I travel the country a lot. And I am often approached by entrepreneurs in cities which don’t have a vibrant VC community. They often ask whether they have to move to SF, NY or LA to get financed.

I have the same response always, “Where do you want to live? Where do you want to build your community, your relationships, your family?” I’m trying to get a feel for their commitment to local community versus being in a place where financing is easiest.

This week, NEA’s Pete Sonsini joined us in the studio for Ask A VC.

Sonsini joined NEA in 2005 and is the co-head of the firm’s enterprise software practice group, focusing on early-stage investments in the space. His investments include Xensource (acquired by Citrix Systems) and Teracent (acquired by Google). He is currently on the board of Engine Yard, Eucalyptus Systems and a number of others.

Silicon Valley-based Founder Institute is heading to Cape Town to give entrepreneurs a boost with a four month accelerator program.

The Founder Institute is an early-stage startup accelerator which has graduated over 800 technology companies across 42 cities and 24 countries, over the past 4 years.

As part of the institute’s “globalise Silicon Valley” mission, the company is setting its eyes on Cape Town to assist South African entrepreneurs to launch their “dream company” with a four-month mentorship accelerator program.

As programming tools become increasingly accessible, it’s not the actual building of a mobile app that’s difficult. It’s the time it takes — and the risk nobody will ever use it. Studies estimates that 26% of mobile apps are used just once, and more than 60% never get downloaded at all.

We are well into the age of the disposable mobile app. Now, according to Raw Engineering, the makers of Built.io, we have the fast, easy to use app-development technology to match. 

The state venture capital bill unveiled at the state Capitol this week aims to boost funding for start-up businesses in Wisconsin by creating two layers of fund managers.

Here's the process the bill lays out, in all its wonkish detail:

Under the bill, the investments would be made by venture capital funds that are chosen by the manager of a so-called "fund of funds." State officials would have no role in choosing the venture capital funds or the investments they made, only the fund of funds manager.

Venerable retailer J.C. Penney opened its doors more than a century ago and boasts annual revenues of nearly $13 billion from its 1,100 stores. Yet a three-year-old website with an untested business model and little discernible revenue is closing in on the department store chain's $3 billion market cap: Pinterest.

The online scrapbooking site recently raised $200 million in venture capital funds to bring its implied valuation to $2.5 billion, according to a February 20 story in The Wall Street Journal. Founded by three young entrepreneurs in March 2010, the tech start-up has 48 million users as of December 2012, up from nine million in the prior year, the article noted.

Research shows people are happier if they like their office space. What is one tip you would give a fellow entrepreneur looking to make a fun, employee-friendly office upgrade?

The following answers are provided by the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, the YEC recently launched #StartupLab, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses via live video chats, an expert content library and email lessons.

Every problem is an opportunity because a good business idea can lie in the solution. Most successful businesses begin with someone merely solving a problem. Chances are if you’re experiencing difficulties with something, then others are, too. If you solve that problem for yourself, you can probably make things easier for everyone — and it might just turn out to be profitable.

Signs of Potential

So, how do you know if your solution is actually a business in the making? Start off by asking yourself three basic questions:

Over the past several years, more and more students have been turning towards entrepreneurship. As a student founder, you usually have a few options for raising seed stage financing. If you’re looking at taking financing from an angel or VC, chances are you’ll need to take a leave of absence from school or drop out entirely. Similarly, if you are aiming to join an incubator or accelerator like YC or TechStars, you’ll also need to get out of school. While those may be excellent ways to seriously pursue entrepreneurship, they shouldn’t be the only way.

The continuing dispersion of employment in the nation's major metropolitan areas has received attention in two recent reports. The Brookings Institution has published research showing that employment dispersion continued between 2000 and 2010, finding job growth was greater outside a three mile radius from central business districts between 2000 and 2010 in 100 metropolitan areas Note 1). This assessment probably underestimates the extent of job dispersion, since it includes some suburban centers as central business districts (such as West Palm Beach, FL and Palo Alto, CA).

The number of women investing money into start-ups reached record levels last year as they become a much bigger force in the risky and male-dominated world of angel investing.

Women made up 21.8 percent of active angel investors nationwide in 2012, compared with 12.2 percent the previous year, according to the Center for Venture Research at the University of New Hampshire, which released its annual report on such spending on Thursday.

