Austin continues to attract new venture capital firms, growth equity deals and a steady stream of new startups. But, in terms of venture firms, Central Texas still lives in the shadow of the nation’s top investing tech hubs on the east and west coasts.

When it comes to angel investing, however, Austin is home to the nation’s most active group — Central Texas Angel Network.

It’s that time of year again. Thousands of qualified college graduates are getting set to enter the workforce. They were promised that their hard work and diligence will earn them an attractive job and a high chance of success. With ambition, motivation, and dreams, scores of young men and women will forge their way into the business world.

Koby Wheeler has launched and crashed three businesses. But he’s not embarrassed by any of it. “It gives me more confidence,” he says, “because I have those experiences. I know to ask better questions, I know to trust my gut, and I have a more long-term way of thinking.”

For many business owners, 2018 will go down as a banner year. Countless companies, both large and small, realized record profits and experienced higher than normal cash flows. The hard work of many executives paid off in various ways.

For me, as a female entrepreneur, 2018 started off immensely successfully. I remember thinking to myself that I had it pretty good. I was running my own company of almost 90 employees, bringing in business left and right and making a strong name for myself and my firm. I had won numerous awards, and although I had some serious issues with my male partners, I refused to let it get me down.

Happy Memorial Day from Rich Bendis and the Innovation America Team!

NEW YORK CITY—When technology entrepreneur Venk Varadan co-founded startup Nanowear five years ago, he had an innovative idea for a cloth-based diagnostic monitoring tool using nanosensor technology. But he faced significant challenges when it came to tackling the nuts and bolts of building the business, such as supply chain, logistics, funding, and healthcare regulations.

Image: https://www.fiercehealthcare.com

STRATEGY Blockchain Is a Technology for Collaboration Andrew Shipilov, INSEAD Professor of Strategy | May 22, 2019

The unique strength of blockchain is authenticating “stuff” to enable trust between partners.

Even though blockchain is frequently in the news, it is still poorly understood. Conventional wisdom is that blockchain essentially concerns cryptocurrency speculation, or at the very least, people believe that this technology’s primary use entails financial transactions.

Image: https://knowledge.insead.edu

The Class of 2019 is getting ready to begin their post-college lives, and many new graduates are deciding where to start their careers and their lives.

We put together a list of 20 US cities with large and thriving populations of recent college grads.

We looked at five indicators in each of the 260 metropolitan areas for which data was available: size of the young-adult population, share of young adults with at least a bachelor's degree, the unemployment rate among young adults, median earnings among young adults, and the cost of living relative to the national average.

Do you feel inundated with calls to innovate, innovate, innovate? The assumption is that first-mover innovation is key to success, especially in ventures and business. Is this true?

One area that has seen a lot of attempts at innovation is K-12 education. One example is AltSchool, a company started by a successful tech-entrepreneur, Max Ventilla, who decided that his children were not getting a great education in Silicon Valley, and decided to start the “right kind” of school to enhance their innovation skills.

Politicians don’t win prizes for speed, but the European Union’s parliament and the leaders of its member states made record time this year when they hammered out an agreement that could supply researchers in Europe with more than €100 billion (US$113 billion) over 7 years.

One day before the last parliament dissolved, on 17 April, negotiators signed off on the general outlines of the union’s next giant research programme, known as Horizon Europe, which runs from 2021 to 2027.

In the community of New Kensington, situated about seventeen miles northeast of downtown Pittsburgh, signs of economic downturn are evident. Vacant storefronts, empty warehouses, and its once bustling Fifth Avenue are what remain since the community’s heyday when major manufacturing corporations called New Kensington home.

Rapid advances in technology have affected almost every business and industry, including manufacturing. The propulsion of things such as artificial intelligence, robotics, and data analysis is fueling the proverbial flame of what some believe will be the next industrial revolution. Known by manufacturing experts as “Industry 4.0,” this shift represents the digital transformation of manufacturing.

Even for strong startups, fundraising is a marathon that requires near constant attention for 8–12 weeks. The process is punishing, and riskier than you might imagine. You need to prep for it as seriously as you would a race.

