Urbanist Richard Florida, in a New York Daily News op-ed, has called for President Obama to define his legacy not only by focusing on gun control, immigration and climate change, but by zeroing in on an even more important issue: America’s urbanization.

This is because today, he explains, the nation’s 50 largest metros contain two-thirds of US population, produce three-quarters of its economic output, and are home to a great concentration of its innovations. Florida, author of Rise of the Creative Class and one of New Urbanism's prime theoreticians, believes that these metros have been neglected by a government that romanticizes suburbs and small towns, while ignoring the greater productivity of dense areas. The answer to this misallocation of resources, he writes, would be for Obama to form a Department of Cities.

In the short year since I joined NerdWallet, a personal finance website, we expanded our small team from 7 to 35.   We evaluated hundreds of candidates for a wide range of roles – from product managers and writers to engineers and designers.  The following is a start-up employer’s perspective–what I learned in the process and have distilled into a few pieces of advice for those looking to find a job at a start-up:

Be flexible – Many start-ups (and small businesses in general) are starved for two things: cash and time.  Offering full-time employment is actually a big commitment for a start-up – not just in obvious cash costs, but also from a bandwidth and time perspective, as managers have to onboard, train, and manage new hires.  As a result, being flexible goes a long way. Many of our employees started as part-time contractors or remote-workers.  If you are truly interested in a certain company, be flexible and willing to consider part-time, consulting, or remote work.  This is a great way for you to get to know your potential employer and direct manager, and also a good way for us to get comfortable with you joining our team.

With money in their pockets and change on their minds, some 700 angel investors flocked to the Angel Capital Association Summit in San Francisco this week.

Along with macro issues like best practices for syndicating rounds and navigating the Series A crunch, attendees buzzed about the JOBS Act, new funding platforms and other recent changes to the $20 billion a year marketplace of private investing. One of the most popular panels however, focused on a topic that’s always been near and dear to investors: exits.

Pop quiz: Is Bill Gates a) the savior of American public education or b) a cloistered billionaire who should stick to something simple like eradicating polio? Both views have proponents. There's Malcolm Gladwell's hero's tale in his book Outliers about the young Gates spending "10,000 hours" in computer labs honing the skills that would spawn one of the world's most important technology companies. And there's the counterpart: the standardized-test obsessive, the avatar of school privatization, the sworn enemy of teachers' unions. "We've gone far down the track of Bill Gates deciding how our children are going to be treated and educated," says Leonie Haimson, a parent-activist with the group Class Size Matters. "Parental rights are going to be meaningless because the richest and most powerful man in America is going to decide what is best for us."

Before you, as an entrepreneur, can hope to successfully start a new business, you need to set some goals and milestones to lead the way. It’s easy to talk in the abstract about all the possible applications for a new technology, but you don’t have a viable business plan until you have specific targets on what you will produce, when, and how.

Yet many people avoid these specifics out of fear of the unknown, or set some totally unreachable goals. I’m a believer in having a healthy disregard for the impossible, but it does help to have a structured path to get there. Only when you have conceptualized your idea into realistic goals can you move on to prepare an implementation plan.

"I'm only going to tell you this once..."

There's a lot to be said for conditioning your audience to listen carefully. If they know that valuable information is only going to come at them once, they'll be more alert for it.

Alas, as the nois-o-sphere gets noisier still, this approach is hard to justify. 

Repetition increases the chance that you get heard.

Have you ever wondered how to be a consultant? What does a consultant do? Well, the answer is simple – a consultant consults. The answer, though true in its basic sense, is much too vague.  If you want to become a self-employed consultant, you need to have a better idea about the business and the way to set it up. Let’s try to define the role of a consultant.

The task of a consultant is to provide advice to an individual or organization about matters in a specific niche. Still sounds vague; right? You need to dig a little deeper into the area before you plunge in to establish your business as a consultant.

So you want to start a business – congratulations!  Once you get over the initial excitement, it’s time to break down the process of launching your startup into manageable chunks. You might get overwhelmed with the sheer number of items on your to-do list. But not to worry; I’ve broken it down into the primary tasks you need to do now, and those that you can defer until later.

What You Need to Do Now

Do the following tasks either before launch or during the early days of your startup.

Over the past 15 years I’ve started several companies and helped thousands of others. In doing so, I’ve seen tremendous successes. I’ve also witnessed tremendous failures.

In assessing what I’ve seen, I’ve identified the following 8 common characteristics of those entrepreneurs and business owners who have enjoyed the most success. If you’re not doing any of these, now’s the time to start.

Is the market price dropping for crowdsourced, industry-shaking ideas, even as demand for them grows? Where companies once thought they needed to dangle million-dollar prizes to get people interested in crowdsourced big-data challenges, lately we're seeing more-modest sums.

The latest innovation challenge was announced on Tuesday, setting the ambitious goal of solving the most daunting data problems in U.S. healthcare. Called the Care Transformation Prize, the competition will award at least three quarterly sums of $100,000 each, with the prospect of more after that.

