A recent study by my company HireArt, a Y-Combinator-backed recruiting business, showed that startup employees often get fired or quit because they are not a good fit for the company. Part of the reason why that is the case is that working for a startup can be a bit different than working for larger companies.

Here are five things people should know before trying to work for a startup:

1. Working for a startup means having ownership over your work and doing something that you really believe in, but it also means doing whatever is needed of you.

For most, putting on deodorant is a necessary ritual on par with brushing teeth or washing hands. But for people who produce no armpit stench, it is totally unnecessary.

Despite that, nearly three-quarters of those people still use deodorant daily, a new study finds.

The findings, published January 17 in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology, show just how much a person's daily life is dictated by what's considered normal.

Google, Apple, Facebook, Samsung, and Amazon are in a mad scramble to enter new territory and cover gaps in their strategies.  The one that gets ahead and stays ahead will earn bragging rights in what may be the most significant business battle of all time. These companies are the Fabulous Five.

Let's look at how each company is placed in the following domains: hardware design and manufacturing, software development and integration, consumer retailing, mobile, voice and digital communications, social, search, and entertainment.  Why these?  I believe the company that covers the biggest footprint across these domains and integrates them in a way that touches the most consumers will become the dominant lifestyle company.  Notice I did not call it B2B, B2C, or even the dominant tech company.  The battle being fought here is to become a part of the consumer's life in a way that allows the company to learn key insights that can be monetized.  It is the battle for the consumer subconscious in a way.

When starting a new business there are many aspirations the owner has in store for the future of it. Careful considerations will have to be made in terms of policies, advertising, and business maintenance. While there are several items that require some kind of investment for a start-up business, there are many that it can do without. There are investments that may sound excellent and look good on paper, but can be detrimental to the well-being of the business.

1. Advertising

Some kind of advertising budget needs to be developed for the start-up business. Although funding can be quite limited, advertising is the means in how local customers find you.

Our tech start-up of the week is MySmark, a start-up conceived in Italy and incubated in Ireland. It has developed an online tool that lets consumers express how they feel; it also aggregates this real-time information and feeds it back to marketers.

Pitched as a technology and marketing play, the founders Nicola Farronato and Paolo Panizza started the company in their home country in 2010, but relocated to Dublin because Farronato says the support structures for technology start-ups are superior in Ireland.

Growing entrepreneurs starts young. In the Blue Valley School District, it is starting in an innovative $12.5 million building where the next generation of entrepreneurs, engineers and life science researchers are getting a head start while still in high school.

It's called the Center for Advanced Professional Studies or CAPS. While many high school biology students are learning about DNA from textbooks, there are teens here actually extracting it from the saliva glands of fruit fly larva.

More than 500 Blue Valley juniors and seniors are getting this opportunity in a program that's fast getting national attention Producer Rich Miller takes us inside in the first of two parts about this program.

San Francisco is used to being No. 1 in lots of things. It’s there in technology, and in biotechnology. Every magazine that ever ranked ‘Best Places to Live’ is practically required to put it near the top. Even Bay Area sports teams are riding high, as the Giants won the World Series, the 49ers are heading to the Super Bowl, and Stanford University won the Rose Bowl.

Northern Californians are famously laid-back folks, but watch the hair stand up on the back of their necks if you suggest the biotech momentum is moving to Boston. My recent column about this trend hit a nerve a few months ago, and people were still ranting or raving about it to me a couple weeks ago at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference. Generally speaking, Boston readers loved it. Bay Area readers mostly loathed it.

If you read our recent post on “A Shifting Pharmaceutical Industry”, you know that the emerging ‘niche buster’ model is pushing organizations to become more flexible, nimble and collaborative as the breadth of their product portfolios increases. Despite the changes and challenges, organizations need to intelligently approach how they manage content and minimize the risks of tech transfer.   

How Can Organizations Minimize These Risks and Implement Solutions?

