The entrepreneur to employee transition is something I am seeing over and over again. There are a number of reasons this is happening:

Baby Boomer business owner who is tired of running their own business. They want to sell but want to continue to work.

You've seen the names in history books: Alexander Hamilton, Samuel Adams, Thomas Jefferson. But which Founding Father has the most namesakes alive today?

That would be John Adams, the second president of the United States, according to a new analysis by contact information provider WhitePages. According to the company, there are 9,893 individuals with the name John Adams in the United States, and 789 in Florida alone.

Home to a quarter of the earth’s population and an economy chasing down the United States, China is fertile ground for companies doing business online. It’s easy to see the allure: The scope and potential of the market is massive.

Image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net

It's an unexpected side effect of globalization: problems that once would have stayed local—say, a bank lending out too much money—now have consequences worldwide. But still, countries operate independently, as if alone on the planet. Policy advisor Simon Anholt has dreamed up an unusual scale to get governments thinking outwardly: The Good Country Index. In a riveting and funny talk, he answers the question, "Which country does the most good?" The answer may surprise you (especially if you live in the US or China).

Image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net

Runa Capital, a Moscow-based global tech-focused venture capital firm, announced yesterday the first closing of its new fund, Runa Capital II. With a target size of $200 million, the firm will continue investing in tech-based companies worldwide, focusing especially on Europe. The amount of the first closing has not been disclosed.

Image: AndyWilson 

Around this time of year, some of us can’t help but think of the history of this great nation. What was life like back in the days of the founding fathers, and how have they changed in the decades since? Using the population data of every Census since the first, which occurred in 1790, at MyLife.com we’ve put together an animation showing the growth of every state’s population from then till now. The states are in order of the date they became admitted, and you may notice that some were being counted prior to statehood. These states were at the time either U.S. territories, or part of another state.

Image: http://www.newgeography.com/ 

After baby loggerhead turtles hatch, they wait until dark and then dart from their sandy nests to the open ocean. A decade or so later they return to spend their teenage years near those same beaches. What the turtles do and where they go in those juvenile years has been a mystery for decades. Marine biologists call the period the “lost years.”

Image: http://www.scientificamerican.com 

The Great American Novel—it’s a familiar phrase. It probably even rings a bell for people who’ve never read any "masterpieces" of American fiction. But what novel is the Great American one?

Lawrence Buell won’t say, and good for him. Answering the question would miss the point of asking it. The nation’s literary community, Buell writes, has never actually wanted to find its "single once-and-for-all supernovel." Instead, the Great American Novel should be thought of as "a horizon to be grasped after, approximated, but never reached, a game that writers, readers, publishers all want to keep on playing." It’s an occasion for conversation, not a title for bestowing.

Image Courtesy of digitalart / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

“Everyone is trying to create the next Silicon Valley.”

That’s what Salim Teja, managing director of the ICT Services Group at MaRS, says to me as we chat over the phone. The conversation mirrors a recent Atlantic article called “Why the ‘Next Silicon Valley’ Is Always Silicon Valley.” Both Teja and Derek Thompson, the author of the article, have similar points: replicating the success of Silicon Valley somewhere else is going to be difficult and perhaps impossible.

Image: Shirin Habibi, Tariq Haddadin and Amie Sergas of the MaRS Business Acceleration Program – Tanja Tiziana 

Zhang Yue, chairman and CEO of Broad Group, is not one to shy away from ambitious targets. In 2010, his prefabricated construction company, Broad Sustainable Building, completed a six-story building, Broad Pavilion, at the Shanghai Expo in one day. He continued to challenge this feat by building two more structures at record paces—the 15-story Ark Hotel in less than one week and the 30-story T30 tower and hotel in 15 days. His latest ambition is to build the world’s tallest structure. Known as Sky City, the 202-story steel skyscraper is expected to be magnitude-9 earthquake resistant and energy efficient. Ninety percent of the structure is being built at a factory and just 10 percent assembled on site. 

