Many entrepreneurs forget that their success is more about helping other people than about personally becoming famous, or overcoming the odds and getting rich. A successful business has to satisfy customers with a strong team, by helping them solve problems, save money, or experience more pleasure. That means more focus on helping others achieve their goals.

How and why this is true was brought home to me in a recent book, “It's Not About You: A Little Story About What Matters Most in Business,” by Bob Burg and John David Mann. This is a fictional story about how an aggressive young M&A executive comes to realize that his aggressive style is actually making it harder to reach his goals.

Starting a business can seem like a long and drawn-out process – but don’t worry, you’re getting closer to being ready to launch. Now that you’ve got office space, a team of advisers and some great-looking marketing material, you’re ready to complete a few final housekeeping items to keep your business “legal” and in compliance, while also helping you manage your money and pay your taxes.

I read an interesting post this week by Mark Suster, an investment partner for Los Angeles-based GRP Partners. He’s a self-described 2-time entrepreneur who  “turned to the dark side” and joined CRP after selling his second company to Salesforce in 2007.

Mark’s blog, Both Sides of the Table strikes a familiar chord.

He talks about the life of an entrepreneur with an unvarnished view – in fact, he gives many presentations to “wantrapreneurs” who have the idea that entrepreneurship is a life of glamour and ease, with no one telling you what to do and a fast track to fame and success. The truth is much different. Big wins are few and far between. The life is far from glamorous, involving much sacrifice, adversity and risk. For those of you who’ve followed my columns, this should come as no surprise.

ROCKVILLE, MD, Nov 21, 2012  -- The Tech Council of Maryland, Maryland's largest technology trade association with more than 400 biotechnology and technology members employing more than 200,000 in the region, today announced that Art Jacoby is stepping down from his CEO duties effective February 15, 2013 to return full-time to his consulting practice. TCM has commenced an executive search to identify its next CEO.

"I want to thank Art for his exemplary leadership of TCM," said Larry Letow, chairman of the Tech Council, who also is president and CEO of Convergence Consulting. "We have accomplished a great deal during his tenure and wish him success in his consulting practice. Moving forward, the TCM Board will conduct a thorough executive search that takes into consideration the valuable insights of TCM stakeholders. We look forward to identifying the best possible leader to advance TCM's mission of helping Maryland technology companies collaborate, grow and succeed."

Use the word "innovation" and most people call up imagery of an inventor slaving away in a garage, designing cutting-edge technology. But this is only part of the story. There are equally important opportunities to innovate, grow your business, and accelerate your career, that require no changes at all to the core technology of what you are, do, or offer. If you understand this, you can grow in new ways.

Everett Rogers, in his seminal book Diffusion of Innovations, shows that five factors determine if, how far, and how fast your innovation will be adopted by the world:

UC Davis Children's Hospital in Sacramento is among those taking part in the launch of a "crowdfunded" hospital gift catalog – www.givemiracles.org – that's part of a national campaign.

The national effort is led by Fundly, which bills itself as the world's largest crowdfunding-for-good platform, and Children's Miracle Network Hospitals.

In general terms, "crowdfunding" is an Internet-based effort that raises money via small contributions from a large group of people.

Locally, the effort enables individuals to purchase medical equipment and care for children at UC Davis Children's Hospital. Gifts range from toys ($30) to a pediatric wheelchair ($970) to an entire hospital wing devoted to neonatal intensive care ($12 million).

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, the humble phone booth took on renewed importance as cut-off New Yorkers used pay phones to connect with each other in an emergency. Now, this quaint but reliable form of public technology is getting a major facelift.

Starting today, New York City is officially launching a plan to transform pay phones into giant touch screens that provide city information, emergency broadcasts and local business deals. Located in the same locations as existing phone booths, the new platforms look like this:

Business schools across the country have been focusing on and developing entrepreneurship programs at a rapidly increasing rate over the past five years. This phenomenon is not driven by a shift in academic thinking, but rather, more pragmatically, by a suffering economy that no longer provides sufficient entry-level positions into established companies to meet the employment needs of graduating classes.

Students now need to be trained and equipped to “make their own jobs,” rather than relying on filling vacant or newly minted positions in large companies.

Human brawn may be the key to why human brains are so big, according to a new hypothesis linking exercise to the evolution of our oversize noggins.

The idea has yet to be thoroughly tested, but researchers writing in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B say that it's worth a deeper look. In fact, some evidence in mice and rats suggests that simply breeding the most athletic animals could create offspring with sharper minds.

As a young entrepreneur selling Beanie Babies on eBay at 12 years old and then video games by the time I was 15, I learned a lot about the road blocks that come with being young and doing business.  Now, at 23 years old, I am still considered young by some.  But I know that I have pushed past any personal doubts I am too young to do business.

