Choosing a career path (or changing one) is, for most of us, a confusing and anxiety-riddled experience. Many will tell you to "follow your passion" or "do what you love," but as Cal Newport argues in So Good They Can't Ignore You, this is not very useful advice. When I graduated from college, I liked lots of things. But love? Passion? That would have been seriously overstating it.

On Friday, veteran journalist Bill Moyers did a segment on Silicon Valley that gives a very different perspective than we get from most mainstream media coverage of the world-renowned tech industry hub, and it’s been fueling some good conversations this weekend.

Called “Homeless in High Tech’s Shadow,” it’s a very interesting look at the growing homeless problem in the South Bay of San Francisco that’s happening in stark contrast to the growing wealth in the same area. Instead of another breathless look at the Google cafeteria that offers free gourmet food for all employees, we meet a former worker in that same cafeteria who was laid off as the company tightened its hiring policies and is now living in a tent. Instead of gleaming footage of the high-tech machinery that produces silicon wafers, we meet a former National Semiconductor employee who is now homeless at the age of 54 with “nothing” to her name.

TechStars has become the most competitive startup accelerator program on the east coast. But for its New York City program, the next few months will be pivotal. It's the first time the New York program will be run by someone other than its founder, David Tisch (David Cohen, the founder of TechStars, is still heavily involved). 

As head of the Human Health and Performance Directorate at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Dr. Jeffrey Davis leads a team with a very unique charge: They are tasked with solving human health issues — in outer space.

In all, Davis’ team is dealing with about 45 different health problems related to long-duration space flight — everything from bone loss and muscle decay to water recycling and food preservation. For some of these problems, Davis and his staff have the answers, or at least know where to find them. But for others, Davis admits, the answers can’t be found in-house — and that’s where the job gets tougher, especially in times of budget austerity.

Red was a star. Now she’s a target. Five assassins came at her and missed with the ultimate weapon, the Transistor. The one and only. It’s hers, now. All she has to do is pull it from the body of her dead friend like Excalibur from the stone.

“Hey, Red,” says the sword in her dead friend’s voice, “That’s not me. Not anymore. I’m safe now in here. Safer than you. So please … let’s go.”

Welcome to the first installment of our perspective series! This series is meant to give you true insight into the realities of your mind, your business and your life.

There is a commonly held belief that the first step in starting a business is to graciously bow out of your current employment and dive right in. This course of action may have been deemed necessary some time ago and might still be true for those who like to have a little more skin in the game. However, with the current economic turmoil most Americans are experiencing, why take the risk? The unnecessary risk, fear and anxiety resulting from such actions aren’t necessary for most businesses, especially online businesses. The average person has more idle time to devote to such endeavors than they think and simply put, just need to put things into perspective.

Keeping with my recent trend of metaphors, a typical comment you hear from the startup community is “I just took the leap”, meaning someone just left their cushy job and took a huge risk to start a company.

Starting a company can be one of the most exciting times in life, just like the first time you strap a chute on your back and jump from a plane 10,000 feet above the ground.

It can also be one of the scariest.

One year ago, President Obama signed the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act into law. So, why isn’t “equity crowdfunding” a reality for startups and regular people who want to support them, in the U.S.?

For the unfamiliar, equity crowdfunding–under the JOBS Act–allows startups and small businesses to raise up to $1 million in equity funding online, through sites registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Broader access to capital could help entrepreneurs when loans aren’t favorable, or they lack connections to deep-pocketed angel and venture investors.

A couple of years ago, when my son was looking for his first college summer internship, I gave him some general advice and urged him to start early, but stopped short of stepping in to make sure he landed a good job. It was hard to watch him struggle, but the frustrations he went through that summer turned out to be so much more valuable than anything I could have possibly taught him through helping or nagging. Besides learning what it would really take to land an ideal internship, he learned that failure is a real possibility.

It’s every startup founder’s dream: Having a venture capital firm invest in your company.  Let’s celebrate! We’ve finally made it! We’re going to be big … right?

Well, most likely not.

First off, only 20 percent of venture funded companies are considered a success by their investors, and of those, not every company exits with the founding team intact.

Once a year at Sigma we bring together our portfolio CEOs to discuss current trends in technology, business models, Silicon Valley, and the markets and to share war-stories. After each event we hear from the participants how valuable it was for them to learn from their peers.

The life of a startup is about maximizing the number of good decisions and minimizing the number of bad ones. If you can learn what worked and what didn’t from someone else who has recently traveled the same road as you, you can save critical time and increase your venture’s chance of success.

