Back in 2010, PayPal founder (and billionaire) Peter Thiel offered $100,000 to 20 students under the age of 20, luring them to drop out of college and become entrepreneurs. Thiel’s idea was that encouraging teenagers to start thinking big would help them become successful innovators early on, rather than taking on education debt and spending their lives under someone else’s direction. 

Most colleges and universities have now begun classes and brought students to campus all over the country. Several of those institutions, especially large ones, are now seeing outbreaks of COVID-19 among students.

Many of the most visible and serious outbreaks are in the Southeast United States.

As the economy reopens, employers are striving to adopt policies and practices that protect their employees from contracting Covid-19. It’s an especially pressing concern, given that infections continue to surge in many states.

Ideally, employees would proactively report that they, or someone in their immediate environment, is experiencing early symptoms as soon as they suspect they may have been exposed. However, employees may not want to reveal that they are a contagion risk. In spite of CDC and WHO guidelines on reducing stigma, reports of discrimination against Covid-19 survivors and frontline workers abound. This makes suppressing outbreaks early very challenging. It also means that as employers plan re-entry — or manage existing in-person workforces — they must ensure that employees are comfortable disclosing risk.

It might seem incredible that an unsolicited email from a startup founder to an investor they’ve never met could result in a response, let alone a multimillion-dollar deal, but it does happen. I know because we've made investments this way, including one of the most valuable companies in the Storm portfolio, which came to us through a cold email. In this post, I'll explain the qualities that can make a cold email successful—at least for me.

Entrepreneurs who experience success with their first startup are often amazed to realize that the risks and fears of doing it right the second time go up, rather than down. Encores are tough, especially in the high-risk world of startups, yet every entrepreneur I know can’t wait to start over and do it again. Sometimes their haste or ego causes them to ignore basics, and they fall hard.

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com

First came the reprimand: More than 100 first-year students who had gathered in Syracuse University’s quad (above), many without masks, to mingle with new friends on a warm August night had been selfish and reckless. If the university were forced to retreat to an online semester, the blame was on the students, the vice chancellor wrote.

As the world eventually pulls its way out of the Covid-19 crisis, we’re going to see a world changed. Some business are suffering, while others are soaring. What’s it going to take to launch and sustain successful ventures (coming out of garages as well as corporate divisions) over the coming months and years? Many entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and business leaders are also pondering the new directions things will be taking. In the first post in this series, we explored the views of industry innovators on the implications of the Covid-driven rush to digital.

The pandemic has led to some Americans choosing to move to a different state, whether it be for a brief move to quarantine with others or a permanent change. 

Moving marketplace HireAHelper examined which states saw more people moving in than out since the pandemic was declared in March. Using customer data, the company looked at the net gains and losses in the past few months.

It’s a very good time to be a domestic jet-setter on a budget. JetBlue’s fall sale, which took place in early August, featured tickets as low as $20 for trips between New York City and Detroit or Los Angeles to Las Vegas. Alaska Airlines recently offered a buy-one-get-one sale, a deal more familiar to Payless shoe shoppers than air travelers. United Airlines passengers could recently book themselves a round-trip from Newark, N,J. to Ft. Myers, Fla.—a major viral hotspot—for as little as $6, before taxes and fees hiked the price to a staggering—wait for it—$27. All of this, of course, assumes that you’re willing to risk exposure to COVID-19, a virus that has killed more than 170,000 Americans as of this week.

Maryland’s 8th Congressional District has the highest proportion of science and engineering jobs in its workforce out of any district in the United States, according to a new report from the Information Technology Industry Council.

About 4.6% of the jobs in the district — which encompasses parts of Montgomery, Frederick and Carroll County — are in science and engineering, but the report found that the median U.S. district has less than 1% of such jobs.

Many experts will tell you that you can’t succeed as a part-time entrepreneur, as any good startup will require a 100 percent commitment of your time and energy. But not many of us have enough savings to live for a year or more without a salary, fund the startup, and still feed the family. Thus I often recommend that entrepreneurs keep their day job until the startup is producing revenue.

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com

While the widespread shift to remote work hasn’t been without its challenges, it does offer a major silver lining: For many of us, commuting has become a thing of the past. In the United States alone, eliminating the daily commute has saved workers around 89 million hours each week — equivalent to time savings of more than 44.5 million full workdays since the pandemic began! These numbers suggest that working remotely could be a deus ex machina for reclaiming one of our most precious and limited resources: time.

Could anyone have predicted the amazing success that Bill Gates, Anne Wojcicki, Jack Ma, and Byju Raveendran would see when they were just starting their businesses? What does it take to succeed as an early stage entrepreneur? How can one decide whether she has what it takes to become one? In the last couple of years, I have worked with more than 400 early stage entrepreneurs, and I‘ve come to believe that entrepreneurs are made, as opposed to born.

This invitation-only event is free for executive level biotech leaders and is presented by the Association of University Research Parks, AstraZeneca, BioHealth Innovation, Children’s National Health System, Emergent BioSolutions, George Mason University, J.P. Morgan, Johns Hopkins University, Maryland Department of Commerce, Virginia Bio, and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, P.C.

Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, DC set the bar high for biotech innovation. So please join us for our 6th Annual BioHealth Capital Region Forum that will highlight the accomplishments of today and chart our successes of tomorrow.

We are excited to bring you an exceptional line up of speakers to this virtual event!

*Please note that attendees’ name might be recorded if participating in the chat function during the event.

Running a business can feel like running a marathon. With rapidly evolving markets, an entrepreneur must continually anticipate how to offer their users a better product or service. But if you forget to pace yourself, you can slide down the slope to becoming a workaholic. 

REI, the outdoor retailer, just announced that it is selling its brand new, unused 8-acre corporate campus in Bellevue, Washington. In the same August 12 statement, CEO Eric Artz said the company will "lean into remote working as an engrained, supported, and normalized model" for employees.

Image: The REI Seattle campus that shuttered before it opened. REI Co-op

The cells that allow people to smell are a key entryway for the coronavirus, making nose coverings crucial, suggests new research from the Johns Hopkins University.

The nose already had been emerging as a main door for the virus and related respiratory disease. But this research specifically points to the olfactory cells because they have a very large number of receptors on their surface called ACE2 that have been shown to be vulnerable to coronaviruses.

As a mentor to aspiring entrepreneurs, I often feel the frustration of someone trying to build a startup in the wrong place and time, and wrongly attributing their struggle to personal limitations. It may not seem fair, but passion and commitment alone are not enough to make your startup successful – every business needs critical resources and favorable location-specific conditions.

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com

The “before times” seem like a decade ago, don’t they? Those carefree days when hugging friends and shaking hands wasn’t verboten, when we didn’t have to reach for a mask before leaving our homes, or forage for supplies of hand sanitizer. Oh, for the days when social distancing wasn’t part of our vernacular.

Image: ALEX HOGAN/STAT

While the use and application of technology has become near ubiquitous around the world, the actual adoption of new and emerging technologies across most organizations continues to be less than optimal. Due to several barriers, tech adoption at an organizational level is often slow or even nonexistent. This keeps old legacy systems alive and hinders an organization from achieving its full potential efficiently. This lag in adoption has long been a concern for companies but now, amid a pandemic, it’s a crisis.