Prepare for rejection. A lot of it. A promising startup will get 17 or 18 “no’s” for every “yes.” These brush-offs often have less to do with the startup in question than idiosyncratic context or concerns for each VC. Still, it stings. Don’t get demoralized.

There are, undoubtedly, many factors that go into a person’s weight. A new report from the lab of Sekar Kathiresan, MD, director of the Center for Genomic Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), documents a clear biologic basis for the predisposition of obesity. More specifically, that genetics play a role in how heavy a person gets.

The study used polygenic risk scores (PRS) to stratify patients into risk categories based on their genetic mutations. It is unusual for a disease to be caused by mutations in a single gene. More commonly, diseases (including cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and some brain disorders) are mediated by a collection of common and low-frequency genetic variants, most of which remain unknown. Each variant has a small effect, but, taken together, they could indicate a person’s overall risk.

Silicon Valley has long been a power center of American innovation. Now that high-tech is also becoming a focus of tensions between the U.S. and China, companies based here are trying to understand how they fit in. VOA's Michelle Quinn speaks with the head of the U.S. Defense Department's local outpost who sees the tech industry as key to U.S. national security.

Coming off the record-breaking venture financing numbers of 2018, the first quarter of 2019 displayed some cooling off, in terms of pre-money valuations across all rounds and amounts raised in Series C and later rounds, although the market remained strong by historical standards. Q1 2019 had slightly fewer up rounds for Series B and later financings than did the last two quarters of 2018. Median pre-money valuations declined moderately across all equity rounds in Q1 2019. Median amounts raised remained strong for Seed, Series A, and Series B rounds, with those medians matching or exceeding those of Q4 2018. But the median amount raised in Series C and later rounds declined significantly, falling from the historic high of $31.1 million reached in Q4 2018 to $15.3 million in Q1 2019.

Image: https://www.wsgr.com

Eleven years ago, Charles Morgan retired from the rat race after suffering a bruising fight with the board of Acxiom Corp., a billion-dollar database marketing company of which he had been chairman and CEO for 33 years. He was content to be an investor in a mobile telecom startup, but found himself taking over when the business struggled.

Morgan wrote about his startup adventures in his new book, Now What: The Biography of a (Finally) Successful Startup. He joined the Knowledge@Wharton radio show on SiriusXM recently to share the business insights he gleaned from rescuing First Orion. (Listen to the podcast at the top of the page.)

As we live longer and technology continues its rapid arc of development, we can imagine a future where machines will augment our human abilities and help us make better life choices, from health to wealth. Instead of conducting a question and answer with a device on the countertop, we will be able to converse naturally with our virtual assistant that is fully embedded in our physical environment. Through our dialogue and digital breadcrumbs, it will understand our life goals and aspirations, our obligations and limitations. It will seamlessly and automatically help us budget and save for different life events, so we can spend more time enjoying life’s moments.

Countries, sectors, and CEOs face an increasingly complex world characterized by the diffusion of new digital technologies, affecting productivity performance while causing disruption. In this world, the rewards for success—and the penalties for failure—are ever greater.

Every February for the last 35 years, the National Football League has run a scouting camp, called a combine, to assess the skills of college players before its annual draft. With scientific precision, the players are evaluated on a number of tests, including the 40-yard dash, bench presses, and vertical leaps. Performance at the combine can affect how early a player is selected in the draft, which is assumed to be a leading indicator of career trajectory. However, many studies (pdf) have shown that although the combine measures the table stakes of athletic skills, it misses the intangibles that make a player stand out come game time.

What is blockchain, where is it used, and will it become mainstream?

These are just some of the questions on the lips of the public as the word—and cryptocurrency in general—are becoming more widely used.

But if you're new to the idea of blockchain, it can seem a tricky concept to get your head around. With this in mind, we recently sat down with Dr. Ying-Ying Hsieh, Assistant Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Imperial College Business School, to talk about blockchain and its applications in cryptocurrency and beyond.