Last week David Verrill, chair of the Angel Capital Association, invited to me speak at the Angel Capital Summit in San Francisco along with my super smart co-panelists Jason Best and Sara Hanks.  The conference theme was “Navigating Change for Angel Success”.  Here are a few snippets of the most memorable moments:

During day one, Anurag Nigam, providing perspective from his experience of doing 60-plus angel investments (many through Sand Hill Angels), said that “Given what is going on with AngelList, SecondMarket, and crowdfunding, it looks like within three to five years angel investments will be a liquid asset class,” and an audible murmur shot through the audience.

The collaborative innovation approach that we developed has been successfully used in several contexts and, in each case, provided surprising RESULTS! On the strength of the success garnered by the two editions of Quebec Seeks Solutions (2010 and 2012), presented by Québec International (QI) and Le Regroupement pour l’innovation et le développement technologique de Québec (IDTEQ), with the support of the International Society for Professional Innovation Management (ISPIM), we offer personalized coaching to produce collaborative RESULTS-oriented innovation events.

From 1989, two professors of education at the University of Washington, Virginia Berninger and Robert Abbott, carried out research on the knock-on effects of good handwriting. They examined beginning pupils at eight state schools in the greater Seattle area, and took a sample of 700 children, of whom 144 had been identified with writing problems. The problem children were divided into groups, and subjected to a variety of remedial approaches. One group did very much better than the others, and not just in writing. Berninger and Abbott found that the group with improved handwriting also had improved reading skills, better word recognition, better compositional skills, and better recall from memory. They began to enjoy learning more: they certainly took more pleasure in writing. They were just much better students. Would the same have been true of skilled keyboard operators? Berninger and Abbott didn’t think so. “Handwriting is not just a motor process; it is also a memory process for letters--the building blocks of written language.” And what happened to these students later on? “Older students who have done poorly from the beginning come to think of themselves as not being writers, so they don’t like writing and avoid it. As a result, their higher-level composing skills don’t get developed,” Berninger says. “We think that if we intervene early with handwriting and spelling instruction, we can prevent problems with written expression later.”

You’ve all seen them. One lone spectacle of arboreal majesty, towering above the treeline as you drive down the highway. It’s only when you get closer (though not too close, because the disguise is not so good) that you realize the impressive tree is nothing more than a cell phone tower with some rudimentary camouflage, meant to blend into its surroundings, but actually sticking out more for their poor attempt at blending in.

I have succeeded at five different ad agencies over the course of nearly two decades by sticking to one simple rule: Be a freakin’ weirdo.

Weird, you question? Yes, weird. Weird is what fuels individuals in the most prolific agencies to remain the vanguards of new ideas. And despite the tendency to outfit agency halls with creative stimuli, channeling our “inner weirdo” is not a natural tendency simply instigated by odd-shaped chairs or brainstorming books. Weirdness--uncovering it, embracing it, practicing it--is one of the most difficult, yet most integral, components to success within the halls of any agency.

Why are some companies successful in implementing change while others struggle? Why can some leaders inspire people to work together effectively, while others cannot?

These questions puzzled a friend of ours, Cynthia Olmstead, who worked for many years as a business consultant. Even though her methodology and practices didn’t change, outcomes from one organization to another varied widely. What was the key factor that allowed one leader to succeed where others failed?

I still know some entrepreneurs who boast of simply following their gut instincts, rather than listen to anyone or any data, to make strategic decisions. We’ve all worked with autocratic leaders in large companies who seem to thrive in this mode. They all forget or ignore the high-profile failures that have resulted from some single-handed business decisions.

One of the biggest in this decade was the merger of America Online (AOL) with Time Warner, engineered in the early 2000’s by Time Warner CEO Jerry Leven and AOL CEO Steve Case for a whopping $164 billion. Levin famously prevailed on his board and ignored everyone, but in 2010 admitted that he had presided over perhaps the worst deal of the century, since Time Warner was forced to take a $99 billion loss only two years after the merger, and Levin was forced out. It’s been downhill from there.

CytoVas, a diagnostics company in University of Pennsylvania’s UPStart incubator program in its Center for Technology Transfer has forged an alliance with a division of diagnostic company Becton Dickinson (NYSE: BDX) to advance a blood-based diagnostic to determine personal risk of cardiovascular disease and stroke.

The alliance with Becton Bioscience will help CytoVas assess cardiovascular disease progression, as well as evaluate the side effects of existing and experimental medicines for cardiovascular disease.