A well-planned strategy and approach to content management, collaboration, information security, and project planning can help organizations proactively confront the challenges and risks of the Technology Transfer process. Tools such as Microsoft SharePoint and similar collaboration platforms provide the following core capabilities to help manage the product lifecycle:  

It’s common for new presidents on campus to announce how impressed they are with the institution and its people, their excitement about learning more from students, faculty and alumni. Substantive ideas? They might be proposed in an inaugural – months after a president has actually taken over. But even then, many presidents don’t exactly break new ground with their addresses.

Purdue University’s new president, Mitch Daniels, released an open letter Friday, a week into his presidency, in which he noted that he very much approves of the Purdue tradition of skipping inaugurals. In the letter, he set out a series of strong criticisms of higher education, as well as various expert opinions on why higher education is in for a period of profound and possibly traumatic change.

The Wikimedia Foundation received a $600,000 grant Friday from the Knight News Challenge competition at the Walter Cronkite School to fund a project that would provide access to Wikipedia from basic mobile phones around the globe.

Wikimedia, along with seven other innovators in the field of mobile technology, were awarded a total of $2.4 million in grants from the mobile portion of the News Challenge to fund ongoing projects using mobile devices.

The projects ranged from enabling radio stations to broadcast over cell phone networks to authenticating media shared by mobile devices. Many focused on improving the quality of life in underdeveloped nations, while others sought to promote community involvement in cities throughout the U.S.

Many 9-to-5-ers dream of being their own bosses, but starting a company is risky business. Over half of all small businesses don’t make it, and the numbers are even worse in the tech industry; a few high-profile success stories dominate the news, but three out of every four startups end up failing.

Despite these statistics, the entrepreneurial spirit is alive and kicking in Silicon Valley and beyond. In fact, some forward-thinking companies are looking to take innovation to the next level by giving employees the chance to launch their own companies while on the job. These new hybrid entrepreneur-employees — or “entre-ployees” — are poised to reshape the face of the tech industry.

Google is using its workers as guinea pigs in an effort to do away with the password as the vulnerable lynchpin that secures everything from social media profiles to bank accounts.

In an upcoming paper from two senior Google employees that work on security – first brought to light by Wired – it is revealed that the company is considering how to make the password something used only rarely. Instead, trials involve people logging in simply by plugging in a compact USB key like the one picture above.

Famed AI researcher and incorrigable singularity forecaster Ray Kurzweil recently shed some more light on what his new job at Google will entail. It seems that he does, indeed, plan to build a prodigious artificial intelligence, which he hopes will understand the world to a much more sophisticated degree than anything built before–or at least that will act as if it does.

Kurzweil’s AI will be designed to analyze the vast quantities of information Google collects and to then serve as a super-intelligent personal assistant. He suggests it could eavesdrop on your every phone conversation and email exchange and then provide interesting and important information before you ever knew you wanted it. It sounds like a scary-smart version of Google Now (see “Google’s Answer to Siri Thinks Ahead”).

Babson sponsored research finds increased demand for entrepreneurial training.

The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) 2012 Global Report estimates that nearly half of the world’s entrepreneurs are between the ages of 25 and 44. The survey also reports that, in all geographic regions surveyed, 25-34 year olds showed the highest rates of entrepreneurial activity.

"Although most of the entrepreneurs tend to fall into the early to mid-career age ranges, we see people participating in entrepreneurship at all ages," commented Donna Kelley, co-author of the report and Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship at Babson College. "Encouragingly, in every part of the world, youth are starting businesses as well as those in their late careers. Given this broad spectrum of participation, some economies may be well-served by looking more closely at certain age groups in order to determine how to encourage and support entrepreneurial activity. Whether it be educated youth in a society unable to find jobs to apply their skills, mid-career workers suddenly unemployed, retirees wanting or needing to continue earning income, or individuals of any age that recognize opportunities and have the desire to be entrepreneurs, people have particular strengths they can leverage at various points in their careers, but they are likely to need different training and resources to effectively engage in entrepreneurial pursuits."

