One of the things we hear a lot about in Silicon Valley is how cheap and easy it is to launch a startup these days. After all, high-quality open source software is free, the cloud makes computer power far less expensive, and anyone with an Internet connection can learn Ruby and CSS. Throw in a few YouTube videos and a Twitter account, and you’re golden — or so we are led to believe.

While all of these factors are true to an extent, the truth of the matter is that the reduced costs of hardware and software are easily offset by the expense of engineers and experienced business people. And no matter what the latest trends indicate, you will eventually have to spend money on PR and marketing.

A new poll in France says 7 out of 10 people think Microsoft did more to change the world than Apple. We think we would have similar results in other countries, if only because a lot more people (still!) use Microsoft products than Apple products, at least for personal computing which is (still!) the most important part of computing.  It's hard to see a mention of Steve Jobs without the worlds "change the world" or "changing an industry." And let's give him his due. Let's give him his due as one of the greatest entrepreneurs in history, as an amazing entrepreneur and visionary who left many "dents" in the universe. And he did change many industries, like music, film, and yes, personal computing.

Dan Shapiro has an excellent post up titled What to do when an investor asks you for your business plan. In it he addresses something we missed in Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist.

In the section where we discuss business plans, we say:

“We haven’t read a business plan in over 20 years. Sure, we still get plenty of them, but it is not something we care about as we invest in areas we know well, and as a result we much prefer demos and live interactions…. However, realize that some VCs care a lot about seeing a business plan, regardless of the current view by many people that a business plan is an obsolete document.”

Innovation Exchanges for Health IT, an initiative from the White House Startup America Initiative in partnership with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), has announced its several upcoming events.

Led by the Office of the Chief Technology Officer and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC), as part of the Investing in Innovations program, the Innovation Exchanges for Health IT are special forums bringing innovators and healthcare organizations together in order to find potential testing opportunities.

A very interesting paper from Steve Bradford:

Crowdfunding - the use of the Internet to raise money through small contributions from a large number of investors - may cause a revolution in small-business financing. Through crowdfunding, smaller entrepreneurs, who traditionally have had great difficulty obtaining capital, have access to anyone in the world with a computer, Internet access, and spare cash to invest. Crowdfunding sites such as Kiva, Kickstarter, and IndieGoGo have proliferated and the amount of money raised through crowdfunding has grown to billions of dollars in just a few years.

"This has been a profound growing experience. One that has really changed the culture of our non-profit for the better in many areas."

These are the words of a nonprofit executive taken earlier this year from an anonymous survey by ZeroDivide of its grantees. The San Francisco-based Foundation has spent the last five years developing a social enterprise incubation program, designed to help nonprofits working with underserved communities become more effective and sustainable through tech and media-related business ventures.

In Part 1 of this post I said that the terms in a termsheet fall into four categories – those relating to economics, to control, the legally binding ones (exclusivity and costs), and everything else.  I then went on to write in a bit of detail about valuation, which is the most important of the economic terms.

In this post I will cover the other key economic terms; liquidation preference and anti-dilution, the most important control terms; board structure and protective provisions, and then finish with a few words on exclusivity and cost.  Over these two posts I will then have covered the most important clauses in a termsheet, and you should be able to tell whether a termsheet is attractive or not, but there is a lot that isn’t covered and they are no substitute for a good lawyer.

Did you go into the office this past Labor Day weekend? Did you work this past Labor Day weekend? If your answer to the first question is “no” but you answered “yes” to the second,” you and your business are part of the growing trend toward workshifting.

Defined by the most recent iPass Mobile Workforce Report as “the ability to work when and where we want to,” workshifting is changing the way work gets done. The good news is, for the most part, workshifting is having positive effects on both employees and the companies they work for. Here’s a closer look at some of what the iPass survey of employees at more than 1,100 businesses worldwide discovered. If your small business doesn’t yet encourage workshifting, the results might change your mind.

When it comes to link sharing in social media, it turns out it's not about where you share it -- it's about what you share. New research from URL shortening service bitly focuses on how long a link is "alive” before people stop engaging with it and whether it matters what kind of content it is or where it was shared.

By calculating what bitly is calling the link's 'half life' (the time it takes a link to receive half the clicks it will ever receive after it’s reached its peak), bitly evaluated the persistence of 1,000 popular bitly links, and found some strikingly similar results.

Millions of professionals donate their time volunteering that impacts the lives of others, but it turns out volunteering is as good for your career as it is to those you help. Here’s how:

Helping Others Matters – All that time you spent raising record amounts of money, the year-end event you planned to perfection all felt like real work and…it was. New research from LinkedIn shows that one out of every five hiring managers in the U.S. agree they have hired a candidate because of their volunteer work experience. Your volunteer experience counts and if you don’t include it in your profile, on your resume or when you’re negotiating for a promotion you’re not getting the credit you deserve.

General Motors is attempting to break into the already massive and growing Chinese market with its new electric vehicle, the Chevy Volt. The cost of entry into the market, however, may be the forced transfer of its electric engine technologies, according to The New York Times.

According to the report, unless the American company gives up the technologies to a company partially owned by the Chinese government, it will not qualify for consumers subsidies of up to $19,300 per vehicle.

With all Chinese low-emission vehicles sold domestically receiving the subsidies, it would put GM at a competitive disadvantage if it didn’t receive the same treatment.

Proof of Concept Testing – Connecting Early Stage Innovators to Stakeholders

One of the more exciting initiatives taking place is a unique effort to unite early stage innovators with the broader ecosystem to shepherd and nurture new technological development.

