Founders almost always cite lack of money as the reason for failure, but if you look deeper, I believe the reason is more often about dysfunctional people and leadership. Sometimes it comes right back to the founder, in terms of a malaise often called “Founder’s Syndrome.” A few years ago I was intimately involved with a promising startup that taught me about this issue.

I’ll be short on specifics here, to protect the guilty, but I hope you get the idea. It’s not a disease, but it can kill your startup. You can find a more complete discussion of Founder’s Syndrome on Wikipedia, but here are a few of the “symptoms” I observed in the Founder and CEO in this case:

Microsoft's Surface tablet will cost over $600 for the ARM-based Windows RT version, DigiTimes reports, citing industry sources.

That price sounds right. Microsoft said it expected the Windows RT tablet "to be competitive with a comparable ARM tablet." The Surface RT comes in 32 GB and 64 GB models. A 32 GB wifi iPad (based on ARM architecture) is $600.

The Surface running a fuller version of Windows, powered by Intel chips will cost $799 says DigiTimes.

Ford officially opened its new Silicon Valley Lab (SVL), ready to engage the tech community in the quest for the technological progress.

Ford Executive Chairman Bill Ford came to the spiritual home of the computer and consumer electronics industry to celebrate the grand opening of the Ford Silicon Valley Lab and to participate in the Computer History Museum’s “Revolutionaries” lecture series.

Entrepreneurs teach VCs, not the other way around. And I was lucky early in my career to back Seth Godin, who taught me a lot. When I met Seth, he was writing books and building a web company. I backed that web company, Yoyodyne, which exited to Yahoo! a few years later. But books were always Seth's passion and he's written a bunch of them. He's also deconstructed the book publishing business and pushed it to do things that were considered unacceptable. I recall when he put out a free pdf of one of his books six months before the book came out. And increased the book's sales numbers in the process. He did that in the 90s.

It is old news now that Seth is doing a Kickstarter for his next book. I've thought for a long time that authors should take their advances from their avid readers on Kickstarter instead of from book publishers who will lock them up and hold them back. In something like four days, Seth has taken an advance of $216,000 and there are 26 days to go. Who knows, he might get a seven figure advance if this keeps going like this.

What if you could wear glasses that gave you a sort of superpower? Not quite anything as high tech as Google’s “augmented reality glasses,” per se. Rather, what if these glasses helped you tap into something a lot more primitive--the ability to “read” other people?

A company called 2AI Labs has developed a pair of glasses, the O2Amps, that claim to do just that. A blog post announced yesterday that 2AI Labs had received its first shipment from manufacturers.

What has it taken to keep your small business thriving—or even just surviving—for the past four years since the U.S. economy crashed? For my business, it’s been an ongoing process of reinvention.

Turns out we’re not alone: A recent survey out from Citibank found the majority (53 percent) of small business owners have stayed afloat or competitive by reinventing their businesses.

Years ago, Russell Howze was working as a creative at an advertising agency in Atlanta when he got laid off due to budget cuts. He then spent years piecing together work through various corporate jobs, until he decided to follow his heart. He founded a nonprofit organization for artists, and now supplements his income running street art tours through Vayable, the company I founded, in his extra time.

The first part of this story is one that has come to define the reality of so many in the wake of the recession. But the second part--where the discontented worker leaves behind the “security” of a corporate job in favor of his or her passions--is a new and growing behavior in post-industrial countries, particularly in the United States, Europe, and Australia.

I. Sigmund "Sig" Mosley, Jr. and Palaniswamy "Raj" Rajan today announced the formation of CTW Venture Partners, LLC, a venture capital partnership focused on early-stage entrepreneurs in Atlanta and throughout the southeast.  CTW will raise a $25 million fund with its first close expected in early 2013.  At that time, the partners expect to begin investing with an eye toward companies in all industries with disruptive innovations or technologies and strong leadership teams. 

Though Mosley's name is most closely associated with Imlay Investments, Inc., where he is president and one of Atlanta's best-known early-stage investors, CTW is an entirely independent venture, with no ties to Imlay.  The partnership between Mosley and Rajan, co-founder, chairman & CEO of Virima Technologies, represents nearly 180 collective deals and more than 35 years of investing.  Wei-Chun Tai, principal at CTW and director of philanthropic efforts for the Mosley Foundation, rounds out the team.  All will continue in their current roles for the foreseeable future. 

Here’s some big news for San Diego’s innovation economy: There’s a new venture capital firm in town—and its investment methodology represents a fundamentally different approach to the conventional business model for venture investing.

The firm, Correlation Ventures, is using predictive analytics technology to tilt the odds in its favor. In fact, by using analytics software that relies on a different way of measuring risk, the San Diego firm is becoming known in some circles as “the Moneyball of venture capital,” according to David Coats, a co-founder and managing partner. He tells me the firm has made 21 investments since mid-2010, and Correlation now has more than $165 million under management.