“The year of the hack” is upon us. Your business needs tips to survive.

From almost the beginning of 2013, stories of alleged hacks on U.S. corporations, organizations and government agencies by foreign governments and malware attacks by cybercriminals on companies like Apple and Facebook have dominated the news.

The attacks have been so pervasive they’ve caused The Atlantic Wire to recently dub 2013 “The Year of the Hack.” And last month Google launched a special resource for hacked sites. Below are three tips to help your business prepare for whatever comes.

When I was a 7-year-old growing up in rural Austria, I had only one dream, one shared by probably 90% of all other boys in my home country: to become a world-class soccer player.

This is probably the equivalent of football here in the U.S. or ice hockey in Canada. And playing soccer was all I did for the next 10 years. I slowly climbed my way up, making it into football academy and playing for bigger teams. And yet, after being injured and slowly developing some doubt in my abilities, I dropped out and went to a normal school.

Most companies (ours included) divide their staff into "technology people" and "non-technology people." I think this divide creates real problems in the workplace: As technology becomes an inseparable part of business, not to mention daily life, everybody is now a "technology person." Key decisions at all levels of companies now involve software, which means that everyone needs to learn how to talk to engineers. And if you're going to talk to them, you should know how they think. You might even learn a thing or two.

Researchers in the Life Sciences Institute at the University of Michigan have challenged a long-held belief that whitening of skeletal muscle in diabetes is harmful.

In fact, the white muscle that increases with resistance training, age and diabetes helps keep blood sugar in check, the researchers showed.

In addition, the insights from the molecular pathways involved in this phenomenon and identified in the study may point the way to potential drug targets for obesity and metabolic disease.

To write or not to write a business plan, when to write a business plan, these are some of the questions that I come across a lot. According to just under 90% of the 100+ founders of web biased technology companies that we have interviewed, you should not focus on writing a business plan… especially when you are in the infant stages of your company’s life cycle. The reason is that when you are starting a company there are far more pressing things to focus on than writing a detailed business plan with a well thought out financial forecast that has no real chance of being even close to accurate. There are really two good alternatives to writing a business plan 1) Write a business model, this idea is championed by Guy Kawasaki or 2) The Lean Startup process, coined by Eric Ries.

The Hype Cycle was a concept put forward by Gartner, Inc. back in 1995 meant to apply to technology product evolution and acceptance. As I was reading about it a while back, it occurred to me that the concept relates directly to how investors see startup opportunities and potential success as well, at least those with technology in their offerings.

For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, the Gartner Hype Cycle characterizes the over-enthusiasm or "hype" and subsequent disappointment that typically occurs with the introduction of new technologies. Hype curves then show how and when technologies move beyond the hype, offer practical benefits and become widely accepted. A hype cycle in Gartner's interpretation always comprises five phases:

Do work and get paid once. Build an asset and get paid for as long as it lasts.

A retailer or a restaurant owner might work 18 hours a day--but the landlord makes just as much money from that effort, often more. The cheeseburger gets paid for once, but the rent bill comes every month.

Real estate is an obvious and simple form of asset. In 1928, my great grandfather traded his real estate assets for the sure thing of the stock market. The biggest difference between the rental houses he owned and the worthless stocks he bought was that the houses paid rent every month, while the stocks offered merely the promise of a later payoff.

As a co-founder of TechStars, I'm a huge believer in the mentor-driven accelerator model. But I don't think government should be funding these accelerators, nor do I think they need to.

A good accelerator can be run in any city in the world for $500,000. Entrepreneurs with a compelling track record and approach should be able to easily raise, or even provide this capital. As evidence of this, there are already hundreds of accelerators in the U.S., without government funding, being run as entrepreneurial ventures for profit by entrepreneurs.

The crowdfunding industry is frustrated that the Securities and Exchange Commission has not yet finalized rules that will potentially turbocharge the industry. But it is also cautiously optimistic that there will be movement this year.

The SEC is expected to finalize and implement rules on the provision of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, known as the JOBS Act, which removes the ban on publically seeking investors by the end of June, according to Chance Barnett, the co-founder of Crowdfunder, a Venice, Calif.-based crowdfunding platform. Rules for the third component of the JOBS Act, which would make it possible to raise money on an online portal from non-accredited investors, are not expected until the third or fourth quarter of this year, Barnett says at a panel discussion in New York City Thursday.