As an entrepreneur building a startup, there is no fail-safe recipe for success. Chances are good that you are experienced in your field, you have vetted your idea enough to know that there is potential, and you are feeling pretty confident that you can make the startup work.Why You Need a Business Mentor

As confident as you may be, you may not even realize what you don’t know. This is why it is so important to bolster your knowledge from experts around you. Finding experienced advisors or mentors can be invaluable to helping you navigate the waters. Whether they can help you avoid unnecessary obstacles, learn more about an industry or discipline, they can be a priceless resource for entrepreneurs.

Welcome to the rest of the year!

Hope you enjoyed a slow, relaxing August, and long Labor day weekend. Now it's time to get back to business.

The fourth quarter is just around the corner, and we expect the rest of the year to be jam-packed with important story lines that shape the technology landscape for years to come.

It's painful enough to see your team lose the season. But the sheer agony of watching your star fantasy quarterback get pummeled to the ground is almost unbearable.

You watch in disbelief as he clutches his leg. He's probably out for the season, taking your fantasy team down with him.

Henry Olszewski, Vice President of Sales at Intermarket Insurance Agency, has felt this pain. In 2008, he drafted New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady. Eight minutes into the first game, Brady tore two ligaments in his knee and was out of commission for the season. As a result, Olszewski's fantasy football team was a wash.

The nation’s leading venture capital trade association is forming a subgroup to advocate for policies and regulations that it says would bolster medical innovation in the U.S.

The new group, the Medical Innovation and Competitiveness (MedIC) Coalition, is open to members of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) and their portfolio companies, according to a statement from the NVCA.

The new group lists three major goals:

• Bring the importance of medical innovation to the forefront as the country implements healthcare reform

• Establish new and preserve existing incentives for investors and entrepreneurs to develop and commercialize medical innovations in the U.S.

• Achieve broad-based reform of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration

One of the most common criticisms of VC investors making seed investments is something that has become known as “the signaling problem.” The explanation of this problem is that VCs create a “negative perception” about a company if the make a seed investment but then don’t follow through and make a next round investment. Another way to say this is that a VC creates a “signaling situation” with their seed investment – if they don’t follow on in the next round they are “sending a signal” that something is wrong with the company (hence the label “signaling problem.”)

Last week I spoke with a partner at a large VC firm whose firm has been around for a long time. They have a new seed program (as of a few years ago) after eschewing seed investments from 2002 to 2008. The partner that I talked to told me that they are doing 30 seed investments out of their newest fund.

I was surprised on two levels – the first is that they have a very visible anti-seed reputation. I pointed out that their market reputation was that they didn’t do seed investments nor did they do many Series A investments. He said “we changed that a few years ago.” I suggested that their web site didn’t talk about their seed program; he responded “yeah, we need to work on our web site.”

I love Jackson Hole, Wyo. It is one of the most extraordinarily beautiful settings in the world.

One cannot help being in a good mood when observing the breathtaking wildlife, open sky and the awe-inspiring Grand Tetons.

Thus, reading the reports from last weekend’s annual economist confab in Jackson Hole could not have been more depressing. If the practitioners of the dismal science sound this pessimistic amidst such an uplifting setting, what will their attitude be when they trade in their cowboy boots for green eye shades and return to their drab offices to stare at spreadsheets?

On a Thursday night in August, some 750 people crammed into a high school auditorium in Minneapolis to discuss the future of the Internet. Most of them went to beseech members of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to act to protect Internet neutrality, the premise that all data on the Web should be treated equally. During the three-hour forum, organized by the pro-Net-neutrality coalition Save the Internet, an array of speakers warned that without safeguards in place, corporate behemoths would cut lucrative deals to prioritize some kinds of content and throttle others, turning themselves into the unofficial gatekeepers of the world's best leveling force. Net neutrality, said Senator Al Franken, is "the First Amendment issue of our time."

There are a number of online resources for entrepreneurs seeking angel investment for their start-up. Although many deals still end with numerous face-to-face meetings, for many small business owners the process is now
 starting through online angel investor communities. Although there are dozens if not hundreds of angel investor networks across the country, the following list of 10 are some of the most active and promising online angel investor communities and resources. In no particular order:

Angelsoft - boasts that it is used by 1,000's of start-ups every month, its system provides entrepreneurs a way to reach the 450+ VCs and Angel Groups that utilize the Angelsoft platform. Angelsoft is a business planning and funding platform that has been used by 20,000+ investors to manage their end-to-end deal flow of their early equity investments.

