Dave McClure’s 500 Startups has just announced the newest batch of companies to be accepted for its fifth accelerator class. This group is the first through which 500 Startups used an open application process, rather than rely solely on referrals when evaluating participants.

Initially, the startup incubator used AngelList’s platform to fill a few remaining spots, announcing just three weeks before the program started. But the application process worked out pretty well: It received hundreds of applications, from which 500 Startups selected eight companies. It went so well, in fact, that 500 Startups plans to use AngelList again, and might ask all interested companies to apply through the platform in the future, partner Christine Tsai told me.

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”

How right Charles Darwin was and how relevant his clear thinking remains to the ever-changing complexities of modern financial markets. Since the early 1990s, traditional fund of funds businesses have slowly built up an increasing market share within the IFA world as an ‘off the shelf’ solution for those advisers wishing to outsource part or all of their investment management.

Turns out, more and more young entrepreneurs favor the business contacts gained via start-up accelerators over those from business schools.

According to The Wall Street Journal, alumni from accelerators like Y-Combinator and TechStars said that they gain "dozens" to "hundreds" of contacts within the tech and business industries upon leaving their respective programs. Those contacts, they claim led to potential investors, customers, or product testers. 

Mixpanel founder Suhail Doshi, for example, attributed much of his software company's success to the contacts he gathered while attending Y-Combinator, the outlet reported. After graduating from the accelerator in 2009, Doshi dropped out of Arizona State University and began asking people on Y-Combinator's listserv to try out Mixpanel at a reduced cost.

What do you get when you put together Startup America, Startup Weekend, TechStars, and Udacity, and then let Steve Blank run the whole thing? Startup Weekend Next, that’s what!

Startup Weekend announced the largest Startup initiative to date today. The startup “super group” (as our good friend Michael del Castillo calls it), consists of Startup America, Startup Weekend, TechStars, and Udacity. It’s all being led by Blank who wrote the book on startups “The Startup Owners Manual”.

The four organizations, and Blank are teaming up to help launch 10,000 startups. Startup Weekend Next will be a rolling four week program with hands on training, education and inspiration.

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.

Many years ago, I enjoyed one of Guy Kawasaki’s first books, “Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition.” In his classical humorous and cynical style, he could reset your dreaming in a moment. Here is a sampling of ten themes from the book that I think are just as relevant today as they were then:

The idea that the country needs more graduates in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields is not new, but several universities are now increasing their focus on finding those potential graduates, turning specifically to community colleges.

The University of Maryland Baltimore County announced today that it will spend three years building and piloting a national model for increasing the number of community college students who ultimately earn bachelor’s degrees in STEM fields. The program is funded by a $2.6 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The City Colleges of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago recently announced a partnership, along with a $100,000 grant from the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities' Minority Male STEM Initiative, which is funded by the Kresge Foundation, to support male minority STEM students at the community college system in transferring to and graduating from Illinois-Chicago. Additionally, earlier this year, Mount Holyoke College received a $600,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to recruit and support female community college students in STEM fields.

What are your retirement plans? Are you expecting to sell your business and retire on the proceeds? Do you dream of passing on your business to your kids?

A new global survey of small business owners’ succession plans by Sellability Score found that small business owners’ expectations for retirement have changed. Since 2008, almost half of business owners over age 50 have delayed their retirement due to economic conditions.

We train our children to be consultants. We don’t call their careers by that name. We call it a reliable job, security and good pay (or at least we used to). According to Susan L. Reid in Freelancer, Consultant, Entrepreneur: Which Are You?:

“Fields where consultants are especially common include: Financial planning, strategic planning, marketing, research, training, business planning, business review, computing, and integration of new technology, medicine, psychology, and law.”

I remember my father being particularly happy if I had chosen to be a doctor or a lawyer, either one was fine. But I ended up in business just like him — well sort of. Which brings me to an ongoing question about the difference between freelancers, consultants and entrepreneurs.

HOBOKEN, N.J. — New Jersey was reeling on Wednesday from the impact of Hurricane Sandy, which has caused catastrophic flooding here in Hoboken and in other New York City suburbs, destroyed entire neighborhoods across the state and wiped out iconic boardwalks in shore towns that had enchanted generations of vacationgoers.

Though the storm raged up the East Coast, it has become increasingly apparent that New Jersey took the brunt of it. Officials estimated that the state suffered many billions of dollars in property damage. About a quarter of the state’s population — more than two million people — remained without power on Wednesday, and more than 6,000 were still in shelters, state emergency officials said.

President Obama and Mitt Romney seemed determined not to discuss climate change in this campaign. So thanks to Hurricane Sandy for forcing the issue: Isn’t it time to talk not only about weather, but also about climate?

Damon Winter/The New York Times Nicholas D. Kristof On the Ground Nicholas Kristof addresses reader feedback and posts short takes from his travels. Go to Blog » Go to Columnist Page » Related

For Years, Warnings That It Could Happen Here (October 31, 2012) A Far-Reaching System Leaves 8 Million Without Power (October 31, 2012) Related in Opinion

Dot Earth Blog: On Sandy and Humanity's 'Blah, Blah, Blah Bang' Disaster Plans (October 31, 2012) Taking Note: Soup, Charity and the American Way (October 30, 2012) Editorial: A Big Storm Requires Big Government (October 30, 2012)

Connect With Us on Twitter For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT. Readers’ Comments Share your thoughts. Post a Comment » Read All Comments (95) » It’s true, of course, that no single storm or drought can be attributed to climate change. Atlantic hurricanes in the Northeast go way back, as the catastrophic “snow hurricane” of 1804 attests. But many scientists believe that rising carbon emissions could make extreme weather — like Sandy — more likely.

