At 88 years old, Warren Buffett is still living life to the fullest.

To Buffett, that means going to work — which he calls a "vacation every day" — and eating McDonald's for lunch at least three times a week.

The CEO of holding company Berkshire Hathaway and the world's third-richest man revealed his peculiar lifestyle habits in a three-hour long interview with the Financial Times. Buffett told FT he has no plans to retire; while his old age means he must wear a hearing aid and avoid driving at night, he still "jumps out of bed" to go to work.

Image: Warren Buffett is 88-years-old and drinks soda every day. Reuters

What dozens of experienced CEOs wish someone had told them before they assumed the hot seat.

“Aspiring CEOs need to be careful what they wish for; the job has its downsides too.” - A seasoned CEO

Many business school graduates see the CEO job as the pinnacle of one’s career. As a result, they work hard to get there or, if they feel their path is blocked, leave the big company to become CEO of their own start-up, sometimes with huge success. Yet those who achieve that hallowed CEO status often face enormous unforeseen challenges that make them wonder whether it was all worth it. And with good reason, because these challenges tend to lead to increased stress. This, in turn, has a detrimental impact on their career and home life.

Why are Angels important?

Angels provide a surprising amount of money to the local startup ecosystem. Angel Capital Association noted in a 2016 report that angel investors provide about $24 billion per year to seed and startup entrepreneurs in the US.

The impact of Angels cannot be overstated. To provide perspective, the Center for Venture Research noted in 2011 that Angels provide first-time capital to over 20,000 companies per year in the US while VCs invest their first capital in less than 1000 new companies per year.

More women than ever are balancing motherhood with their careers, and it’s a feat that often goes unnoticed. That is unless you think about their daughters who are watching how they seemingly do it all. Research indicates that children raised in working-mom households grow up to be happier adults, and if you ask female executives, that’s their desire for their kids.

New research from Congress’ Joint Economic Committee’s Social Capital Project finds that the migration of highly-educated adults toward dynamic states and major metropolitan areas is accentuating America’s geographic divisions. Using census data from 1940 to the present, the authors define “brain drain” as someone in the top third of the national education distribution who resides in a state other than their state of birth between the ages of 31 and 40.

Image: https://ssti.org

Barriers to economic opportunity are not an abstract theory for me. I experienced them firsthand. Growing up in a working-class home outside Cleveland, Ohio, I lived four blocks from the dividing line between two school districts. The discrepancy between the high school I attended — which served mostly lower-income kids like me — and the one I would have gone to had I lived just a few blocks to the east was stark.

Image: https://reports.jpmorganchase.com

Last month, we celebrated five years in business at my enterprise, Infographic.ly. A landmark, really, when you consider the reality of what it takes to keep a company going today- it’s definitely not easy! Amidst all the celebrations, I found myself in a particularly reflective mood, looking back at how we got to where we are now- the ups, the downs, the incredible highs, and the crushing lows, all shaping the business as a whole.

Former Apple Macintosh evangelist and author Guy Kawasaki has given at least 2,000 speeches since 1987. Many of the presentation techniques he uses to captivate an audience he learned from the most influential boss he's ever had —Steve Jobs.

I recently had an opportunity to sit down with Kawasaki at his Silicon Valley house to talk about his latest book, "Wise Guy." Specifically, we talked about public-speaking strategies that all entrepreneurs and leaders should follow if they want to give presentations that stand out.

These days, the influencers at the top of your business make your brand, rather than a brand making influencers of your leaders. Consider Jeff Bezos at the top of Amazon, or Howard Schultz at the top of Starbucks. They were influencers before they were a brand. You too can become an influencer through social media, videos and blogs, and people will follow you on what to buy, what causes to support, and who to vote for.

Image: Jeff Bezos via Flickr by jdlasica 

According to PwC’s 22nd Annual Global CEO Survey, just 40% of technology leaders said they were ‘very confident’ in their organisation’s revenue growth potential over the next 12 months. We also asked tech CEOs about their longer-term prospects for revenue growth between now and 2021. 

Their confidence was at the lowest level recorded in the past five years. The challenges tech companies face arguably are greater, and more complex, than any the industry has come up against recently, in part because some of them go to the heart of their relationships with their customers—indeed, to the question of how seriously they take their consumer and business customers’ concerns about privacy and data safeguards.

Your boss tells you to create the next multimillion-dollar blockbuster product. After all, you are the expert. Yet, no matter how much your team tries to think outside of the box, your innovation iterations can’t seem to break through the legacy product. Sure it has better bells and whistles, but at the end of the day, it’s still the same widget with a new name.