Currently residing in Los Angeles, I have been running Transportation Supply, an online traffic safety distribution company, since my freshman year of college.  Getting into business is difficult enough without fighting to prove your legitimacy and age.  Here are some of those road blocks that I have faced, and how I overcame them:

In a recent editorial, futurist Ray Kurzweil compared the current university model to the bookstore model, suggesting that universities will be undermined by online the way digital books undermined Borders. Others have suggested that universities are headed the way of the newspaper. Others have suggested that online teaching represents a new funding model for universities.

Yogi Berra said predictions are hard, “especially about the future.” With that in mind there are a couple of perspectives to take from predictions in old issues of Popular Science or Scientific American: Futurists always over-estimate how soon new technology will manifest and researchers in the field always underestimate it. The bottom line, though, is that while online education poses a challenge for universities, they will ultimately improve them.

In the typical office, machines will increasingly do more work, automating functions that were once performed manually.

Machines that are capable of learning seem smart to us today.  Consider how Internet radio service Pandora is able to better-understand your music taste over time.

There are copious reports that machine learning on “big data” will replace human domain expertise.

However, even the smartest machines still need teachers, and those teachers are human experts. We shouldn’t fear that they will replace people in the workplace.

Mexico’s I.T. offshoring industry ranks as #3 in Gartner’s global rankings, lagging behind only India and the Philippines, according to analyst Frances Karamouzis. Its ambition is to take second place. Given that Mexico now claims to graduate 130,000 engineers every year — which is more than the U.S. — this may not be impossible. At an event hosted by Mexico’s I.T. confederation, CANIETI, I was asked for advice on how the country can achieve this objective.

I told them to not to waste resources on catching up, but to instead leapfrog India. Indian industry is a victim of its own success and is trying to defend a sinking turf. That is one of the reasons I canceled my trip to India this month — the Indian industry confederation NASSCOM was unable to focus on the future.

The folks at Andreessen Horowitz may be the rock stars of venture capital these days. But a new fund with roots in online media and Y Combinator is looking to be the VCs for real rock stars, and movie stars, and TV stars, and celebrities of all stripes.

The fund's called #DominateFund and is run by general partners Ben Parr, formerly of Mashable, and Matt Schlicht and Mazy Kazerooni, founders of Y Combinator graduate Tracks.by, a music promotion service.

The group is, according to Tomio Geron of Forbes, raising a seed fund in the single-digit millions. So far, that's pretty standard stuff. What's different about #DominateFund is that it's tapping into a zeitgeist that's seen such celebrities as Ashton Kutcher become angel investors. The group is raising its fund in Hollywood, not from the Silicon Valley or New York rich or pension funds, as most other venture capitalists do.

Happy Thanksgiving!

As the CEO or founder of a start-up company much of your success will stem from the treatment of your start-up team and early employees or partners. When people join your start-up it is often because they believe in you, your concept and the potential for success. When and if the company is successful, team members should benefit from the success in proportion to the effort they contributed to it.

If you have the money, you can simply pay them their market salary and they should be happy. If you don’t have the money you will have to cut them into the deal by providing equity that matches their contribution. However, deciding how to divide up equity in your early stage start-up can be one of the most difficult and delicate decisions you can make. No matter how you do it, there are long-term consequences that are usually uncomfortable. This is because start-up companies change a lot during their early formation and what founders think is going to happen rarely actuallyhappens. In spite of this, founders still make the mistake of dividing equity based on what they think (or hope) will happen because they don’t know how to divide up equity based on what actually happens.

Last week, in response to a question posed during #prodchat, a weekly Twitter chat about productivity, I mentioned a reflective practice I’ve been doing recently that helps me focus on what I’m learning each day. Several people were interested in my remark, and I thought I’d explain a bit more about it.

How to be Happier Eric Barker’s recent post, What’s the secret to being happy at home and fulfilled at work? summarizes recent research into the benefits reported by people who find ways to use their signature strengths during the day. According to this research, people who spend more time using their signature strengths during a given day report more positive emotions and fewer negative ones.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Every so often I find myself caught up in a really hectic 3-4 week schedule where it seems like I float endlessly betweens meetings. Pitches. Intros. Board Meetings. Conferences.

And I get flooded with legal docs, end-of-quarter financial administration, recruiting, whatever.

I get sucked up in “Do” mode.

Let’s face it — by the time November rolls around, members of even the best startup teams are starting to think about the holidays. Many are preparing for travel or seeing family; more than a few will be looking forward to some hard-earned days off.

But for founders, the same time of year signals something very different — an important time to regroup and strategize for the year ahead. And you need your team by your side to do so effectively.