Millennials are delaying homeownership, but they might find house keys in their hands sooner rather than later depending on where they live.

Clever Real Estate recently looked at the best cities for millennials to buy a home — with a focus on cities that are both affordable and appealing — by using data from the US Census, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and Zillow. To determine this list, it ranked the 100 most populated metro areas in the US against four key metrics: job opportunity, home affordability, livability, and housing market forecast.

In the past, a small business owner might not consider using a Non-Disclosure Agreement (also called a confidentiality agreement or an NDA). But times have changed, and today having an NDA in your toolbox is a must.

With freelancers now regularly taking part in projects with small businesses, you have to use an NDA. And if you don’t make your freelancer sign one, it could have negative repercussions down the road. But NDAs can also protect you with inventions, purchase or sale, development of a project, and even a private party.

You’ve got to have a pioneering spirit to stay ahead of the competition in the IT market.  Executives that strive to break new ground, that aren’t afraid to forge new paths, are a tremendous asset to the companies they work for.

Image: https://www.crn.com

One of my favorite independent business documentaries is a movie called Startup.com. The documentary follows to men who started an internet business at the height of the "dot.com boom" in the late 1990's, when countless internet companies were starting and being funded at a remarkable pace by venture capital firms. The dot-com startup company, govWorks.com, raised $60 million in venture capital before becoming another statistic in the bust that followed.

After working in business at all levels, and consulting to entrepreneurs for years, I’m still surprised to see so many situations where things that should be easy are painful to customers, and lead to customers hating your business. How could any rational employee or executive fail to do his or her job, not realize there is a problem, or not care enough to even try to do the right thing?

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com

Astronomers have found dozens of potentially habitable planets outside of our solar system. That's dozens of chances to discover the first alien life! Or plenty of places we could park our first interstellar colonies!

But with so many options, how do we know which is best? You might think the most Earth-like planets should be top of our list. After all, we've got water, land, an atmosphere, and trillions of life forms lapping it all up.

One of India’s most dynamic and successful entrepreneurs, Bhavin Turakhia, announced this week that he's just raised a sizable investment round to grow his latest venture Zeta, which he co-founded with Ramki Gaddipatiin 2015. The investment from French facilities management company Sodexo now values Zeta at $300 million. It’s a strange thing for Bhavin to do because he doesn’t need the money and he has never raised investment for any of his previous ventures. 

In little more than a decade, the impact of social media has gone from a being an entertaining extra to a fully integrated part of nearly every aspect of daily life for many.

Recently in the realm of commerce, Facebook faced skepticism in its testimony to the Senate Banking Committee on Libra, its proposed cryptocurrency and alternative financial system. In politics, heartthrob Justin Bieber tweeted the President of the United States, imploring him to “let those kids out of cages.” In law enforcement, the Philadelphia police department moved to terminate more than a dozen police officers after their racist comments on social media were revealed.

The New Jersey Economic Development Authority is pressing ahead with a plan to expand business opportunities for women in the Garden State.

The Authority has approved a proposal to organize a New Jersey chapter of Golden Seeds, a national network of “angel investors” dedicated to investing early seed money in women-led startup companies.

NJEDA CEO Tim Sullivan said this is part of a strategy “to build the most diverse and inclusive innovation ecosystem in America, and that means really focusing on women and communities of color.”

In this episode of the Inside the Strategy Room podcast, McKinsey senior partner Erik Roth, partner Matt Banholzer, and communications director Sean Brown discuss how to put together winning innovation teams. (For more conversations on the strategy issues that matter, subscribe to the series on iTunes.)

When we imagine the homes of the future, we can’t just think about the technologies that could alter our domestic lives. We also need to think about the changing ways that people relate to their habitats.

For the past five years, Ikea has been on a mission to better understand people’s relationships with their homes by doing in-depth sociological studies of its consumers. The company publishes its finding in its annual Life at Home report, which began in 2014. Last year’s report involved visiting the houses and apartments of 22,000 people across 22 countries to better understand what everyday living looks like in today’s world.

Image: Ikea

Blue collar jobs initially meant roles that required manual labour. Today, the definition has broadened to include our Zomato and Swiggy delivery executives, Uber and Ola drivers, UrbanClap and HouseJoy personnel, Rapido Captains, Yulu and Bounce helpers, and others.

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.

I recently helped a large industrial manufacturing company with its strategic planning process. With so much uncertainty surrounding autonomous vehicles, 5G, robotics, global trade, and the oil markets, the company’s senior leaders needed a set of guiding objectives and strategies linking the company’s future to the present day. Before our work began in earnest, executives had already decided on a title for the initiative: Strategy 2030.

Brian Rothenberg’s career has spanned every stage of startup growth, from scrappy zero to triumphant IPO.

We’ll start with a snapshot of “zero”: It’s 2009, and Rothenberg and his SkillSlate co-founder Bartek Ringwelski are piled on the seat of a rickety Vespa knockoff, zooming precariously through the streets of Manhattan to their next pitch meeting. Fast forward nine years (plus one Skillslate acquisition and a stint at TaskRabbit later) to “IPO”: Rothenberg has scaled Eventbrite’s $5B+ growth engine as VP of Growth, and he’s watching the company surge to a nearly three-billion-dollar valuation as it debuts on the New York Stock Exchange.

Creating new products, processes and ideas, innovators are at the forefront of development and progress. Be it a corner-shop or a multinational company, businesses that innovate are able to attract the best talent, increase revenues, scale up more efficiently and grab bigger shares of their respective markets.

Every Congress there are thousands of bills introduced, but earlier this month I was privileged to help introduce one: The Stronger Patents Act. It addresses innovation, an issue close to my heart.

I’m the son of two hippies who taught me to dream and imagine, but also all about business. They taught me that anyone in America can build something new, get a patent, and compete. That means that from the inventor in his garage to the hippy dreamer, anyone can compete with a big corporation with just an idea.

It’s always been tough to start a new business, even when the bottom line was just making a profit to stay alive. A few years ago, a second focus of sustainability (“green”) was added as a requirement for respectability. Now I almost always hear a third mandate - social responsibility. Entrepreneurs are now measured against the “triple bottom line” (TBL or 3BL) of people, planet, and profit.

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com/

Tad knew he was losing his hearing. What he didn’t know was that everyone around him knew as well.

Tad (not his real name) was a senior executive in a multinational company. Much of his work was done in lengthy meetings with dozens of participants. His hearing loss was making it difficult for him to keep track of what was happening in meetings — but his vanity kept him from getting a hearing aid. So instead, when he missed important points, he would try to decipher what was happening from slides or fill in the blanks from the fragments of conversation he could catch.

A common complaint I hear from my startup clients and many entrepreneurs is that rapid growth is more difficult than ever anticipated. The assumption usually is that more money is needed for marketing, or another round of new development is needed on the product. Yet I find in digging deeper, the challenge is just as often getting the right people and culture, rather than money.