You have to be extra tough mentally to start a new business venture. While thinking about it, I realized that it’s really not that different from the toughness required and trained into America’s elite military force of Navy SEALs, who are known to be cool under fire, able to sense danger before it’s too late, and never give up on achieving their objective.

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You might think given the chatter in the startup world that venture capitalists are short on funds — after all, we’re hearing about young tech companies finding themselves marooned between stages, hitting up investors with smaller capital pools than prior backers and turning to equity crowdfunding to keep their cash balances healthy.

Across the financial industry, the term “dry powder” gets thrown around a lot. What started as a slang term with historic ties is now a well-known word with relevance across the global capital markets. In fact, the PitchBook Platform currently tracks more than 12,000 investors whose fund dry powder percentage is at least 10%. In this article, we take a closer look at what dry powder is, its history and a few ways investors can leverage it.

The final numbers from the Pitchbook-NVCA Venture Monitor show that the second quarter was a mixed bag for the U.S. startup ecosystem.

While deal count and fundraising by VC funds remained strong in Q2, economic worries and the war in Ukraine made everyone more cautious. Deal values across all stages and VC-backed public listings were hit harder by the economic downturn, the report said.

The James Webb Space Telescope might be getting all the news headlines this week, but the grand old dame of the space telescope world, the Hubble Space Telescope, continues to peer out into the cosmos and provide stunning views of space. At over 30 years old, Hubble remains one of the key instruments for examining cosmic objects in the visible light range and captures views of everything from distant galaxies to beautiful nebulae to planets in our solar system.

Image: The globular cluster Terzan 2 in the constellation Scorpio is featured in this observation from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. Cohen

Using a novel fabrication process, MIT researchers have produced smart textiles that snugly conform to the body so they can sense the wearer’s posture and motions.

By incorporating a special type of plastic yarn and using heat to slightly melt it — a process called thermoforming — the researchers were able to greatly improve the precision of pressure sensors woven into multilayered knit textiles, which they call 3DKnITS.

Newswise — For the function of many biomolecules, their three-dimensional structure is crucial. Researchers are therefore not only interested in the sequence of the individual building blocks of biomolecules, but also in their spatial structure. With the help of artificial intelligence (AI), bioinformaticians can already reliably predict the three-dimensional structure of a protein from its amino acid sequence. For RNA molecules, however, this technology is still in its infancy. Researchers at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) describe a way to use AI to reliably predict the structure of certain RNA molecules from their nucleotide sequence in the journal PLOS Computational Biology of 7 July 2022.

College has been a defining experience for countless people, but it's one that many of today's teenagers would rather do without. Between February 2020 and January 2021, the number of high-schoolers considering a traditional higher education dropped by 25%, with more than half planning to enter the workforce without a degree.

The pandemic has accelerated the growth of remote work and has transformed the landscape into something much more dynamic. While digital nomadism has existed since before the inception of Web2, with Steve Roberts being called the first digital nomad, it wasn't until social media became a forerunner in today's society that it really took off. Now, paired with the transformative changes that lockdowns and border closures have implemented, we are seeing emergent trends that point towards a new culture that will go on to transform retail, commerce and entrepreneurship.

Thousands of words have been written about the path and the journey of entrepreneurship, but taking the advice of people who have walked the same path—with all its ups and downs—is priceless. These five pillars of entrepreneurship are based on what I’ve learned from my own failures and successes.

I have learned from experience that scaling any business is difficult. You may feel good when that first burst of customers arrives, but don’t assume that “word of mouth” and those early adopters will grow your business to match your dreams of success. In these days of global competition via multiple channels, you need continuous marketing to find more customers. They won’t find you.

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As the market swoons, venture capital firms continue to announce new funds.

TechCrunch reporters covered five of these more in-depth Tuesday, as you will see below.

Meanwhile, I corresponded with three firms about their funds and any concerns that limited partners had brought up during the fundraising stage.

