Though rising numbers from the final quarter for 2009 had many hopeful that 2010 would see a rebound of venture capital funds, new data from the Nation Venture Capital Association (NVCA) is bound to disappoint as Q1 2010 saw the lowest first quarter numbers (PDF) in 17 years. According to the NVCA, just $3.6 billion has been raised so far this year by VCs compared to $5.2 billion in 2009 and $7.1 billion 2008.

"Over the last two years, alternative asset allocations have declined and the exit market has suffered, putting venture firms in the unenviable position of communicating their value in an extremely challenging environment," says Heesen. "Many firms have been waiting until the exit market improves before embarking upon their fundraising efforts."

It’s not enough that Warren Buffett has become one of the richest men in the world. He’s also a world-class storyteller – and nowhere does this gift go on public display more than in his annual letter to shareholders.

His latest  letter on the Berkshire Hathaway Web site offers terrific lessons for startup ventures in shaping their communications.

Lesson No. 1: Converse Like a Real Human Being

There’s something about a position of power that often causes perfectly normal executives to embrace “corporate speak.” Their communications become stiff and jargon-filled drivel.

In contrast, look at how Buffett explains his philosophy of empowerment:

We tend to let our many subsidiaries operate on their own, without our supervising and monitoring them to any degree. That means we are sometimes late in spotting management problems and that both operating and capital decisions are occasionally made with which Charlie and I would have disagreed had we been consulted.

Duncan Stewart doesn't pretend to know where the world of technology is going, but he's never shy about expressing an opinion, usually with considerable vigour.

After two decades as a high-tech analyst, money manager, venture capitalist and media commentator, Deloitte Canada's resident high-tech guru also has the street cred to back up his views.

So when Stewart addresses the annual TEC VenturePrize awards luncheon Thursday, my guess is the audience won't be bored. Stewart has a habit of calling it as he sees it, whether good, bad or ugly.

Tengion Inc.’s initial public offering on Friday harks back to the days when small venture-backed companies routinely employed boutique investment banks to escort themselves to the public markets.

The biotechnology company raised $30 million in the IPO, the smallest venture-backed offering since Feb. 19, 2008, when another unprofitable biotech, Bioheart Inc., earned just $5.8 million in proceeds in a slimmed down offering. Tengion is also the first such company since Bioheart to use boutique banks solely as bookrunners - which do the majority of work and collect the largest fees.

A year ago, the National Venture Capital Association urged the venture capital community to hire boutiques to take companies public, much like the industry did during the 1990s, arguing that VCs have relied too heavily on so-called bulge-bracket banks that aren’t interested in smaller companies.

Boutique investment banks can handle smaller transactions that have less appeal to larger banks. They’re also more likely to have staff with specialized experience needed to market offerings from small technology and health care companies to long-term investors, some observers say.

Transcript of Governor Schwarzenegger Announcing the Establishment of the Office of Economic Development

SECRETARY BRADSHAW:

Good morning, everyone. Let me be the first one to officially welcome you to the Governor's Office of Economic Development. (Applause) My name is Vickie Bradshaw and I'm California Secretary for Labor and Workforce Development and I'm going to introduce a few people before we get started. Robert Rivinius, president and CEO of the Building Industry Trade Association; (Applause) Patricia Fong Kushida, president and CEO of the California Asian-Pacific Chamber of Commerce; (Applause) Steve Gándota, Sacramento Hispanic Chamber of Commerce; (Applause) Juan Alday, director of the Latin Business Association; (Applause) Ken Macias, the chairman of the California Hispanic Chamber of Commerce; (Applause) Stuart Drown, the executive director of the Little Hoover Commission; (Applause) Wayne Schell, the president and CEO of the Association of Local Economic Development; (Applause) Danny Curtin, the director of the California Conference of Carpenters; (Applause) Some of them are buried deep in the back. Aubry Stone, the president and CEO of the Black Chamber of Commerce; (Applause) Bill Dombrowski, the president and CEO of the California Retailers Association; (Applause) Edwin Lombard, board member of the Black Chamber of Commerce; (Applause) Malaki Seku-Amen, the legislative advocate for the California State Conference of the NAACP; (Applause) Linda Adams, the Secretary of Cal EPA; (Applause) a couple other cabinet members are tied up at the moment. Bill Leonard and Teri Takai - ah, we found him. Bill Leonard is making his way up. And Undersecretary Will Brown of the California Department of Food and Ag. (Applause)

Good Company Ventures is hosting its Philly launch event about social entrepreneurship and mission-driven investment. Then the party moves to Ladder 15 for the Philly Startup Leaders happy hour.

Agenda
5:00 Registration
5:30 Introductions -- Beth Cohen

GoodCompany 2009 Company Speed Pitches
GoodCompany 2010 Social Impact Incubator -- Garrrett Melby, Chris Bentley
Missioneurs -- Blake Jennelle

6:15 Panel Discussion -- Venture Capital as Engine of Social Innovation

Josh Kopelman, Gil Beyda, Nate Lentz, Len Lodish, Tom Balderston, Jacob Gray (Moderator)

7:15 Networking Reception

Kenya's National Council for Science and Technology and the British Council are to work together to expand the Africa Knowledge Transfer Partnership programme. The aim is to provide opportunities for businesses to improve their competitiveness and productivity through the better use of higher education knowledge, technology and expertise.

