In 22 years of working with venture capitalists, Steven M. Cohen, co-manager of Morgan Lewis’s emerging business and technology practice, can only remember one time when a venture capitalist returned feedback to a presenter and ultimately invested. When the odds are that slim, “how do you get that first meeting and give yourself the best shot at getting a potential investor?” he asked.

Cohen moderated a panel titled, “VC Confessionals: Why We Funded, Why We Passed,” during Wharton’s recent 2012 Entrepreneurship Conference, whose theme was “Turning Painpoints into Opportunity”. In explaining that tagline, the conference organizers noted that “pain has often been embedded in entrepreneurship. The pain of a personal frustration inspired a new venture. The pain, sweat and tears of an idea turned it into a viable business. The growing pains of the startup helped it morph from being in a league of its own, to one in which it became an industry leader. Pain has often revealed opportunity.”

As anyone who has started their own company will tell you, it’s hard for others to understand your passion for your endeavor.

Startup founders can seem crazy, willing to work long hours for little or no pay, driven by wanting to see their idea come to fruition. And, for those few great ideas that actually make it beyond a science experiment and secure funding, customers, and revenue, one of the greatest challenges can be transitioning from a founder to a manager and corporate leader.

It is easy for all of us to get focused on the few exceptional success stories of first-time founder CEOs like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg. Let it suffice to say that these are indeed exceptions and not the norm.

The recent economic performance suggests that our economy is in serious crisis driven by blatant disregard for the need for balancing the books in the interest of national prosperity. Having failed to understand how the consequences of tipping the nations’ public banks as penny banks, we have exhausted our capacity to lift from where we were languishing in May 2009 at end of war on terror.

One major objective of sustaining a steady economic growth is to identify and secure sources of revenue and earmarking strategic expenditure where growth can be measured with credible indicators. When this recipe is ignored, and then engages in haphazard monetary and fiscal policies, it raises a plethora of challenges that cannot be solved by simply turning to bandage jobs, such as issuing TB or bonds or emptying state banks or even asking private banks to raise capital for further local borrowing.

Investing in startups has often meant writing checks for $50,000 or more to a company looking for funding. To get access to those deals you need a network that can refer those deals to you.

Most angels make several investments per year to spread the risk around. That means you need $200,000 or more per year to be an angel. That traditional scenario left a lot of interested angel investors sitting on the sidelines.

Today, it’s a lot easier to become an angel investor, due to crowdfunding, micro lending and investment sites like MicroVentures, which is opening doors to those looking to invest $1,000 to $30,000 or more.

As early as next week, we may know whether Congress will change US securities laws to permit startups to sell stock to the general public over the internet.

You know how, today, companies raise money on Kickstarter by offering products, t-shirts, and other bennies? Imagine those same companies selling stock to investors over a Kickstarter-like platform. If the law changes – and this is something that one chamber of Congress has already passed and that President Obama supports - entrepreneurs seeking capital will have one more alternative to angel investors and venture capital firms.

Traveling on business often took television producer Kaylyn Thornal across the country. During her downtime on locations, the Los Angeles resident would try to catch local sporting events or look for local nightlife.

Finding that information on the run, however, was often difficult and time consuming.

"I just realized that I kept needing the same info," Thornal said. "Simple information, like, 'Where do I park? Where do I grab a bite to eat, or where do I get last-minute tickets if the game is sold out?' I wanted to find local places and not places where the stadium wants you to go. The idea really came from that."

Join other industry experts at the 2012 19th Annual NASVF Conference “Advancing Innovation: Seeding Tomorrow’s Opportunities” which will take place in Cleveland, Ohio October 15th -17th.  The conference will feature best practices in innovation capital, updates on industry trends and great sessions with industry leaders.  More than 250 industry professionals are expected to attend the conference to exchange their best strategies and tools for building and managing strategic investment programs and institutions.

I had this ethical dilemma pop up on one of the first deals I even did as a VC.  I had been looking around at several deals in late 2008 as the markets were tanking.

I had gotten close on a couple of deals but nothing rose to the level of “must do.” I was learning which VCs I wanted to work with, what stage & check size I wanted to commit to and what teams would be a good fit for me.

I got a call from a VC friend of mine who said, “we’re looking at this deal but can’t write the full check. I think you should look at it.”

To be competitive globally, many U.S. companies, from startups to Fortune 500 firms, rely on new technologies invented by our nation's universities to fuel their next-generation products. In 2010 alone, technologies from U.S. universities and research institutes have been turned into 657 new products and 651 new startup companies.

A specific example illustrates the power of university research in the development of innovative products. In the 1980s, Dr. Thomas Maren, a professor at the University of Florida, discovered a new drug that solved a significant problem: protecting patients from vision loss caused by glaucoma.

Daniel Brusilovsky started his first business when he was 14. With his next venture, he wanted to help other young entrepreneurs, so the then 15 year old launched Teens in Tech Labs in 2008. And now Microsoft is backing it.

“What I realized is there was a lot of young entrepreneurs out there who had great ideas, but they didn’t know what to do with them,” Brusilovsky says. “So I wanted to create this platform for young entrepreneurs to come to us from anywhere in the world and get the support they need.”

