I was sitting outside at Samovar Tea Lounge in the heart of San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center. It was the middle of July, but the 55-degree temperature and brisk coastal winds made it feel more like late November. 

“I thought this one advisor would be great with connections to multiple customers, but after signing the advisory agreement, I have not heard back from her in six months,” said an entrepreneur I know who was starting a company for remote product shipping in Europe.

When you’re starting, scaling, or simply running a business, it seldom feels like there are enough hours in a day. As a result, entrepreneurs quickly learn to adapt by sacrificing parts of their lives… and their social lives are often the first to go.

But, what are the costs of consistently abandoning a Friday night out with friends in favor of your work? It may seem like a smart time investment at the moment, but it may be harmful to your mental well being. A study from DePaul University found that the happiest people are those with strong social ties who engage in social events frequently.

BLACKSBURG, VA (WVNS) — A program at Virginia Tech empowers students with knowledge and skills to build or launch companies. According to a release, the Apex Center for Entrepreneurship is on track to engage more than 3,000 students across the college campus.

Apex Director Sean Collins shared that the center is building the 21st century workforce, and is helping entrepreneurs work in cross-functional teams, navigate ambiguity, assess risk, and build new technology fluency.

Image: https://www.wvnstv.com

In the fall of 2016, the First Round team launched our first mentorship pairing effort as a small experiment, with just a few dozen mentors and mentees pulled from across our community. Fast forward more than three years later to last week, when over 400 pairs wrapped up their last sessions together.

One day soon an emerging technology highlighted in this report will allow you to virtually teleport to a distant site and actually feel the handshakes and hugs of fellow cyber travelers. Also close to becoming commonplace: humanoid (and animaloid) robots designed to socialize with people; a system for pinpointing the source of a food-poisoning outbreak in just seconds; minuscule lenses that will pave the way for diminutive cameras and other devices; strong, biodegradable plastics that can be fashioned from otherwise useless plant wastes; DNA-based data-storage systems that will reliably stow ginormous amounts of information; and more.

There is no question that air pollution poses a serious health danger. It exacerbates asthma, especially in children, and shortens lives. It’s also linked to diabetes, cognitive decline, and birth defects, as well as heart disease and stroke. The contamination comes from multiple sources, including cars, trains, airplanes, and power plants, which foul the air and heat up the planet.

During the past few years, all kinds of businesses have begun using what they call “artificial intelligence.” One international survey said 37 percent of organizations have, as a press release put it, “implemented AI in some form.” A different survey, looking at U.S. businesses, put the figure at 61 percent. A third, focused on the U.S. and the U.K., said, in the words of another press release, a whopping “77% have implemented some AI-related technologies in the workplace.”

We would like to invite you to a special event to join other industry leaders and peers to celebrate a year of growth within our entrepreneurial ecosystem and the greater Biohealth Capital Region.

Several of the region's top startup executives will participate in an engaging discussion and share the lessons they have learned along their journeys in building their past and current companies.

Narrator: Bees might not be your favorite insects out there. After all, their stings can really hurt.

Hand: Ouch!

Narrator: But as far as important species go, bees are near the top of the list. You see, bees are critical pollinators, meaning they're responsible for pollinating more than a third of the crops that feed the world's population. But today, bees are dying off at record rates. So, what would a world without bees look like, and what would that mean for our global food supply?

Cancer is the second-most-common cause of death in the United States, after heart disease.

It fundamentally affects the way our cells grow and divide, changing them in perverse ways. All cancer is a result of damage or genetic mutations in our DNA. The debilitating class of diseases spreads through a body like an invading army as toxic cells grow relentlessly into unruly tumors.

Profitability has lately been a hot topic in the tech world. But it's hardly a new headache. One Term Sheet reader unearthed a New York Times article from 20 years ago that rings eerily familiar: “So Lucrative That It’s Almost Profitable.”

The following excerpt is from Napoleon Hill’s Success Masters. Buy it now from Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Apple Books | IndieBound

Problems and adversity can be motivational, as Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, author of the bestselling book, The Power of Positive Thinking, once said. Why? Because “it grows you strong,” he explained. In other words, a life lived without some adversity is going to be a stunted one.

There can be a tendency to see invention and innovation as one and the same. 

Inventions are new technologies that change the world - the satellite, the motorcar, television, the plough. Innovation can be world-changing too, if it’s transforming business models or offering novel services on the back of new technology - think Uber (GPS) or Facebook (the internet). 

Colleges and universities face daunting challenges to their sustainability if they continue to pursue a “business as usual” model. The cost of providing higher education continues to rise for most institutions with fewer students either able or willing to pay the price. Competition among institutions for students has increased especially between public and private institutions; this is exacerbated by the demographic changes in the country whereby the number of high school graduates has decreased in most of the country and where fertility rates are at their lowest levels in our nation’s history.

The importance of business and industry R&D investment for competitiveness and economic growth is a well-entrenched dictum of national and state innovation policy across most of the developed world. Approaches for incentivizing increased research expenditures fall into two broad categories, direct grants and subsidies to offset R&D costs or R&D tax credits companies may take post-investment for research expenditures. Direct subsidies or competitively awarded grant programs optimally target specific activities, desired outcomes and performance milestones (e.g., the SBIR/STTR programs). A new paper looks at which approach – direct subsidies or R&D tax credits – actually works better for achieving at least one of the stated policy goals: increasing competitive, private R&D investment?

In so many ways it often feels like innovation is both wholly new, and ancient at the same time. Tools that we use to innovate aren’t new, in fact many are very old, but put to appropriate use they help us create miraculous new things. Too often we distrust old tools or methods, thinking that newer tools or methods are more current, more viable, but fail to realize that some things are simply grounded in truth, no matter hold old they are.

When Amazon (AMZN) and Apple (AAPL) put out different smart-home devices or streaming services, often only one can win. But when the tech giants create differing company cultures that match their respective business strategies, both can be effective, says a top venture capitalist in a newly released interview.

“Amazon has low prices. Apple's got beautiful products. Two different cultures. One's not good and one's not bad,” says Ben Horowitz, who co-founded venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and last month released “What You Do Is Who You Are,” a book on how to build an effective company culture.

Image: https://finance.yahoo.com - From Video

SAN FRANCISCO — Mark Frank, who runs a health technology start-up called SonderMind, had planned to wait until the end of 2020 to raise more money for his company.

But after Uber and Lyft stumbled when going public and WeWork ousted its chief executive and pulled its initial stock offering, Mr. Frank changed his mind. With so much disappointment clouding start-up land and an economic slowdown looming, he decided that having more cash on hand was the better course.

A 16-year-old gunman opened fire at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, California on Thursday. Two students were killed, and three were injured — all five were between the ages of 14 and 16. The gunman used a .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol, and he also shot and seriously injured himself, according to Captain Kent Wegener of the Los Angeles Country Sheriff's Department. 

There have been 366 mass shootings in the US so far in 2019, meaning there's been more than one shooting per day, on average.

Leaders possess skills that may not always easy to define. But we know leadership when we see it. As a result, those with leadership abilities share several qualities that make them successful and stand out. For example, they remain anchored by a clear set of principles and values about themselves, the people in their lives and their place in the world.