Haris Khurshid, general partner at Chalo Ventures, launched a $50 million second fund focused on investing in Pakistani startups and a smaller percentage in Latin American startups.

If the hype weren't from NASA, you might think it hyperbole: "Never before seen images of the universe."

But an endeavor doesn't get any more cosmic than that of the $9.7 billion James Webb Space Telescope, which in December launched on a journey 1 million miles from Earth and today released its first batch of images from space. The full-color images show, in startling detail, corners of the unseen universe, from the star-speckled "mountains and valleys" of the young, star-forming region called NGC 3324, to the largest-ever mosaic of the millions of young stars in the galaxy cluster called Stephan's Quintet.

Image: https://hub.jhu.edu/2022/07/12/webb-space-telescope-stsci-first-images/

The Board of Governors of the Israel-U.S. Binational Industrial Research and Development (BIRD) Foundation approved $7.9 million in funding for nine new projects between U.S. and Israeli companies. In addition to the grants from BIRD, the projects will access private sector funding, boosting the total value of all projects to $20 million.

Image: Bird Foundation Board of governors. (Bird Foundation)

Only a few areas in the U.S. have the right infrastructure and coastal location to support government and commercial space ports—places like the coasts of Virginia, Florida, Texas, California, Alaska, or remote areas of Arizona and New Mexico. But lack of a spaceport does not mean a region cannot grow and attract space tech companies. New space technologies and space companies are advancing manufacturing, bridging the digital divide, monitoring climate change, and furthering sustainable growth, on the ground and around the globe.

AmerisourceBergen, one of the top pharmaceutical distributors, is investing $150 million in a corporate venture fund focused on healthcare startups.

The wholesale giant's new VC fund, called AB Health Ventures, will initially look to invest in early to midstage health-related startups both in the U.S. and abroad. The fund will prioritize investments in startups focused on innovation in pharmacy and distribution, clinical development and commercialization of pharmaceuticals, practice solutions for healthcare providers and animal health, executives said in a press release.

A volunteer in New Zealand has become the first person to undergo DNA editing in order to lower their blood cholesterol, a step that may foreshadow wide use of the technology to prevent heart attacks.

The experiment, part of a clinical trial by the US biotechnology company Verve Therapeutics, involved injecting a version of the gene-editing tool CRISPR in order to modify a single letter of DNA in the patient’s liver cells.

Image: MS TECH | ENVATO

Please join us for the release party of NASA’s SBIR Ignite solicitation on July 13 at 6 p.m. EDT. During the interactive webinar, you’ll learn more about SBIR Ignite, a new funding opportunity for product-driven, commercialization-focused firms and the technology challenges NASA is looking to solve. NASA SBIR Ignite offers a simple and streamlined path to receiving up to $1 million in funding through Phase 1 and 2 awards and more through Post Phase II opportunities.

SBIR Ignite is part of NASA’s SBIR/STTR program, which the federal government created to strengthen the role of innovative small businesses in federally-funded research or research and development (R/R&D). One of the specific purposes of the program is to increase private sector commercialization of innovations derived from federal R/R&D, thereby increasing competition, productivity, and economic growth. In particular, SBIR Ignite seeks to fund early-stage, high-risk technologies that are relevant in the commercial market while contributing to the agency's goals in aeronautics and space technology development.

When launching a new startup, I always surround myself with two types of business people: creatives, to bring ideas, inspiration and inventiveness; and engineers, to help build the business "machinery" and make it work and scale.

In his book Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Peter Drucker said, “Entrepreneurship is neither a science nor an art. It is a practice. It is a knowledge base... But in all practices, medicine, for instance, or engineering, knowledge in entrepreneurship is a means to an end.”

Some people are not cut out to be entrepreneurs. This is a good thing, or the business world would be chaos, with everyone trying to do their own thing. So what about you? How do you know if you should be running your own company, or concentrating on that queue of work that someone else has built for you?

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