-skilled immigrants.

In the first half of 2020 we have witnessed how fragile and exposed our global systems and structures are to a major global crisis. As we come to terms with the global pandemic and look to the future, we have an opportunity for a global reset — to build a better, greener, and more resilient and inclusive future. Innovation, new technologies, and scientific discoveries are critical components in this reset.

Brexit White Paper

Introduction

The UK formally left the EU on 31^st January  2020 and the transition period, as set out in the withdrawal agreement, will come to an end on 31^st December  2020. During this transition period the UK has continued to remain under EU pharmaceutical law.

From 1^st January 2021 the UK will be able to adopt an independent regulatory framework with the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) positioned as the stand-alone regulator for medicines and medical devices.

Negotiations between the EU and UK are still ongoing to define the future relationship and with only a matter of months left before the end of the transition period there has been no formal agreement. For the pharmaceutical industry this presents numerous challenges as companies prepare to continue supply of medicines that comply with new legislation. The preferred outcome for many within the industry will be to implement a mutual recognition agreement for areas such as GMP certification, batch testing, etc. between the UK and EU.  It is unclear at this stage if an encompassing mutual recognition agreement is achievable so all involved parties should be preparing for a ‘no deal’ scenario and review existing guidance to understand risk exposure and mitigating actions.

One of the biggest misunderstandings of how entrepreneurship works is to assume recessions immediately spark new companies. They usually don’t. But this may be one more way 2020 is unlike no other.

The most important economic role that recessions play is to cull underperforming firms and industries. We do want workers to take the painful steps to transition out of dying sectors and into growth ones — though they likely need more support to get there. Though we do see big lumbering giants call it quits during economic downturns (like, say retail chains), recessions are particularly brutal to smaller firms.

The American economy is on a decades-long aging toward larger and older firms. Entrepreneurship has been declining for decades and recessions are typically unkind to the new and the small.

When it comes to the economy as a whole, describing a slowdown is the norm as the COVID-19 pandemic continues. In venture capital, however, it’s picking up. VC investment dollars hit a seven-quarter high in the U.S. in the third quarter of 2020: A total of $36.5 billion was invested in U.S. tech and healthcare companies, according to data from the MoneyTree Report by PwC/CB Insights. That’s up 30% from the second quarter. The total number of deals rose to 1,461 investments in companies, up 1% over the prior quarter.

It’s the second straight quarter of growth, indicating that a slowdown toward the end of March as the pandemic set in didn’t become the norm.

Image: Whitebox's Baltimore team inside its Curtis Bay HQ. (Courtesy photo)

Most of the time, I’m all about providing encouragement and inspiration to entrepreneurs. They need it and they deserve it, because entrepreneurs are the lifeblood of our economy. But every so often, I try to give them a reality check, just to keep their feet on the ground and their nose to the grindstone.

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When Fast Company first appeared in 1995 declaring that “Work is Personal,” the workplace looked vastly different than it does today. Many of the changes mirror the tech advances of the past two and a half decades  (Slack replaced email which replaced faxes, for example). But the real workplace evolution has been in making work more personal—for both better and worse.

Companies aren’t made up of robots (yet!); they are made of people. Some of the best changes over the past 25 years have been in recognizing employees’ humanity: from the rise of Diversity and Inclusion efforts, to efforts to reduce gender pay gap, to more flexible work, and the #MeToo movement.

IWhen it comes to interviewing advice, there’s plenty to go around for hiring managers. We’ve certainly covered our fair share here on the Review — none more popular than last year's 40 Favorite Interview Questions from Some of the Sharpest Folks We Know.

Since we published this guide, it’s racked up hundreds of thousands of views and received tons of wonderfully-kind feedback, turning into something of a staple for interviewers prepping to dig in with a candidate. We were thrilled to see that getting folks to share their best interview questions — and crucially, why they ask it and what makes for a good answer — seemed to strike a chord. It confirmed our hunch that despite the wealth of content around crafting the right questions, there’s still a hunger for these resources to keep your hiring skills top-notch.

Sixty years ago a dozen nations, including arch-rivals the United States and the Soviet Union, agreed to preserve the Antarctic continent as a place of peace, research and conservation. Commercial exploitation of its resources and its animals was forbidden. Yet much of the ocean that surrounds the territory does not have the same protections.

This will be up for discussion during a virtual meeting of the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) from 22-30 October. The Convention is meeting to discuss the region’s future and will decide whether or not it’s time to give some of the most biodiverse seas around Antarctica the same defenses as the land itself.