The universe is a mighty big place, but there is no shortage of amazement right here in our celestial neighborhood. From Venus's searing surface temperatures, hot enough to melt lead, to Jupiter's Great Red Spot, a storm that has been raging for hundreds of years, to the cryovolcanoes of the Saturnian moon Enceladus, the solar system boasts plenty of extreme locales.

That is the thrust of a new book, The 50 Most Extreme Places in Our Solar System (Harvard University Press), which serves as a kind of photo-illustrated guidebook for the planets—along with their accompanying moons and rings—that surround the sun. The book's authors, David Baker of Austin College and Todd Ratcliff of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, acknowledge that they use the term "places" loosely: Some of the 50 entries are specific events, such as the asteroid impact that killed off the dinosaurs on Earth, and some are long-term phenomena, such as plate tectonics.

Seedcamp Week, the week when the startup programme brings its pan-European travels to a head and lands in London, starts next week and they’ve released the startups they will be running through their intense mentoring wringer.

Over 600 teams applied over the last year of nine Mini Seedcamps, finally coming up with teams from 16 different countries and 19 different cities. Although Seedcamp pinged to South Africa, Israel and even Asia this year, their hard-core remains Europe, and the above data points show just how intense you have to be to suck out startups from such a wide area. If you’re just in Silicon Valley, thank your lucky stars you only have to drive up and down the 101.

Despite the continued growth and popularity of Facebook, a number of alternate social networking sites are cropping up in order to the needs of groups in ways that Facebook can't. One such group is scientists and scholars, who want to have a platform for communication and collaboration, but one that focuses on research interest and reading lists, not just friends and family.

And more and more - 2000 a day - are joining ResearchGATE, a startup that hopes to connect scientists, researchers, and scholars worldwide.

There is a fascinating article online this morning from the San Francisco Chronicle's Tom Abate in which he profiles Raymond Lei, a 19-year-old Berkeley student and entrepreneur. While still in high school Lei founded ooShirts.com with just a computer and an idea. A few years and just a couple thousand dollars in capital later, Lei runs a successful 2.5 person team set to earn over $700,000 in 2010. Abate dubs ooShirts an "ultralight startup," but is Lei's bedroom business any different from a lean startup?

In recent years, lean startups have become a popular sector of Internet businesses that look to push a product at "low burn." A lot of what makes a lean startup lean, according the man who coined the term, Eric Ries, is when the company strives to create value for customers. "Every activity that does not contribute to learning about customers" should be defined as "waste," Ries says.

The braintrust at Greentech Media suggested I write an article on the top ten solar venture capital firms. Even despite what Sanjay said in this article.

As I started writing, I realized that the normal metrics for grading VCs -- IRR, quality of exits, etc. -- don't apply to today's solar investors, at least not in any meaningful way.  The fact is that very little, if any, of the billions of VC dollars put into solar in the last few years have yielded the type of results that VCs look for. 

Suddenly, everybody wants to be an early-stage startup investor – an "angel."

People you may have heard of doing it include Chris Dixon, the Hunch cofounder, Zach Klein, the Vimeo creator, Shana Fisher, the IAC M&A boss, Ashton Kutcher, the actor from Dude, Where's My Car?, and Joshua Schachter, the Delicious founder.

That's just a few. There's an army of them.

More established VC types – and some of the angels – want to get into a debate about whether all this is good for startups and if it means there is an angel "bubble."

Bor-ing!

Editor's note: This post is based on a rant Chris Dixon posted to his posterous account.

Dixon details the changes he'd like to see in the world of venture capital. We're republishing it here, with permission.

Dixon is CEO of Hunch, as well as a successful early stage start-up investor. (A famous, fancy VC told us last week that Chris is the "Ron Conway of New York.")

I've been pondering the "truths" we hold dear and wondering whether or not the mental models we were taught in college and graduate school hold up under the changes occurring in our economy. Do the great business thinkers of the past twenty or thirty years and their models and descriptions hold true, especially when we introduce innovation into the mix? Over the next few months I'll look at a couple of the models we hold dear and place innovation within the context of the model, to see if the model is extensible enough to account for innovation, or whether we may want to revise our thinking to account for innovation.