The Economic Alliance of Greater Baltimore (EAGB) announced today that it has completed a formal agreement to serve as Greater Baltimore's primary business partner with BioHealth Innovation (BHI), Maryland's private-public collaborative that focuses on commercializing market-relevant bio health innovations and increasing access to early-stage funding in central Maryland.

BHI is the first regionally focused innovation intermediary created to connect the university and hospital bio health research strengths of Baltimore with the bioscience industry and federal laboratory strengths of Montgomery County.

There's a lot of talk these days about the importance of innovation. All CEOs worth their low salt lunch want it. And they want it, of course, now.

What sparks innovation? People. What sparks people? Inspired ideas that meet a need -- whether expressed or unexpressed -- ideas with enough mojo to rally sustained support.

Is there anything a person can do -- beyond caffeine, corporate pep talks, or astrology readings -- to quicken the appearance of breakthrough ideas?

Incumbency can be like a gift from a wicked fairy godmother, one that sounds like a good thing at first, but if poorly managed, turns out to be deadly.  In particular, incumbent tech companies have a peculiar tendency to asphyxiate their once innovation-oriented culture after they achieve market dominance.   I speak of Microsoft and RIM and their ongoing struggles to master the tablet market.

Last week at the IdeaCity conference I was given a Blackberry Playbook, RIM’s answer to the tablet wars.  Not the disastrous first version of the Playbook, but the latest upgrade.   Then as if on cue,  Microsoft just announced that this fall, after years of sitting out on the exploding tablet market, will finally dip its gigantic toe into the waters.  Microsoft will launch a hybrid tablet/laptop called “Surface” to compete with Apple’s iPad.

How can you prepare your company to scale? An excellent product and the right initial talent is key. But when those are in place, here’s a novel idea—how about designing a compensation strategy that empowers and motivates everybody in your business to help the company grow?

The structure I’m about to describe has been instrumental in helping my own company, Fishbowl, achieve rapid growth of 70% per year since 2007 with less than a 10% per year addition of staff, even through difficult economic times.

Unless a CEO has his or her head in the sand, increasing one’s innovation capacity is a consistent theme in the fight against the globalized commoditization of products and services. Innovation has become the “flavor” of the year in business media and everyone has their view of how to make it happen more frequently in more companies.

Most of these prescriptions while well meaning are not founded in the science of how innovation occurs. Innovation is the result of iterative learning processes as well as environments that encourage experimentation, critical inquiry, critical debate, and accept failures as a necessary part of the process.

Startup Weekend, the household name in hackathons, has expanded its operations to a much wider international audience. Although the organization has for some time been conducting hackathons around the world, it is now opening offices in two non-U.S. locations: London and Mexico City.

Startup Weekend hackathons are what they sound like: weekend-long hack sessions that focus on creating interesting solutions to the hackers’ own problems. In San Francisco, this can amount to a lot of tech and apps, but in other parts of the world, the company has seen weekend warriors present game-changing ideas about farming innovation or other, less digital means of improving their communities.

Many insiders (including me) expected the SBA's size standard issues to be straight forward, and mainly dealing with the changes necessary to accommodate the new SBIR reauthorization law. However, what we received were many changes to important areas where there was no statutory authority to do so, such as redefining "Domestic Business Concern" and items such as changing eligibility from "at time of award" to "at time of submission."

This edition is very important because it deals with the complex issues of SBIR/STTR eligibility, the size standards that allow you and others to participate in the program, as well as several proposed changes that are viewed by many SBIR veterans as destructive to the program, and small businesses alike. The SBIR program and the SBA desperately need your involvement and informed comments.

The University of Cambridge is embarking on a programme of scientific open collaboration with GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) that will involve working alongside GSK scientists and other partner organisations, to advance drug discovery and the development of new medicines.

Researchers will be based at Stevenage Bioscience Catalyst, the UKs first open innovation bioscience campus, co-located with GSKs Research and Development centre. This bioscience park provides an independent scientific community allowing scientists to foster relationships across organisations and share their expertise and knowledge.

A painting for sale along the boardwalk in Venice, Calif. The Los Angeles boardwalk community of Venice has long celebrated its seediness, accepting — embracing, really — the kind of sensory assaults that would faze more conventional places: beachfront bodybuilders, ragamuffin street vendors, tattoo artists, Hare Krishna chanters, skateboarders, drug dealers, gangs, homeless encampments, rowdy tourists, film crews and, more recently, a colony of medical marijuana dispensaries.

Recently entrepreneur and educator Vivek Wadhwa took on PayPal founder Peter Thiel’s premise that students would be better off starting businesses without finishing or even starting college. By framing the argument in terms of cost of education versus long-term earnings, both overlooked one of the most important factors in the decision — the connection between higher education and happiness.