You sit down at your computer fully armed. You’ve got a cup of coffee to your right, your brainstorming notebook to your left, and your browser is opened to your favorite online dictionary. You place your hands on the keyboard and take a breath, ready to let the great ideas flow from the ether to your brain to your computer screen. But wait! What’s this? Nothing is happening. No torrents of inspiration are springing forth. You type some gibberish just to hear the familiar clicks of the keyboard. You backspace them out of existence. You chew on your pen. You tap on your desk. Oh well, maybe it’s just not going to happen today. You open your favorite game and begin to play. Maybe the writer’s block will just work itself out.

Don’t Give Up

Don’t let writer’s block boss you around. As a dedicated writer/blogger, you have a responsibility to create quality content for your readers. More importantly, you’ve made a commitment to yourself and your vision. Consistent writing can seem daunting, but remember that you’ve done it successfully before. Writer’s block is temporary and it will pass. Keep fighting and writing, even if the words are only slowly dribbling out of your fingertips.

For many of us, life is rarely conducive to creativity - a reality that may be holding some of us back from realising our potential. 

As we get older and become more sensible and structured, our sense of sponteneity and creative spark is dulled - or so suggests one study of 1600 children which found that, on a test measuring creativity and lateral thinking, 98 per cent of three to five year olds scored at the genius level, but by the time they were 25 only 2 per cent of the same individuals were at this level.

Next Tuesday’s presidential election will likely be extremely close, magnifying the potential impact of vote-counting errors. So it could be problematic that several states rely on computerized voting machines that don’t print out a paper record that can be verified by voters and recounted by election officials if necessary.

Such machines are in use in 16 states, as indicated in red on the map above. Computer scientists and fair-election advocates have warned for years that potential software malfunctions are possible threats to the integrity of elections in counties and states that use these machines.

It might seem that the Internet doesn’t lose track of anything that has been published online. The alleged permanence of tweets, blogs, snapshots, and instant messages worries many privacy activists and policymakers such as Viviane Reding, justice commissioner of the European Union and vice president of the European Commission. She has proposed that Europe adopt a “right to be forgotten”—a proposal that is now working its way through the EU legal process and could be law within two years.

Reding’s proposal would grant EU citizens the right to withdraw their consent from online information services after the fact—allowing people to redact embarrassing things from the global information commons, even after the data had been copied to other websites. It’s a controversial proposal: George Washington University law professor Jeffrey Rosen wrote in the Stanford Law Review that such a right could have deeply negative implications for both free speech and journalism and could ultimately fragment the Internet. Rosen pointed out that companies like Google would need to suppress from European search queries information that had been deemed “forgotten” on the continent, even as such information would still be perfectly allowable in the United States.

Americans tend to picture successful entrepreneurs as young, bold risk takers, like Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. But, as Chris Farrell points out in a recent Bloomberg Businessweek column, older entrepreneurs start companies too.

From Farrell's piece:

The popular image of older folks is hardly as stalwarts of entrepreneurial ambition and energy. They have a reputation for being set in their ways, unwilling to challenge the established order, showing little interest in the latest technologies and organizational ideas, thinking more about retirement than launching a new venture.

For the past 15 years, I have invested a great deal of time, energy and money in the field of social entrepreneurship. I did this because I believe we need to take very significant actions to address global poverty and socio-political inequality, primarily through the creation of livelihoods and personal wealth. This will only happen by financially and politically empowering the disenfranchised so that they may climb out of poverty.

Social entrepreneurship, if done properly, creates, fosters, and grows communities with new opportunities which were never within their reach before.

Over the years, as the enthusiasm for social entrepreneurship has grown, I have seen all sorts of individuals, teams, and organizations join our ranks to start to form an ecosystem. But I've also observed the term “social enterprise” used in all sorts of ways - some valid, and some completely disingenuous. 

Venture capital investment by corporations has had its ups and downs over the last 50 years but there are signs it is again resurgent.

Companies from Citrix Systems to Nike are looking to get close to start-ups and a relative newcomer to the venture scene, Google Ventures, was the top investor in venture-backed companies in the third quarter.

Now comes a report from the Boston Consulting Group, a global management consultant, declaring that the trend is real and lasting.

“Venture investing appears well on its way to establishing a firm foothold in the corporate world as companies look to nascent companies not just to generate financial returns but also to complement their R&D efforts, penetrate fast-growing emerging markets, and gain early access to potentially disruptive technologies and business models,” the report says.

A startup begins with a great idea, but all too often, that’s where it ends. Ideas have to be implemented well to get the desired results. Good implementation requires a plan, and a good plan and good operational decisions come from good people. That’s why investors invest in entrepreneurs, rather than ideas.

People and operational excellence have to converge in every business, large or small. Microsoft found this out when their market capitalization, once at $560B, had fallen in 2010 to $219B, allowing them to be passed by Apple, who grew from $15.6B during that period. Apple is now at $570B, with Microsoft at $240B. Both had access to the same technology, people, and market.