African Knowledge Transfer Partnerships, or AKTPs, are UK-sponsored partnerships between higher education institutions and private sector organisations in the UK and Sub-Saharan Africa. The partnerships are being piloted in six African countries - Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa and Rwanda.

The aim, according the British Council, is to help companies improve their productivity and competitiveness by using the scientific knowledge, technology and skills available in higher education institutions through collaborative projects.

Neatorama calls this clutch eco-conscious and fashionably stylish, but I disagree. While recycling a keyboard may be a good idea, I wouldn't be caught dead enjoying a night on the town with this thing.

Many people dream of starting their own businesses and becoming financially independent, but while the idea of organising and operating your own business venture may be thrilling, there’s a good chance that your fledgling company won’t survive unless you identify potential pitfalls and plan to circumnavigate them.

Here are 10 ways that you could fail as an entrepreneur:

1. Poor market research
Make sure there’s a need for your product or service. Ideally, your offering should be unique and fill a gap in the market, but if there’s already competition in your intended sector, research ways to position yourself uniquely to improve your chances of success.

2. Inadequate planning
Every new business needs a roadmap to follow, a solid business plan. Unless you’re looking for outside funding, this doesn’t have to be a long, formal document, but it must at least outline the operational and financial directions that your business will take. On the flip-side, be flexible. Don’t allow a business plan to stifle your business if circumstances change.

Motivation in business is a critical key to success. It is easy to lose focus and become overwhelmed with the demands of entrepreneurship. Operating a business often takes the owner away from family and creates financial stress or burden, especially during the start-up stages or in rough economic times.

This collection of small business quotes features pearls of wisdom and motivation from those who have gone before and were able to persevere through challenging times. Others in this collection are simply humorous and meant to lift an entrepreneur's spirits and provide the motivation to push through obstacles and build a better business.

Serial entrepreneur Steve Blank has an excellent post on his blog today about the value of business models vs. business plans.

He points out the ultimate benefit of making a dynamic business model: being able test your assumptions before you waste time crafting a plan that might not actually work.

Blank compares two early-stage startups: one that had spent the last 3 months researching and writing up their business plan -- while the other spent their 3 months building and testing their business model.

I [Scott Kirsner] occasionally get e-mails from soon-to-graduate students asking how they can find a tech job. Last week, I received one from a Babson College senior.

I usually feel ill-equipped to provide good advice; while I have a job covering the tech community, it has been a long while since I’ve interviewed for jobs. So what recommendations would you share with students, many of whom are trying to make plans for June and beyond?

There is a long-running dispute over who constitute ‘real’ entrepreneurs. It is important we understand their importance.

At the University of Miami a few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend an entrepreneurship class with roughly 40 students.

Most of them were juniors and seniors, joined by a small number of law students.

The course had so far covered the theoretical literature on entrepreneurship, but on this particular day all the students wanted to talk about was their own futures.

Studying entrepreneurship in the midst of a severe recession and stumbling recovery, and in the months leading up to graduation, has made these students acutely aware that their own economic futures may not be entirely secure. Make no mistake: jobs are front and center in students’ minds. Both the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve expect the unemployment rate to remain at relatively high levels for the next few years, falling from the present 9.7 percent to around 8 percent by the end of 2012.

Organizations within the nonprofit sector are, for the most part, in a constant state of struggle. Between trying to keep funding coming in and keeping all the constituents happy, it can be easy to lose sight of what they are trying to get done. Some of this is just the inherent nature of nonprofits, but much can be remedied by taking a different approach to how nonprofits are run, and therefore perceived. Applying entrepreneurship skills and perspectives to nonprofit organizations will open the doors for a better public reputation and a better opportunity to make a real difference.

Nonprofits, by their very nature, are difficult to manage. Because they are legally owned by the public and exist for the benefit of the public, they are run by a group of usually unpaid individuals. The board is made up of people with a variety of motives for being there -- some have a passion for the cause, some enjoy the role of leadership, some are just trying to beef up their resumes. Between the board and the people who contribute their time and money to work in the organization, there is a sense that everyone has to agree before any move can be made.

I'm Paul Maidment. This is Notes On The News. Tom Falk, chief executive of Kimberly Clark, the health care and consumer goods company that has big plans in China, told us a story of meeting a mayor in China who was pitching his city as a place for Kimberly Clark to invest, one of the selling points being that the city produced 200,000 new graduates a year.

Across China, universities are minting new graduates at record rates, half of them majoring in science or engineering. This has doubled the number of people working in science and technology over the past two decades and tripled the number working in R&D. China is also pouring money into R&D to the point where it is now the third-biggest spender, behind the U.S. and Japan.