The first form of support was a conference in 2009 ran by then 16-year-old Brusilovsky and held at Microsoft’s San Francisco office. This was a huge form of validation for the young founder and CEO.

This is my last column on the psychology of the entrepreneurial spirit. Beginning next week I will examine family businesses and what makes them tick. The idea is to expose the inner workings of business founders and their problematic ties to their families, as skillfully as David Chase (The Sopranos) gave us an insider’s view of  an illegal, primarily Italian, interdependent but hostile group of family business founders.

Before heading in that direction I want to dispel a number of bizarre notions that have dogged entrepreneurs since Horatio Alger’s novellas were best sellerse. I’m irked by such canards because I’m thinking about whether the kid in Texas should go to Acton MBA and do whatever he can to become an entrepreneur, or work for Dell, the business built by one of Texas’ stellar entrepreneurs.

As entrepreneurs, you always need to be on the lookout for ways to expand your current business, and always on the lookout for your next big thing. The competition never stands still, and new opportunities are evolving, based on culture changes in your customers, new technologies, and new problems in the world which need to be solved.

Steven Schussler, in his latest book “It’s a Jungle In There” characterized this well in relation to his own success by recommending to all entrepreneurs that you observe the world around you and make a consistent, conscious effort to ask yourself: “Is there something here I could change (by providing a service or product) that would bring me financial gain?”

Thomas Edison once said that “genius” is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. In the world of technology startups, that 99% involves a heck of a lot of coding and wireframing. If you’ve got an idea for a startup, that’s great — but odds are that an idea is all you have. (Well, maybe you have passion and some savings, too.) But you’ll need more than that to bring your idea to life — you’ll need a developer who can transform your vision into an elegant app or website.

If you’re just foraying into the land of entrepreneurship, you may wonder where the to even start looking for such a person. And even if you do find a developer, how will you know the extent of his talent and whether he’s a good fit for you?

With more than 300 technology companies that have direct veins flowing into high-level education and research within the parameters of the City of Tempe’s city limits, it is understandable that Tempe is often referred to as a city transformed, founded by and defined by a steady stream of innovators.

Just as Tempe’s pioneers of yesterday used early innovations such as Hayden’s Ferry and the Mill Avenue Bridge to overcome the obstacle of the Salt River, the City’s transformation from desert buttes into verdant fields and growing businesses continue to surge ahead as home to innovative researchers that are bridging the gap between industry and research.

An excerpt from this article is below. Read the full story on the Peninsula Press.

In Silicon Valley, much attention is given to those companies seeking venture capital funds. But much energy goes into the development of a company before financing is even a question. For many Stanford students looking to break into the startup culture, finding a team can be the biggest obstacle.

That’s where startup FounderSoup comes in. Started by a group of Stanford alums and sponsored by venture firm Andreessen-Horowitz, FounderSoup aims to connect potential co-founders in order to best capitalize on Stanford students’ skills.

New Orleans CityBusiness Publisher Mark Singletary recently wrote about the immediate need for Louisiana to encourage the development of the biosciences industry in New Orleans by supporting BioDistrict New Orleans. Click here to visit CityBusiness online, and click here to sign up for daily updates.

Biomedical research future bright, but state must help BY: Mark Singletary, Publisher

It’s time for the state of Louisiana to go all in for biomedical research.

The Greater New Orleans Biosciences Economic Development District, better known as BioDistrict New Orleans, is a 1,500-acre development housing a state agency that was created in 2005 by the state legislature.

The district has three self-defined missions:

1. Facilitating the creation of high-paying jobs in the region by increasing the current health and biosciences work force;

Ever since Rosey the Robot took care of “The Jetsons” in the early 1960s, the promise of robots making everyday life easier has been a bit of a tease. Enlarge This Image

Rosey, a metallic maid with a frilly apron, “kind of set expectations that robots were the future,” said Colin M. Angle, the chief executive of the iRobot Corporation. “Then, 50 years passed.”

Now Mr. Angle’s company is trying to do Rosey one better — with Ava, a 5-foot-4 assistant with an iPad or an Android tablet for a brain and Xbox motion sensors to help her get around. But no apron, so far.

Employees at a small job-development agency in the Commerce Department have now been without computers or Internet access for six weeks.

This sounds impossible. But according to the Economic Development Administration, it’s true. A virus of still-undetermined-origin attacked the place in mid-January, and the cyber-security experts called in to figure out what went wrong are still working on the problem.

“Over the past several weeks, the Department of Commerce IT security team, US-CERT, and an external team of experts have been working with EDA to conduct tests and isolate the origin of the virus,”agency spokeswoman Cleve Mesidor said in a statement after the Post requested an update.

This week, I've been looking at the projected growth in jobs across American metros. My last post charted the projected growth in service jobs; I also looked at blue-collar gigs.

Today, I look at the projected growth in higher-paying, higher-skill jobs that make up the creative class. More than 43 million people are currently employed in creative class work, a third of the workforce, in fields like science, technology, and engineering; business, finance, and management; law; health care; education; and arts, culture, media, and entertainment.