The dream of being your own boss is a driving factor for many when it comes to striking out on their own, but the idea of starting a business from scratch without a safety net (financial or skill-wise) can prove overwhelming. The gig economy, which encompasses more than one-third of U.S. workers according to a Gallup report, has, however, helped mainstream this concept of embracing the unknown and pursuing one’s passion on the side while continuing to be gainfully employed full time.

The decision to take the ultimate plunge to build your own firm is never an easy one. The decision can be spurred in a moment of realising a path-breaking idea or an intense desire for individual freedom driven by a stifling corporate culture. Whatever the reason, the path is akin to a game of  thorns where the entire world seems to queue up against you! The article intends to serve as a primer for aspiring entrepreneurs to help them navigate through the initial days before the real battle begins!

The hardest part about starting a business is finding the seed capital to get the ball rolling. Like the first step of a thousand-mile journey, it's the hardest and most important. For many veterans, owning their own business is the way to financial freedom. There's a reason entrepreneurs call seed capital "friends and family money." Now veterans don't need to go around asking loved ones for the money – one bank is willing to jump start your idea.

Why did grunge music emerge in Seattle? Business strategists and development economists may have an answer that can at least partially explain why, and it relates to something called regional competitive advantage.

Regional competitive advantage is the “secret sauce” that enables regions and industry clusters to compete on a global scale. The same concept can be used to explain why Silicon Valley emerged around San Francisco or why Southern Ontario’s Toronto-Waterloo corridor is emerging as one of the premier innovation ecosystems and technology clusters in the world.

Incubator Managers play a crucial role in how a startup evolves through its initial days. An incubation manager’s skills can make or break startups’ potential and future... In short, they are responsible for guiding their startups towards sustainability and investability. Since they are the highest-touch interface between startups and the incubation, they play the most important role in determining the incubation program’s success.

Richard Ennis’ new autobiographic book, Never Bullshit the Client- My Life In Investment Consulting tells the story of his misspent youth, the interest he later developed in finance theory and his role in helping create the field of institutional investment consulting as we know it today.

I first met Richard, the co-founder of investment consulting firm, EnnisKnupp, around 1998. At that time he had the dubious distinction of heading possibly one of the least profitable, highest integrity pension advisers in the country.

People don't ask each for advice as often as they used. Instead, they're much more likely to whip out their phone and ask their favorite search engine. With voice-enabled AIs, they can literally ask out loud. Other users type their query in as a cobbled string of keywords, and still others start typing in a question and go where autocomplete leads them. 

Ohio State University joined the state's 13 other public and two private universities to standardize and simplify their legal and business processes for commercializing technology.

Image: Kevin Taylor, Ohio State University associate vice president of technology commercialization, listens Sept. 6, 2019, as Lt. Gov. Jon Husted announces the statewide standardization of university technology licensing processes. CARRIE GHOSE

You could call it hibernation, but that’s too kind. You could call it neglect, yet some are working on it pushing the proverbial boulder up the corporate mountain. To be kind, let’s simply call it The Long Sleep. This condition happens inside organizations when an innovation concept bounces along internally for a long time without launching.

Investing in entrepreneurs and startups is a fun but different world from investing in conventional stocks, bonds, and commodities. First of all, it’s more of an investment in people than in a business, since the startup is usually an idea barely half-baked when they need your money. Secondly, the risk is very high, since as many as 90 percent of startups fail within a few years.

“Meet me at the club.” It was practically my catchphrase my first year of running my own company. It’s not that I liked my city’s swanky business club more than my office … I just didn’t have an office at all.

I was just 26 when I started my executive headhunting business, and I couldn’t afford the fancy downtown office I knew I’d need to woo new clients. What I could afford, though, was a youth membership at Vancouver’s Terminal City Club. It was a few hundred bucks a month: a splurge if you include the initiation fee, but well worth it (and far less than an office lease).

The neighborhood pool is crowded, the garden in the backyard is overflowing with vegetables, and the lemonade stand down the street is thriving. It’s official: summer is in full bloom.

But not everywhere in the US sees an infusion of liveliness this time of year. In fact, in many places—particularly so-called “college towns”—summer is a notably quieter time of year.

September 5, 2019 – (San Francisco) – The Breakthrough Prize Foundation and its founding sponsors – Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Ma Huateng, Yuri and Julia Milner, and Anne Wojcicki – today announced the recipients of the 2020 Breakthrough Prize and 2020 New Horizons Prize, awarding a collective $21.6 million in recognition of important achievements in the Life Sciences, Fundamental Physics, and Mathematics.

Now in its eighth year, the Breakthrough Prize, known as the “Oscars of Science,” annually recognizes achievements in the Life Sciences, Fundamental Physics and Mathematics, disciplines that ask the biggest questions and seek the deepest explanations. Considered the world’s most generous science prize, each Breakthrough Prize is $3 million.

The oceans of the world are warming up, their average temperatures pushed higher and higher each year by human-caused global warming.

Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution a few hundred years ago, humans have burned massive amounts of fossil fuels; cut down huge swaths of forest; and undertaken many other activities that pump heat-trapping carbon dioxide into Earth’s atmosphere. In response, the planet has warmed up.

After speed and emissions, excessive noise from vehicles is possibly one of the biggest sources of pollution in Europe.

Noise can be more than just a nuisance that stops you sleeping at night.

Noise pollution is a serious public health problem according to the World Health Organization, and is a leading cause of pollution shortly after environmental pollution.

We analyzed the terms of 215 venture financings closed in the second quarter of 2019 by companies headquartered in Silicon Valley. The quarter showed the highest percentage of up rounds since 2004, when we first started publishing this report, and the strongest rise in median price increases since mid-2015.

Image: https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/silicon-valley-venture-capital-survey-19314/

Armed with some data from our friends at CrunchBase, I broke down the largest global startup funding rounds for the month of August.  I have included some additional information such as industry, round type, a brief description of the company, and total equity funding raised for the company to further the analysis.

Image: https://www.alleywatch.com

Healthcare giant Johnson & Johnson today announced the six winners of the Champions of Science Africa Innovation Challenge 2.0 at the 28th World Economic Forum on Africa in Cape Town.

The winning teams will get share of $300 000 prize pool, along with extensive mentoring and network building to support the expansion and sustainability of the companies and their programmes.

Image: https://ventureburn.com

TORONTO, CANADA and LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM / ACCESSWIRE / SEPTEMBER 6, 2019 - Soricimed Biopharma Inc. ("Soricimed"), a clinical-stage pharmaceutical company discovering and developing first-in-class targeted cancer therapeutics, today announced that it has entered into a strategic alliance with Image Analysis Group (“IAG”), a UK-based company with unique expertise in medical imaging and artificial intelligence (“AI”)-based image analytics, whereby the companies will join their efforts in the development of Soricimed’s lead anti-cancer drug candidate, SOR-C13, a first-in-class inhibitor of the TRPV6 calcium channel.

There's never been a better time to work at a startup.

With industries like self-driving cars, machine learning, and cloud computing growing, startups are at the forefront of innovation. Social media site LinkedIn has released its third annual Top Startups list, which ranks the best startups to work for.

Image: Scooter startup Bird. Bird