By Dr. Janice Presser

Let's say you're a VC or an Angel, and you need to figure out which of many companies will survive, succeed, and become a profit-making 'star'. So, you follow a generally accepted set of guidelines.  You evaluate the market, examine barriers to entry, rank the competition, and predict the outlook for product sales.  You place a value on IP and examine cost projections for everything from the technology infrastructure to the coffee vendor.  You often know the 'ballpark', and if you don't, you know someone who does, so you can easily make adjustments and allowances to refine the company's projections.  

But there is one thing you can't do - or at least, you haven't been able to do 'til now - and that is to predict how well management will perform as a team.

What's Human Infrastructure?
For the past 100 years, business has viewed people as individual units of productivity and/or cost, a bias that is reflected in the terms 'Personnel,' Human Resources,' and 'Human Capital'.  In a business plan, this bias shows up as "plug in two for R&D, one for Finance, five for Operations", etc.  But has it occurred to you that this concept is way out of date?  We live in a world where one person, sitting on a beach in the Bahamas with a laptop and a wireless connection, can execute work that - just 20 years ago - might have required the coordinated efforts of fifty people.

Last Friday, I had the opportunity to join an extraordinary group of women entrepreneurs mostly from Saudi Arabia for a lunch at the home of the Honorable Esther Coopersmith.  All were both proud of their higher education in Saudi Arabia and had started companies in a wide range of businesses from construction to IT.  I should not have been surprised.  Starting a business in Saudi Arabia is relatively easy. Its “ease of starting a business” rank is 13 out of 183 economies, according the World Bank’s Doing Business 2010 data. This is not surprising. Saudi Arabia is widely recognized as a leader in promoting and enabling entrepreneurship and innovation.

Entrepreneurship enjoys high level support in this country. Prince Abdulaziz bin Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, the advisor to the King of Saudi Arabia, chairs the Saudi Arabian National Entrepreneurship Center (NEC), an institution created to empower the young to be successful entrepreneurs by creating the needed supportive environment through specialized education, training, knowledge, mentoring, and finance.

Moreover, Saudi Arabia is home to the one of the most influential Middle Eastern educational institutions, the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). The university is an international, graduate-level research university dedicated to inspiring a new age of scientific achievement in the Kingdom, across the region and around the globe. KAUST recruited top education leaders from around the world to ensure high-impact education, and engages in academic relationships and research collaborations with various global academic institutions.

Maybe you’ve seen a PowerPoint presentation that looks something like this [visual: heinous PPT template]. Maybe you were the author of a PowerPoint like that. This is a little unfair—usually people will throw in some clip art to jazz it up a little [visual: ridiculous smiley-face clip art]. How do you avoid the dreaded bullet-drenched PPT? Here are 3 tips.

1. Be simple. I know, you’ve heard it before. But it’s worth hearing again. There’s a trial lawyer who holds a focus group with the jury after every major case. His one overriding conclusion: If you make 10 arguments to the jury, no matter how good each argument is, by the time they get back to the jury room, they’ll remember nothing. If you say 10 things, you say nothing. Well, your colleagues are your jury. I know it hurts to cut but if your main points are going to shine through, you’ve got to be ruthless.

2. Show something. To be clear, that’s not the same thing as using clip art. You don’t need to decorate, you need to communicate. What you show doesn’t even need to be on the screen. I got an email from the president of a power tools company who was on the way to a sales meeting. He’d prepped a long presentation about how great his tools were. At the last minute, he decided to toss it out and instead, he put two drills on the table in front of the customer—his and his competitor’s. He disassembled both of them side-by-side to show the durability of his drills. The customer loved it. The best presentations are like this—they bring a little reality into the room.

By now you've probably heard of Australopithecus sediba, the 1.95-million-year-old human species that made news on April 8. In a nutshell, researchers have found two beautifully preserved partial skeletons that they say represent a previously unknown member of the human family--one that may have given rise to our genus, Homo. You can read my story on the find here.

There's a lot to talk about with this discovery, so I thought I'd supplement the story with some tidbits from the cutting room floor and material that came in after my deadline.

First, some tidbits:

• Lead investigator Lee Berger's nine-year-old son Matthew spotted the first A. sediba fossil--a collar bone that turned out to be from a juvenile individual around Matthew's age. Matthew was originally listed as a co-author on the Science paper describing the fossils, but the reviewers of the paper rejected that idea, according to a news story that accompanied the technical reports in the journal.

The valley of death refers to the severe financial risks that startups face as they struggle to grow from small teams to viable ventures. The dip of the valley refers to the debt -- i.e., the negative balance sheets -- that companies experience as they invest money now in hopes of making it back upon success (the accompanying figure provides a general description).

Nowhere is this valley of death more evident than in clean technology, where startups face a difficult combination of challenges. On the one hand, there is the challenge of teams seeking $50k to $5M or more in funding to begin translating their advanced science into industrial processes (moving thin-film solar or fuels from algae out of the lab and into commercial production) and, on the other hand, there's the challenge of funded startups trying to raise investments for the industrial-sized plants and equipment needed to utilize those emerging processes.