In 2012, for the second consecutive year, the number of Americans starting their own businesses declined.

A report from the Kauffman Foundation found that 0.30 percent of American adults started their own business each month, down from 0.32 in 2011.

The annual Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity shows there were 514,000 new business owners a month last year. In 2011, that number was 543,000. But is this reduction a bad thing?

The FBI appealed to the public Thursday for help identifying two men shown in pixilated photos and video footage who are suspected of involvement in Monday’s bomb attacks in Boston.

The two men, now identified as Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, brothers originally from Chechnya, were involved in a dramatic shootout with police in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Thursday night. The pair robbed a 7/11 and killed an MIT police officer before hijacking a car and engaging police in pitched battles in the suburb of Watertown. The older of the two men, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was killed during a shootout with police while his younger brother, Dzhokhar, remains on the run as of Friday morning.

Driving on Interstate 495 toward Boston in a Ford Fusion one chilly afternoon in March, I did something that would’ve made even my laid-back long-ago driving instructor spit his coffee over the dashboard: I took my hands off the steering wheel, lifted my foot off the gas pedal, and waited to see what would happen. The answer: not much. To a degree, the car was already driving itself. Sensors were busy tracking other vehicles and road markings; computer systems were operating the accelerator, the brake, and even the steering wheel. The car reduced its speed to keep a safe distance from the vehicle ahead, but as that car sped up again, mine did so too. I tried nudging the steering wheel so that we drifted toward the dotted line on my left. As the line approached, the car pushed the steering wheel in the opposite direction very slightly to keep within its lane.

The balanced scorecard is a planning and management system that helps align business to strategy while also improving communication between multiple groups and stakeholders. As this article on balancedscorecard.org explains, the balanced scorecard was developed by doctors Robert Kaplan and David Norton to help give a more balanced view of performance inside of an organization (where, previously, only financial data was available for comparison). Focusing on elements such as the customer, learning and growth, internal business processes, and financial success, the balanced scorecard proved to be fundamental to understand all elements of the business and how they interact with each other. The article goes on:

Venture capital is the exception, not the norm, as a funding source for startups. More VC-backed new companies fail than succeed, and since 1999 VC funds have barely broken even.

Those are just some of the myth-busting facts revealed by Diane Mulcahy, director of private equity at the Kauffman Foundation and a former VC herself, in the May issue of the Harvard Business Review that focuses on entrepreneurship.

"For someone who's starting (or thinking of starting) a company, the myths surrounding venture capital can be powerful," Mulcahy writes. "In this article I will challenge some common ones in order to help company founders develop a more realistic sense of the industry and what it offers."

Everyone seems to agree that education in the STEM fields -- science, technology, engineering, and mathematics -- needs work, and all the more so when it comes to the women and underrepresented minority students who are the least likely to persist in those subjects. But measurable progress -- or even a clear idea of how to achieve it -- is often hard to come by. Northwestern University can boast of both progress and hard data thanks to its Gateway Science Workshop, which began in the 1990s as a small pilot in biology and was soon expanded to hundreds of students and a variety of science and math courses. Some 15 years after its inception, the program has not only helped thousands of students, but has also provided a wealth of data on what works for which students, and why.

Driving on Interstate 495 toward Boston in a Ford Fusion one chilly afternoon in March, I did something that would’ve made even my laid-back long-ago driving instructor spit his coffee over the dashboard: I took my hands off the steering wheel, lifted my foot off the gas pedal, and waited to see what would happen. The answer: not much. To a degree, the car was already driving itself. Sensors were busy tracking other vehicles and road markings; computer systems were operating the accelerator, the brake, and even the steering wheel. The car reduced its speed to keep a safe distance from the vehicle ahead, but as that car sped up again, mine did so too. I tried nudging the steering wheel so that we drifted toward the dotted line on my left. As the line approached, the car pushed the steering wheel in the opposite direction very slightly to keep within its lane.

As part of the 2013 Best Undergraduate B-Schools ranking, Bloomberg Businessweek asked undergraduate business students from the Class of 2013 to tell us, via an online survey, about the full range of their business school experience, from getting in to getting a job. One section of the survey singled out specific aspects of the business program and asked the students to grade them on a scale from A to F. Over the next few weeks, we will publish the top 10 B-schools in each of 10 specialty areas, from accounting to sustainability, culminating with publication of the entire undergraduate specialty ranking, including each of the 124 ranked schools.

Diane Mulcahy of the Kauffman Foundation isn't a big fan of venture capital. In an article for the May issue of the Harvard Business Review, she argues that VCs don't fund all that many startups, don't have the greatest returns, and are shrinking in numbers.

Her arguments are fine, as far as they go. But that doesn't change the fact that the best of the venture capitalists will still attract top entrepreneurs with big checks, connections, and services like marketing and recruiting for startups.