Earlier this week, the Commerce Department announced US GDP in Q1 2014 fell by 3%, the most in a quarter since the recession. I've linked to the WSJ's chart depicting the trend above. The decline was 3x greater than forecasted. Silicon Valley seems unfazed. As I wrote about earlier this year, we've seen a decline in the public markets of about 25% in consumer stocks and 45% in enterprise stocks. But since that time, public tech companies have witnessed a small recovery. Both enterprise and consumer companies are up 18% from their 10 month lows.

Image: https://www.linkedin.com 

On June 24, UBI Index announced the Global Top 25 University Business Incubators of 2014. We would like to thank all participants of this year's benchmark for great efforts in supporting entrepreneurs and helping the industry understand the importance of incubation.

Best regards from Stockholm, Sweden UBI Index Team

Graduates around the world gather at the end of spring for one final lesson: the commencement speech.

It’s a time when luminaries from business, politics and the arts deliver wisdom (and humor) to students eager for the next stage. Susan Wojcicki recalled watching the first item uploaded to Google Video—a purple, furry puppet, dancing and singing in Swedish—with no idea what to think. Until her children saw it—and cheered. Marc Benioff shared that time he did “what all lost thirty-somethings do: travel to India.”

Image: Steve Ballmer speaks at the University of Southern California’s commencement ceremony on May 13, 2011. Reuters 

Last week, the team at Wharton in San Francisco invited me to speak at the Entrepreneurs Workshop. I chose the topic of the "Five Forces Shaping the Fundraising Market" and prepared a Mary Meeker style presentation, with a chart and a bullet point on each slide, to illustrate the forces in tension. It was great fun.

Image: http://tomtunguz.com/ 

I’ve founded three SaaS startups, all without writing a single line of code.

“You can’t build a software business if you can’t make software.”

Bullsh!t. While we’ve got a long way to go, I’m damn proud of how far we’ve come at Groove.

And we’ve done it with an outsourced prototype, a killer team and a ton of hustle. And me. A decidedly non-technical founder.

Image: http://www.angelhack.com/ 

In 1999, I founded a spin-off company to exploit technology I had developed with a postdoctoral researcher in my laboratory at University College London. Twelve years later, the company, BioVex, was sold to the biotech firm Amgen for $1 billion (£600 million): $425 million upfront and another $575 million on reaching further milestones. It was one of the biggest buyouts of a UK biotech company.

Image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net

Dreams of starting your own business are often filled with fantasies of coming up with a great idea, and venture capital firms fighting to fund it for you.

But as Bill Reichert of Garage Technology Ventures puts it: “The odds of raising venture capital are equal to the odds of getting struck by lightning while standing on the bottom of a swimming pool on a sunny day.”

Newer wisdom in venture capital circles is that some of the best investors are those who have started or run companies themselves. Before he became an investor, Stuart Larkins was a founding member of advertising tech startup Performics, which DoubleClick acquired in 2004, before Google bought DoubleClick. When Larkins and partner Kevin Willer launched Chicago Ventures in 2013, they aimed to bring operations know-how along with their funds and connections. Larkins explains why founders need more than money to succeed.

Image: Stuart Larkins, Chicago Ventures (Chicago Ventures photo) 

If you have trouble resisting the impulse to check your smartphone while you’re out with friends or having dinner on a date, this table might help: By literally strapping two people together for the duration of the meal, it forces them to pay attention to each other.

“With more and more people addicted to mobile technology, it happens more frequently that people have meals absentmindedly,” says designer Michael Jan, who created the Napkin Table along with fellow industrial design students at Tunghai University in Taiwan. “This inspired us to consider what ideal dining is, and figure out if there is a new dining experience that can draw attention back to the dining table.”

Image: http://www.fastcoexist.com/ 

Not all jobs are equally easy to fill. It’s an obvious point, but one that sometimes gets missed in the debate over whether the American economy is suffering from a “skills gap.” Companies complain that there is a shortage of talent, economists counter that if that were true it would be evidenced by rising wages. With wages stagnant, where’s the skills gap?

Image: http://blogs.hbr.org/