SAN FRANCISCO — Eric Firestone began a new job at a Web start-up here three weeks ago, and he’s already thinking about what he might do next. But that’s just fine with his new employer.

The company, a service to turn cellphones into credit card readers, lured Mr. Firestone from Apple partly with an unusual pitch: it promised to give him weekly lessons about starting his own business someday, including how to find venture capitalists to finance it.

Mr. Firestone, a 28-year-old software engineer, said he could try to get financing for a start-up from venture capital firms now, “but I feel like I’d be having a hard time. Here you get to learn.”

The vast majority of startups with roots in a university are formed by alumni or former students, similar to the process that was depicted in the movie The Social Network. The Zuck had it easy. Since Zuckerberg was a Harvard undergraduate student, not an employee, the university could not lay claim to an ownership stake in Facebook. Had Harvard owned a patent for a core component of Facebook’s technology or business method, the plot of The Social Network may have been different. Imagine the following:

* Zuckerberg works for Harvard
* Zuckerberg uses a Harvard computer, network, and proprietary photos of students from Harvard’s various residence halls
* Zuckerbergs files his invention, as required by his employment contract, with Harvard’s technology commercialization office
* Harvard files for a patent which costs Harvard $30,000 and lots of staff time and overhead
* Zuckerberg decides he *must* launch Facebook commercially, and he and his co-founders approach Harvard’s patent office to see what their options are

The “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” analogy might not be that far off when comparing venture capitalists and entrepreneurs. I spent four years as a VC, and I’ve been the CEO of an e-commerce startup for the last two years, so in yesterday’s opening piece, I gave some pointers to VCs, and particularly associates, on how to better work with entrepreneurs. Today, I’m going to give some advice to entrepreneurs based on my personal experience on how to work smarter with VCs.

* It’s a numbers game. Expect casualties. I’m not kidding. Preparing to reach out to VCs, particularly if it’s your first time, is not unlike the preparation one does when preparing for battle (and this comes from a former air force pilot). You should prepare for a process that can take six or nine months or even a year, depending on the market conditions. You need to prepare for people with little knowledge of your technology or market who are comfortable telling you that there is no market for your technology.

With revenues of $10.7 billion last year and 16,850 shops in 40 countries, Starbucks is clearly the world's top coffee retailer.

The coffee giant celebrated its 40th anniversary this month but it shows no signs of slowing down.

Heck, it's brand is so well recognized all over the world it doesn't even put its name on its cups anymore.

In the past few months it has announced new partnerships with other coffee companies, grocery stores and plans to move into digital content as well as introducing new products. In some stores you can already have wine with your coffee.

This, according to the Aurik Business Incubator's Pavlo Phitidis, is something many entrepreneurs have lost sight of.

With a BCom, MBA and significant business experience, Phitidis expected his ventures to make him a millionaire. When it did not happen, he decided to find out why.

Of the eight businesses he and partner Carien Engelbrecht were involved in, two failed, four were sold and two ended up on the stock exchange.

While not a bad track record, he realised that the last four businesses took much longer to mature and cost them much more money.

"Entrepreneurship is not an academic discipline. It is about acting," he says.

Every startup founder knows implicitly that startup success is a long hard road. Yet we always dream that we are the exception to the rule. So once in a while it’s good to look at some facts to temper our imagination.

I was reading an article written by marketing guru Seth Godin a while back where he mentions that “it takes about six years of hard work to become an overnight success”. Based on a small sample of household names from Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg, he is an optimist. Here is some data from Wikipedia:

* Microsoft – Bill Gates founded Microsoft in 1975, to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800. Six years later, he managed to land a contract with IBM to provide their IBM PC base operating system. Even still, it was another five years before Microsoft went public in 1986, making him an overnight success worth $350 million.