AEBAN (Spain), BAND (Germany), BAN Netherlands, BeBAN (Belgium), France Angels and IBAN (Italy), have signed today the founding act of Business Angels Europe (BAE) – the European Confederation of Angel Investing.

BAE’s strategic goals are:

• to offer the business angel communities across Europe the opportunity to benefit from a strong coordinated voice to represent them to the European institutions,
• to support the development of a favourable fiscal, regulatory and policy environment for the growth of the business angel market across Europe,
• to encourage and enable the growth of national federations and trade associations across Europe,
• to promote professional and ethical standards and best practice among the business angel community including the exchange of experience,
• to be the resource of knowledge, experience and intelligence on the European angel market,
• to encourage the growth of cross-border investment at European and international level,
• to act as the key interface with the global angel community level.

“It is an exciting time for angel investing in Europe and BAE is going to be the hub for it. We want to make our ecosystem more and more effective and professional while keeping the spontaneity and adrenaline that is innate in investing in start ups. We want to make sure that angel investing stays high on the political agenda. Finally we want each country to have its own National Association as only 10 EU countries have one today” says Philippe Gluntz, President of France Angels, who has been elected as President of BAE.

CORRECTION 1/20/2013: An earlier version of this story stated that batteries would be banned from all flights, including within carryon luggage. This is not correct. It appears  that  the ban only affects cargo. This story has been updated to reflect new information.

Just a few days ago, flights across the globe were canceled as concerns mounted over a January 7 fire in a Boeing 787 at Boston’s Logan International Airport. The fire was caused by faulty lithium-ion batteries built in to the plane. Now it appears that the International Air Transport Association, a trade organization, wants to ban shipment of such batteries in the cargo of Cathay Pacific flights, according to one expert.

“I received an IATA notification yesterday saying that Cathay Pacific is stopping all shipments of lithium-ion and lithium batteries on cargo aircraft,” battery quality assurance expert Kevin Elsdon told me tonight. “And then another one saying that British Airways was banning the shipment and carrying of lithium and lithium-ion batteries, period.”

If your startup is looking for an Angel investor, it makes sense to present your plan to flocks of Angels, and assume that at least one will swoop down and scoop you up. Or does it? Actually numbers and locations are just the beginning. The challenge is to find the right Angel for you, and for your situation. Here are some basic principles: Angels invest in people, more often than they invest in ideas. That means they need to know you, or someone they trust who does know you (warm introduction). For credibility, they need to know you BEFORE you are asking for money.

We all know that getting a good night’s sleep is good for our general health and well-being. But new research is highlighting a more surprising benefit of good sleep: more feelings of gratitude for relationships.

“A plethora of research highlights the importance of getting a good night’s sleep for physical and psychological well-being, yet in our society, people still seem to take pride in needing, and getting, little sleep,” says Amie Gordon of the University of California, Berkeley. “And in the past, research has shown that gratitude promotes good sleep, but our research looks at the link in the other direction and, to our knowledge, is the first to show that everyday experiences of poor sleep are negatively associated with gratitude toward others – an important emotion that helps form and maintain close social bonds.”

I'm an idiot. Not all of the time, mind you, but every now and then, I'm an idiot. Like the time my friend and co-founder Brian Halligan asked me to read the book “Moneyball” . This was back when we had first launched our startup, HubSpot. “But, I'm not a baseball guy,” I said. “It's not about baseball. It's about data,” he replied. So, I put it on my reading list, bought the book, but still failed to read it. That was a mistake.

Years later, I watched the movie when it came out. Twice. In one weekend. The first time I felt like I missed so much that I watched it again. If you haven't seen the movie yet, you should stop reading this article and go watch it. If you get distracted and never make it back to this article, don't worry, you made the right call.

We have argued from the very beginning that everyone will need to develop entrepreneurial skills to thrive in the years ahead. Given how fast the global economy is involving and the number of jobs—and indeed entire industries—that are disappearing you simply have no choice.

And we have explored in depth the thought process you need to follow when dealing with all the uncertainty we now face.