People who get stressed managing their own lives don’t make good entrepreneurs. Small businesses require multi-tasking, work prioritization, and decision-making, with no assistants or help from specialists. That’s why Fortune 500 executives usually don’t survive as startup CEOs.

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com

If we asked you to envision a creative person, you might imagine an artist with paint-spackled clothing, or a designer launching a revolutionary new product, or even a child, painstakingly fitting Legos together to create a flying car.

What you almost certainly wouldn’t think of is an office cubicle.

Creativity, we think, happens in wide open spaces, brightly colored rooms, and messy studios. It happens from disorder and experimentation at midnight or 3 am, not the middle of the work day.

Image: Creativity isn't just the domain of artists: it belongs at work as well.PHOTO BY CHRISTINA MORILLO VIA PEXELS.

As AI-enabled automation advances, organizations should embrace “lifelong employability,” which stretches traditional notions of learning and development and can inspire workers to adapt, more routinely, to the evolving economy.

After much thought and deliberation, we’ve decided not to move forward with our plans to build a headquarters for Amazon in Long Island City, Queens. For Amazon, the commitment to build a new headquarters requires positive, collaborative relationships with state and local elected officials who will be supportive over the long-term. While polls show that 70% of New Yorkers support our plans and investment, a number of state and local politicians have made it clear that they oppose our presence and will not work with us to build the type of relationships that are required to go forward with the project we and many others envisioned in Long Island City.

Funding is often one of the primary challenges faced by deep tech and science startup companies.

Compared to consumer products, software and other industries, deep technology emerging out of the hard sciences is inherently riskier and more capital intensive at similar stages of development. As a result, it may be more difficult for deep tech startups to obtain the necessary capital to transition from federally-funded research to privately-funded commercial product development.

Everybody loves feedback . . . as long as it’s positive.

But most of us dislike negative feedback so much that we’ve even changed the name — it’s not negative, it’s constructive.

Still, it’s an irreplaceably valuable gift.

We need to know when we are doing things that don’t land the way we planned. When our impact veers from our intention. And the best — often times the only — way to discover that gap is through feedback.

A colleague of mine, a roboticist, recently proclaimed that if one could teleoperate the robot he developed in his lab, it could hold down a desk job. It’s a common sentiment among roboticists that existing mechanical hardware is sufficient to replace humans in many of the tasks by which we earn a living. Rather than the hardware, the last, golden step to having human-like machine counterparts is in the development of appropriate algorithms. But this is wrong. There is in fact little evidence that robots have the mechanical features necessary to hold down a desk job, regardless of the algorithms.

Recently coined words such as “selfie” and “hangry” reflect humans’ evolving language. The communication patterns of other social animals, including whales, also vary over time. The “songs” adult male humpback whales produce during the breeding season, for example, are constantly changing. 

But in a new study, researchers investigated the permanence of nonsong whale vocalizations known as calls and found that the majority have remained stable over multiple decades. This surprising result suggests that calls may function as important tools for conveying information about foraging, social behaviors and whale identity. 

Who runs the world? Well, still, by and large, men. But gradually and strategically—women, if you pay attention to statistics. Over the past two decades, the number of women-owned businesses has grown 114%, compared to the 44% national growth rate for all new companies. As more women venture into entrepreneurship, they will tackle the laundry list of gaps women are continuing to change.

Think about some venture funds. Now think about their approach. What comes to mind? Do they focus on a particular geography or technology trend? Or invest alongside their most famous friends? Maybe their partners have built large personal brands. Or they have an operational platform to support their companies' growth.

When we talk about entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley, the words “venture capital” are never far behind. But the reality, Indie.vc founder Bryce Roberts says, is that VC funding isn’t right for most entrepreneurs.

“In the same regards that VCs want to fund billion-dollar, monopoly-style businesses, they have themselves a monopoly on the language we use about entrepreneurship, the archetypes they highlight as the ideals for entrepreneurship,” Roberts said on the latest episode of Recode Media with Peter Kafka.

Juli Lerner, PanXchange Founder and CEO, says finding investors for women-run companies is challenging seeing as female founders receive only 2% of venture capital funding. Yahoo Finance’s Alexis Christoforous speaks to her.

Silicon Valley is synonymous with cutting-edge startups that offer a progressive workplace culture forged by young people who demand greater job satisfaction than the previous generation. Have these companies cracked the code of work-life balance? Hardly, says journalist and author Dan Lyons. His new book, Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us, exposes the junk science and questionable management practices that have migrated from Silicon Valley to the rest of the economy, making millions of workers stressed out and unhappy. He spoke to the Knowledge@Wharton radio show on Sirius XM about the perils of worshipping Silicon Valley’s false gods.

The year 2018 was a record-breaking year for venture capital deal-making. It witnessed 14,889 deals worth an aggregate $274 billion.

According to the UK-based capital market company Preqin, the total deal value of the previous year has surpassed the last high of $192 billion set in 2017.

As debate heats up on Capitol Hill about whether to tax our top earners at a significantly higher rate, one detail seems missing from the conversation: How successful business owners often use their fortunes for the greater good.

While not every not every jet-setting, millionaire or billionaire entrepreneur feels the philanthropic impulse, many do, as reported today by The Chronicle of Philanthropy. The publication released its annual Philanthropy 50 list, which highlights the people who gave the most to charity. Last year, the individuals on their list contributed nearly $8 billion to charities.

One of the biggest decisions you’ll have to make when starting a business is whether to go it alone or to find a partner. Creating a partnership can be a great move if you want to quickly scale the business, because you’ll both bring your talent, know-how, networks and financial resources to the endeavor. Plus, there are other benefits, like having backup if you get sick or want to go on vacation. 

I love learning innovation so much that, along with my collaborator Eddie Maloney, we are trying to build a new interdisciplinary field.

In higher ed, sometimes the best way to get some traction in the marketplace of ideas is to argue against yourself. This is what I tried to do in "The Case Against Learning Innovation."

Building a new discipline of learning innovation requires that we agree (broadly) on some definitions. This definitional effort is foundational to our work. Our definition of learning innovation should emerge from those practicing, studying and critiquing the scholarship and activities within this domain. We need to do this together.

A “downer” is defined here as someone who seems to dwell on the negatives of every business challenge, and loves to highlight bad news or potential problems. No matter how smart or experienced this person may otherwise be, things must change or they will kill your startup.

The rise of Silicon Valley tech giants like Facebook and Google has brought incredible wealth to the region, but their domination might end up putting a damper on the very model of innovation that fostered them.

Image: https://www.bizjournals.com

If you’d be willing to accept a smaller salary to work for a company that’s environmentally responsible, you’re not alone. In a recent survey, nearly half of all respondents and three-quarters of millennial workers said the same thing; more than 10% of workers said they’d be willing to go as far as to take a $5,000-$10,000 pay cut.