One of the greatest challenges facing any health care innovator is to develop ideas with the broader environment – working with a myriad of stakeholders in an appropriate manner to obtain the crucial data needed to validate the effectiveness, value, and strategy tied to the innovation. I’m referring to getting to the critical stage known as the proof-of-concept.

If you’re the type of person who pays attention to the economy, you’re probably familiar with the grumblings of an economic downturn making its rounds through the financial media in recent months. Treatment of the issue can range from dismissive to downright apocalyptic, depending on who you ask, what they do for a living, and how they’re feeling that day. But regardless of the tone, the staggering volume of chatter about economic woes can leave a small business owner feeling uneasy. By Google’s count, nearly 50,000 articles have hit the web in the past day alone containing the menacing keyword, “recession.”

IMAGE PROVIDED BY: ALEXTHEPINK First of all, don’t panic. Just because there’s a buzz about a recession doesn’t necessarily mean there will be one, as the experts have at best a spotty record for predicting these things. Also, resist the urge to use the stock market as an indicator; things are usually not as bad—or as good—as fluctuations in the S&P 500 would indicate. But this exercise is really about the ‘what if’’. What would happen to revenues? Would you need to make wholesale changes to the way you operate? Coming from a background in equity analysis, I answered these types of questions for the public companies I covered. Here are some key things to think about when evaluating your own company’s sensitivity to the overall economy:

“If we would find ways to have an overall common approach in healthcare we could achieve much more,” according to Alexander von Gabain, an Austrian biopharma entrepreneur and chairman-elect of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology. “We have to find ways of getting healthcare costs down – by working together, expanding best practice, and cooperating intellectually and financially,” agreed Bart Gordon, former chairman of the US House Committee on Science and Technology and now a partner at Washington law firm K&L Gates.

The call for transatlantic cooperation in healthcare came at a meeting on Capitol Hill that was organized by Science|Business and hosted by Rep. Phil Gingrey, a Georgia Republican who is also a doctor. Gingrey called for greater collaboration on electronic medical records. He praised a $19 billion US e-health effort, included in the 2009 economic-stimulus bill, and suggested it add a global dimension. “If you go into an emergency room where you don’t speak the language, or maybe you can’t even talk because of injuries, for the doctors to be able to take your card and swipe it” to get an instant medical history – “this can be very important. It should be there globally.”

Download the PDF

On the heels of a U.S. Department of Labor jobs report showing no net increase in jobs for the first time in 11 months-as well as an unwavering, high rate of unemployment-the Kauffman Foundation released two videos today that illustrate how entrepreneurs drive the nation's economy and how policymakers can help new firms start and grow.

In the first video, Kauffman Foundation President and CEO Carl Schramm narrates animated whiteboard drawings that illustrate the three vital contributions entrepreneurs make to the economy: They birth innovations, create jobs, and produce all net new wealth in society.

Jobs are the hot topic in Washington, D.C., and for good reason. With another national election 14 months away, unemployment holding steady above 9 percent, and job creation at anemic levels, the politicians who run things are getting nervous.

The man with the most to lose, President Barack Obama, is unveiling his proposal to improve the jobs situation on Thursday night before a joint session of Congress. But lawmakers are only a small part of the audience, more a backdrop as Obama makes his case to the American public.

Reports say that Obama is going to ask Congress to approve a $300 billion plan that the White House hopes will spur companies to hire by offering tax cuts, pumping money into infrastructure spending, and offering direct aid to state and local governments. Any plan to increase spending will have difficulty passing the Republican-led House.

"By 1970, the governments of the wealthy countries began to take it for granted that they had truly discovered the secret of cornucopia. Politicians of left and right alike believed that modern economic policy was able to keep economies expanding very fast -- and endlessly. That left only the congenial question of dividing up the new wealth that was being steadily generated."

Those words, from a Washington Post editorial more than twenty-five years ago, echoed the beliefs not only of politicians and the press, but of mainstream economics professionals resistant to the idea that growth in a market economy would ever stagnate over a protracted period.

Startup accelerator DreamIt Ventures is introducing its Fall 2011 Philadelphia class today, which includes five minority-owned companies selected in collaboration with Comcast Ventures. In May, DreamIt and Comcast teamed up to provided seed funding, training and mentoring to minority-led startups, starting with DreamIt’s fall program.

The current class includes students and alumni from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, Duke, Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Columbia and MIT. Startup founders have past work experience at Google, Yahoo, Intel, Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan.

It takes real energy to negotiate, crunch numbers and exercise willpower.

What you eat impacts your ability to do all these things. In fact, complex brain processes are "literally fed by glucose that circulates from gut to brain," according to Psychology Today.

"Willpower is more than a metaphor," Florida State University psychologist Roy Baumeister told the magazine. "The human body is undeniably an energy system. Evolution gave us this new and more complicated way of acting, but it's expensive in terms of fuel burned. Being our better selves is biologically costly."

Twitter just landed the largest single venture capital investment deal in history: $800 mn, according to reports, although the company would only call the amount ‘significant’. Half the money goes to Twitter directly and the other $400 mn will buy shares of existing holders. That means an $8.4 bn valuation.

And who’s leading the round? DST Global, the fund run by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner. This isn’t the first time DST has written a big check to a social media start-up: two years ago, it made a big splash by investing $400 mn in Facebook, with a similar split of half the money to the company, the other half to provide liquidity to insiders.

The Twitter investment shows a change to the traditional troika of Silicon Valley start-up, American venture capital firm, and eventual IPO. Instead, companies get funding to build strength – working their way toward profitability before filing their S-1 with the SEC – and cash out early shareholders who don’t want to hold for years. Oversea investors help make that possible.