As manufacturers wrestle with increasing demands for advanced technology and integration of it within their facilities and across their supply chains, the Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) Program has also been in the process of undergoing its own transformation. It’s becoming a National Network capable of providing small and medium-sized manufacturers (SMMs) across the United States with access to the resources and expertise they need to manufacture tomorrow. What was originally a program (or “system”) has evolved into a national community of manufacturing experts who work together to devise solutions that are delivered to manufacturers on a local level.

A favorite among entrepreneurs and tech scene advocates, Mike Krenn chosen to lead as CEO Two of San Diego’s oldest startup groups — Connect and the San Diego Venture Group — are merging into one entity, creating what could be a powerhouse of influence with more money, more connections, and ultimately more support for the startup scene.

The two nonprofits, both founded in the 1980s, have put Mike Krenn, the former president of San Diego Venture Group, at the helm as CEO. The combined entity will be a startup accelerator on steroids, helping to train, fund and fuel new tech and life science companies in San Diego.

Image: Mike Krenn, who will be the CEO of the newly merged San Diego Venture Group and Connect, at the new offices last week in San Diego.(Eduardo Contreras/The San Diego Union-Tribune)

The VC firm New Enterprise Associates has previously invested in buzzy open source software companies like MongoDB, Elastic, Nginx, and Databricks. So when NEA principal Julia Schottenstein saw how fast an open source business intelligence software project called Metabase was growing, she knew what NEA's next investment had to be.

Image: Metabase

As the managing partner for Andreessen Horowitz — the venture capital firm that counts Airbnb, Facebook, Lyft, and Slack in its portfolio — Scott Kupor knows what to look for in startups, and what startups should look for in venture capital.  

At the April 19 MIT Tech Conference Kupor — author of the upcoming “Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It” — shared his advice on choosing whether venture capital money is right for you, if you’re right for a venture capitalist, and what it really means when a VC joins the team.

To thwart possible disruption, pundits give legacy companies such advice as “disrupt yourself before you get disrupted” or “put frontline employees in charge of strategy and execution.” This counsel is of little help. Military history offers a much better way to respond. We call it tempo-based competition.

In 1976, U.S. Air Force Col. John Boyd explained why American fighter pilots had a far higher “kill ratio” (10:1) than opponents in the Korean War. At the time, the commonly held belief was that U.S. pilots were much better trained. If this was true, then dogfight victories should have been evenly distributed among all U.S. pilots. They were not; a few pilots achieved most of the kills while the others had very few, none, or were shot down themselves.

Coral reefs smell of rotting flesh as they bleach. The riot of colors—yellow, violet, cerulean—fades to ghostly white as the corals’ flesh goes translucent and falls off, leaving their skeletons underneath fuzzy with cobweb-like algae.

Corals live in symbiosis with a type of algae. During the day, the algae photosynthesize and pass food to the coral host. During the night, the coral polyps extend their tentacles and catch passing food. Just 1 °C of ocean warming can break down this coral-algae relationship. The stressed corals expel the algae, and after repeated or prolonged episodes of such bleaching, they can die from heat stress, starve without the algae feeding them, or become more susceptible to disease.

Image: UNSPLASH / SCOTT WEBB

For my money, there’s no better crash course in risk management than the documentary, Free Solo . To most, the thought of climbing 3,200 feet up the granite face of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park is daunting enough. But free-climbing it without any ropes is just pure insanity. Or is it? When Alex Honnold decided to climb El Capitan, it wasn’t just on a whim. He had spent more than a decade planning his ascent, logging dozens of climbs up and down the granite face, most of it roped in, so he could examine every crack and crevice.

Ten years ago, in 2009, David Brailsford, the then performance director for the Great Britain cycling team, established a road cycling team, Team Sky. When the team launched in January 2010, Brailsford announced they would win the Tour de France within five years.

At the time, this seemed an incredible claim. No British cyclist, let alone British cycling team, had come close to winning this event in over one hundred years of history. And yet he felt confident in setting this ambitious goal.

New CEOs often hear two conflicting messages: first, get out of the gate quickly because your honeymoon will be short and you need to show results; second, play for the long haul. Can you do both? The answer is yes, but it’s hard, and the results can be bittersweet. The companies of new CEOs who shifted their focus to the long term underperformed their counterparts at first and outperformed only after the CEOs had left.