Tim O’Reilly has a financial incentive to pooh-pooh the traditional VC model, wherein investors gamble on nascent startups in hopes of seeing many times their money back. Bryce Roberts, who is O’Reilly’s longtime investing partner at the early-stage venture firm O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (OATV), now actively steers the partnership away from these riskier investments and into companies around the country that are already generating revenue and don’t necessarily want to be blitzscaled.

Image: Tim O’Reilly  - https://techcrunch.com

Just like that, our internet connection has become an umbilical to the outside world. We now depend on it to do our jobs, to go to school, and to see other people. It is our primary source of entertainment. And we’re using it a lot.

Between January and late March, internet traffic increased by around a quarter in many major cities, according to Cloudflare, a US company that provides network infrastructure to businesses around the world. Demand has skyrocketed for certain online services in particular.

As an advisor to new hardware entrepreneurs, I often hear the myth that a business plan is no longer required to find an investor, if your idea is good enough. You may have heard that venture capitalists in Silicon Valley no longer read business plans. What you don’t realize is these famous investors only deal with entrepreneurs who sold their last company for a $100M dollars or more.

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com

We all make mistakes. Even the most admired and successful leaders have made disastrous leadership mistakes. It's actually one of the best ways to learn, grow and become more effective. At the same time, not everyone is cut out to be in such a dominant position.

One recent and much-publicized example is WeWork's CEO, Adam Neumann. He was with the company since he helped found it in 2010. After WeWork failed to take the startup public, questions were raised about his behavior. Additional spiraling losses and corporate governance occurred. Say what you will about Neumann, but he made the right decision and stepped down.

A new report by the George W. Bush Institute and Opus Faveo Innovation Development recently named Drexel University the most innovative mid-sized research university in the country.

These two organizations — the former an offshoot of the George W. Bush Center that is located on the campus of Southern Methodist University and advocates for leadership, policy and action to solve current issues; the latter an innovation consulting firm with university clients including the University of Texas Dallas, Texas Tech University and the University of Michigan — released these first-of-their-kind rankings as a review of the productivity and influence of colleges and universities across the country. Drexel scored the highest marks of its category.

BALTIMORE (WMAR) — A Johns Hopkins professor recommends rescheduling travel if you can, saying we are still in the thick of this virus.

"We’re in the soup again and we won’t know how deep in the soup we are for another 2-4 weeks," said Johns Hopkins School of Medicine Professor Emeritus William Greenough.

With things reopening, he doesn’t want people to get a false sense of security. The coronavirus is still serious.

"We are going to have a difficult summer. It didn’t go away with the warm weather as we were told it would," said Greenough.

The COVID-19 pandemic has left no one untouched. While effective treatment and a vaccine remain in development, some countries have succeeded in containing the spread of COVID-19, allowing a cautious return to economic life. Even as more businesses open their doors and more people are able to return to work, life may remain indelibly changed.

Entrepreneurs inherently understand that they have to be the initial leader of their startup, but often they don’t have the experience or the training to know where their leadership competencies lie, or how to build a leadership team. For new entrepreneurs, leadership development efforts may be more valuable for achieving startup success than business skills development.

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com

Creative Artists Agency and the Silicon Valley capital firm New Enterprise Associates announced a new investment partnership that aims to support early-stage businesses centered on commerce, content and media.

The two companies formed Connect Ventures, which launches this week with $100 million, with plans to invest up to $400 million. Its initial focus will be on supporting projects in a post-COVID-19 environment.

Image: Creative Artists Agency headquarters in Century City.(Benny Chan / Fotoworks/CAA)

Try, try, try. Fail. And try again until you succeed and achieve your goals. This is hard work. Hard work isn't a one-time thing. It's a series of continuous efforts in a particular time span, with pure dedication and a clear vision of the goal you want to achieve.

For the vast majority of us, nothing in life comes easy. Business is no exception — unfortunately, there is no secret to success beyond motivation and hard work. As Thomas Edison put it, "The three great essentials to achieve anything worthwhile are, first, hard work; second, stick-to-itiveness; third, common sense." These weren’t just words: Edison, one of the most successful inventors and businessmen of all time, famously worked 20 hours per day.

Two hundred and ninety years ago, when the French-Irish economist Richard Cantillon first defined an entrepreneur as anyone who worked for unfixed wages, he noted that the one thing that linked all entrepreneurs—from wealthy merchants to beggars—was the risk they shouldered as the price of independence.