Youth. Antisocial, mobile-tapping, Lady Gaga-obsessed layabouts who get off the couch only to riot. What's to like? Rather a lot. In the Middle East and North Africa, youths played a major role in bringing down some long-standing dictatorships. And that may be only the start. A burgeoning young population might help speed global economic growth and be a sign of positive developments in the quality of life worldwide.

Around the world, countries are in various stages of progress through what economists call the demographic transition. That's the move from high rates of fertility and mortality — women having lots of children, many of whom die young — to low birthrates and longer life expectancies. The rich countries of Europe and North America, along with Japan, are all the way through this transition, with many of them seeing shrinking populations as a result. Africa is still in the middle of the change; Latin America and Asia are further ahead.

There is no rumbling of change. The transition has not shown up in any statistic. But it has happened. India is innovating. It is genuine, it is grass roots, it has commercial value-and it is distinct from the jugaadwe are best known for.

Incubation centres of technical and management institutes across the country report a rise in number of innovations that have been commercialised. Applications for the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry's (Ficci) DST-Lockheed Martin India Innovation Growth programme has grown to 915 from 102 between 2007 and 2011-a nearly 800% jump in five years. Most of these have already reached the market.

Most US universities maintain three core businesses that earn most of their revenue:

1. Selling diplomas
2. Competing for federal and industry research sponsorships
3. Trying to crack open the checkbooks of wealthy alumni

Since the 1980s, universities have ventured into a new line of business: patenting inventions from university research labs and brokering these patents to businesses and start-ups. Thirty years later, university patent holdings have swelled into the tens of thousands and larger research universities spend millions of dollars each year on filing for new patents. Yet, on average, over three-quarters of university patents are never licensed to companies for commercial use. Since US universities own 5% of our nation’s patents, and a growing number of patents in cutting-edge fields such as nanotechnology and biotech, even on human genes, people get worried that needlessly “locking up” basic university research will stifle innovation and create a patent anti-commons.

Blogs. We all read them to get a sense of what is going on in the world, peeling back layers of the old world in which media was too scripted.

By definition, if you are reading this you read blogs. But should you actually write one if you’re a startup, an industry figure (lawyer, banker) or VC? Absolutely.

This is a post to help you figure out why you should write and what you should talk about.

1. Why
If you care about accessing customers, reaching an audience, communicating your vision, influencing people in your industry, marketing your services or just plain engaging in a dialog with others in your industry a blog is a great way to achieve this.

“Dear CEO,

I hope you are well and had a successful 2010. I know how tough it can be – you have shareholders questioning your decisions; employees questioning your leadership; and customers questioning your product.

In fact, you’ve probably had to deal with so many questions in the past 12 months that the last thing you want to see is another question, especially from someone that may or may not be a fan of your product.

So I’ll try and keep this brief and limit the questions.

As you move your company forward into 2011 and beyond, there are a lot of challenges that are going to come your way. There’s this new fad called “social media”, for example, that everyone and their dog is telling you is the next big thing, and you need to be in it or be out the game...."

As Wall Street and other investors clamor for a piece of social-networking giant Facebook Inc., Silicon Valley venture capitalists are betting on a new generation of companies that hope to unshackle social networking from personal computers—and shift it to the cellphone.

On Thursday, Color Labs Inc., a phone-based social network founded by veteran entrepreneur Bill Nguyen, is opening its doors. The Palo Alto, Calif., start-up recently secured $41 million from top venture-capital firms including Sequoia Capital even before the company's iPhone and Android apps were ready to debut.

Adam Neary, co-founder/CEO of New York startup Profitably, has a great post on their long and hard slog to raise money.

Now, posts like that are dime a dozen, but Neary's stands out for one reason: it names names, and says who is or isn't up to snuff. Great stuff.

As Chris Dixon points out on Twitter, this isn't just great reading, it's also good because it makes entrepreneurs wiser and investors more accountable.

Here's the report card:

Founder Institute: (a Y Combinator-style incubator) "quite helpful with early-stage advice and not helpful at all during fund-raising." "In our case ... FI became a major scarlet letter to be overcome during funding, and that’s regrettable."

