Like small companies all over the country, Silicon Valley startups have been letting tens of thousands of people go. But does that mean venture capital-backed startups should receive small-business loans paid for by taxpayers? It depends on who you ask.

A few weeks back, U.S. Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Palo Alto, signed a letter with other Congress members to the U.S. Small Business Administration arguing for VC-backed startups to be treated like other small businesses.

Whether business is booming or your organization is in the midst of a tough time, a crucial aspect of risk management is ensuring that your organization has bench strength — that employees have the depth of skill and experience to move easily into jobs of increasing responsibility. Is your staff prepared to step up if business grows rapidly, if new regulations or other world events make it more complex, or if a senior leader is suddenly unable to perform?

In the space between the coasts, Austin is the king of seed capital, a new report shows.

In the central part of the United States, Austin took the No. 1 spot among metros based on seed investments between 2010 and 2019, according to a study by Crunchbase and Dundee Capital titled “America’s Mighty Middle.”

“The Destroying Monster Continues the Work of Destruction Making a Vast Graveyard of Stricken Cities.” That is how a newspaper headline from Little Rock, Ark., described a yellow fever outbreak in 1878. The mosquito-borne illness infected 120,000 individuals and killed between 13,000 and 20,000 during the spring and summer of that year in the southern U.S.

NEW DELHI (IDN) – Failures of the patent system to meet the public health priorities demand a new approach in research and development (R&D) financing and incentive to pharmaceutical innovations. An R&D model delinking the cost of R&D from the price of the product is the way forward.

As we eagerly await a vaccine for severe acute respiratory syndrome-coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), we are reminded of 2003 SARS and 2012 Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS).

Image: Image: Collage of pictures about biomedical research. Source: Delhi Posr

With a troubled spring and an uncertain fall, institutions of higher education — colleges and universities – are worrying about bringing paying students back to campus. Student safety is paramount. But higher education has more to worry about than the immediate crisis of public health and budget shortfalls.

On May 4, 2020, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced that it was providing temporary, conditional relief to established small businesses impacted by COVID-19 that will facilitate their ability to pursue offerings under Regulation Crowdfunding. The SEC’s action is intended to expedite the offering process by relaxing certain of Regulation Crowdfunding’s rules with respect to the timing of an offering and the financial statements required. To benefit from the SEC’s temporary rule changes, a small business must meet enhanced eligibility requirements and make a clear disclosure about its reliance on the temporary rules to investors. This relief is available for offerings launched until August 31, 2020.

While some fields of study, like engineering or finance, can reliably lead to highly remunerative careers, other majors may not guarantee great wealth, even if they're still associated with socially useful and emotionally satisfying jobs.

Using individual-level data from the US Census Bureau's 2018 American Community Survey compiled by the Minnesota Population Center's Integrated Public Use Microdata Series program, we looked at average total annual personal incomes for different fields of study among college degree holders.

Moody’s Analytics analyzed U.S. metro areas capabilities for a strong recovery post-coronavirus using two primary factors: population density and educational attainment.

“The most dynamic recoveries may well bypass traditional powerhouses and take place instead in areas that (weren’t) poised to lead the way in 2020 before everything changed,” wrote Adam Kamins, senior regional economist at Moody’s Analytics.

As an entrepreneur, you wear many hats. From sales and accounting to marketing and product development, you've got your hands in every aspect of your business. But how concerned are you about customer experience? If the data is any indication, you should be very concerned.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused— and will continue to cause—much uncertainty in the worldwide financial markets. We expect to see substantial declines in the coming months in the number and aggregate dollar value of venture financings, similar to the declines during the dot-com crash in the early 2000s and during the 2008 financial crisis. We are already beginning to see in early Q2 more investor-favorable terms, in particular reduced valuations.

Only eight weeks ago, we published “Safeguarding our lives and our livelihoods: The imperative of our time.” Back then, we worried about the supply of ventilators and critical-care capacity, the world’s ability to suppress the coronavirus, and how governments would respond to the pandemic’s economic fallout. So what has the world learned since?

As the reopening of economies continues across much of Europe and North America, it’s worth taking stock of the epidemiological situation and trends that will define the months ahead. At the time of this writing, the official counts of cases and deaths from COVID-19 have passed four million and 280,000, respectively. Recent studies have made increasingly clear that each of these figures is a significant underestimate. Population antibody surveys suggest that official counts are underestimating the true number of cases by a factor of five or more (although in several cases the methodology has been called into question) (Exhibit 1).

According to The Washington Post (May 6) “Expert say — and initial reports from European countries suggest — once the pandemic has subsides, roughly half of all deaths may be found to have occurred in assisted living homes.” My email inbox received a bulletin this morning (May 8) from the Committee to Unleash Prosperity giving powerful evidence that this may indeed be the case, and included a link to a nursing home fatality spreadsheet with data on 37 states and the District of Columbia (excerpt in Figure 1).

Image: http://www.newgeography.com

Are you working with a technology that may be valuable to the fight against COVID-19? BHI has expanded its federal funding assistance program to provide resources to assist early stage companies seeking funding through the NIH, NSF, DoD, MTEC, and BARDA.

New digital technologies have upended conventional business models, organizational structures, and operating processes in most industries. Almost every aspect of business — customer relations, supply chain management, after-sales service — has been radically altered.

Image: https://sloanreview.mit.edu

On March 17, 2020, the DoD issued class deviation 2020-O0007, which has major implications for small businesses seeking DoD contracts under the SBIR program. Since 1982, the SBIR program has provided funding for small businesses to perform federally funded research and development (R&D) as well as to commercialize innovations that spring from such R&D efforts. The federal government allocates $2.2 billion annually to fund the SBIR program and its sister program, the Small Business Technology Transfer program.

Image: https://www.jdsupra.com

Researchers at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center are planning a randomized, controlled trial to evaluate a form of allogeneic cell therapy for COVID-19, after four out of six patients critically ill with the disease recovered well enough following infusions of the cells to be discharged from the hospital. The remaining two patients who received the treatment are also alive, in the hospital.

In 1977, when Warren Buffett's son Peter turned 19, he received his inheritance — proceeds from the sale of his grandfather's farm, which his father converted into $90,000 worth of Berkshire Hathaway stock.

Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Buffett#/media/File:Peter_Buffett_and_Michael_Kott,_Vancouver_Peace_Summit,_2009.jpg

While many people perceive artificial intelligence to be the technology of the future, AI is already here. Many companies across a range of industries have been applying AI to improve their businesses — from Spotify using machine learning for music recommendations to smart home devices like Google Home and Amazon Alexa. That said, there have also been some early failures, such as Microsoft’s social-learning chatbot, Tay, which turned anti-social after interacting with hostile Twitter followers, and IBM Watson’s inability to deliver results in personalized health care. What separates the AI projects that succeed from the ones that don’t often has to do with the business strategies organizations follow when applying AI. The following strategies can help business leaders not only effectively apply AI in their organizations, but succeed in adapting it to innovate, compete and excel.