With a barrage of doom and gloom in the media, combined with all sorts of strange information flying around on social media, you could be forgiven for feeling that it’s a terrible time to be an entrepreneur. Maybe you've even considered updating your CV and applying for a few jobs.

I like to think in terms of “first principles” — fundamental ideas that can prove or disprove a theory without needing to rely on opinions or rumors. 

“Never let a crisis go to waste!”, People may say this when facing some sort of significant challenge, and trying to turn it to their advantage. As COVID-19 has become a global crisis, it presents enormous opportunities to some people. In fact, this crisis is no idle time for many entrepreneurs. They are among the first to offer and deliver innovative responses. If some of them act selfishly or wrongly, many others are moving swiftly and creatively to make permanent and valuable changes in the world. Their innovations, technological and otherwise, have alleviated the effects of the crisis; harnessing their best entrepreneurial impulses will help find ways out of it.

Image: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk

Just 1% of venture-funded startup founders are Black, according the Crunchbase startup database. This means Joe Bayen, who runs a small company called Grow Credit, has beaten the odds.

In the wake of Black Lives Matter protests, Bayen got in touch with me to talk about how he wants to inspire other Black entrepreneurs to succeed. He published a Black founder’s guide to raising a seed round in a recent Medium post, and he has also written an essay about personal responsibility versus societal responsibility.

Image: Grow Credit tries to help people establish credit without outrageous rates. Image Credit: Grow Credit

For all the mysteries that remain about the novel coronavirus and the COVID-19 disease it causes, scientists have generated an incredible amount of fine-grained knowledge in a surprisingly short time.

In the graphics that follow, Scientific American presents detailed explanations, current as of mid-June, into how SARS-CoV-2 sneaks inside human cells, makes copies of itself and bursts out to infiltrate many more cells, widening infection. We show how the immune system would normally attempt to neutralize virus particles and how CoV-2 can block that effort. We explain some of the virus's surprising abilities, such as its capacity to proofread new virus copies as they are being made to prevent mutations that could destroy them. And we show how drugs and vaccines might still be able to overcome the intruders. As virologists learn more, we will update these graphics on our Web site (www.scientificamerican.com).

When I was in high school, my dad brought home a copy of Black Enterprise’s annual list of the largest black businesses. I was mesmerized. I decided immediately that I would be an entrepreneur like them. I wanted to create my own company, where I could make the rules and race would not be a factor. What the teenage me didn’t know was that the path I set myself on would set me up for a confrontation with the overwhelmingly white world of venture capital. In 2020, there are far too many obstacles to realizing the dreams of aspiring African-American entrepreneurs.

“I don’t know how you do it.” Whether it comes at the start of a videoconference or a call, this is one of the most frequent comments I hear from clients, colleagues, and even friends these days as we’re doing our usual pre-meeting check ins.

The statement always surprises me. I’m a professor who teaches and a consultant who advises various organizations, now virtually. I am a researcher, engaged with colleagues on several projects. I am a partner, married to a committed working spouse, trying to be creative about having fun dates during lockdown. I am the mom of four children: the oldest is seven; the youngest is just over six months old. When I hear “I don’t know how you do it,” my answer is “I don’t!” — at least not perfectly and sometimes not even well.

AZTechbase offers a wealth of information related to technology companies, people and investors

The Arizona Technology Council, in partnership with the Arizona Commerce Authority, today launched AZTechBase, an online platform that provides a comprehensive listing of companies, people and investors in Arizona’s technology industry. The goal of AZTechBase is to further elevate the state’s technology ecosystem by providing accurate, current datasets and making the data easily accessible to the community.

Image: https://www.aztechbase.com/

Times of crisis create an explosion of opportunities for the companies that are prepared to seize them. COVID-19 is no exception: Indeed, hundreds of pandemic-related innovations have already sprung up globally, fueled by initiatives such as Startups Against Corona in Germany.

Image: https://www.gallup.com

Leslie Lynn Smith didn’t envision leaving her native Detroit, MI, where she spent decades building infrastructure to support equitable entrepreneurial development. But when the opportunity arose to apply her hometown’s hard-won economic lessons to the city’s unofficial Southern cousin, Leslie not only moved to Memphis but also brought along an entire Michigander fleet, including her husband, their adult children, her father and sister, and her business partner. Now serving as the founding president and CEO of Epicenter — the nonprofit hub of the greater Memphis entrepreneurial movement — Leslie and her team increase support to businesses across industries and stages of growth to create a more successful, just and representative local economy.

Image: She’s the founding president and CEO of Epicenter and our newest FACE of Memphis — meet Leslie Lynn Smith!- https://styleblueprint.com