After researching endless universities and speaking with fellow FledgeWing-ers, we proudly present the first version of our ‘Top 50 University Entrepreneurship Clubs’ list. Ranked in no particular order, we think these 50 communities best represent the direction we hope all university-based entrepreneurship groups are striving towards.

The next phase will be to refine the list and rank the schools, which will need your help for. If you believe your club should be on the list, or should be ranked highly on the list, then get in touch and let us know why.

1. Caltech Entrepreneurship Club (eclub.caltech.edu)
   University: California Institute of Technology
   Brief: Minimalistic website, yet smart plentiful entrepreneurs.
2. GSB Entrepreneurship Club (www.gsbeclub.org)
   University: Stanford Graduate School of Business
   Brief: Been around for over 40 years.
3. Babson Entrepreneurship Club (www.babsoneclub.com)
   University: Babson
   Brief: Slightly outdated content, but lots of resources.
4. Cornell Entrepreneur Organization (CEO) (www.rso.cornell.edu/ceo/)
   University: Cornell
   Brief: Poor acronym, but good site and club otherwise.
5. Columbia Entrepreneurs Organization (www0.gsb.columbia.edu/students/organizations/ceo/)
   University: Columbia
   Brief: Some useful content but sparse overall.

This comes from someone Forbes calls “the most powerful woman in startups,” Ann Miura-Ko, co-founding partner with FLOODGATE. In October, she gave a lecture at Stanford University titled “Funding Thunder Lizard Entrepreneurs,” which is filled with so much insight we were tempted to just transcribe the whole damned thing and offer it up as a blog post of its own. However, her talk is available as a conveniently indexed webcast.

Perhaps her comments resonate with you as common sense of the most practical sort. Perhaps they don’t. Regardless, it’s much easier to talk in theoretical terms about what it takes to successfully launch a startup and bring technology to market than it is to follow through and execute effectively.

As Human Genome Sciences prepares to rake in its anticipated billions from sales of its newly approved lupus drug, the Rockville biotech's smaller brethren strive to duplicate that success.

What they need to get there, more than anything, is money — for research and development, salaries, equipment, licensing deals and rent.

But in a post-Great Recession environment in which investors still remain wary of companies that have yet to prove themselves with a solid deal or technology milestone, many private biotechs find themselves turning to a variety of other capital sources, from government grants and contracts to licensing deals and debt.

How many times have you come up with great ideas for products or entire businesses, but bailed on them because you didn’t want to be the one who had to take on the risk, the overhead, the complexity, the sleepless nights of building a business around them?

What if you could spend your time dreaming up nutty ideas and get paid for that and only that? What if you could hand your concept over to another company that had the capability to mass produce it, distribute it, handle all aspects of the business and then just write you a check every month for a percentage of sales?

Sounds like some wacky fantasy scenario…but it’s not.

I’ve become fascinated, over the last few years, by ways to leverage and scale ideas that allow you to:

Bring cool things to life
Minimize complexity, and
Generate enough to live well in the world.

COVINGTON, Ky.– Gov. Steve Beshear today joined state and local officials to announce that 14 Kentucky high-tech companies will share more than $4.22 million in state funds as part of a Kentucky initiative to attract and support technology-based small businesses. Through the state’s competitive SBIR-STTR Matching Funds program, Kentucky matches federal SBIR-STTR awards received by Kentucky companies and those willing to relocate to Kentucky. The eighth and ninth rounds of the state awards supplement more than $8.7 million in federal funding the recipient firms have brought to Kentucky.

If you want to bum out 370 Americans, call them up and ask them what they regret. Make them explain it in detail. Keep them on the phone for 20 minutes, discussing their regrets. Then, in exchange for ruining their evenings, send them five bucks in the mail.

That’s what a couple of researchers did recently. The goal was to find out what the typical American regrets. It turns out, typical Americans have a whole list of regrets. Here’s a breakdown: