Last week I mentioned that sometimes I am at a loss for something to post about on MBA Mondays. Andrew Parker, who got his MBA at Union Square Ventures (largely self taught) from 2006 to 2010, suggested in the comments that I post about the differences between Enterprise Value and Market Value. It was a good suggestion and so here goes.

The Equity Market Value (which I will refer to as Market Value for the rest of this post) is the total number of shares outstanding times the current market price for a share of stock. To make this post simple, we will focus only on public companies with one class of stock. The Market Value is the price you are paying for the entire company when you buy a stock.

Let's use .com/company/open-table/" mce_href="http://www.tracked.com/company/open-table/">Open Table, a recent public company as our real world example in this post. Open Table (ticker OPEN) closed on Friday at $48.19 and has a "market value" of $1.1bn according to this page on Tracked.com. According to Google Finance, Open Table has 22.77 million shares outstanding. So to check the market value calculation on Tracked.com, let's multiply the market price of $48.19 by the shares outstanding of 22.75 million. My desktop calculator tells me that is $1.096 billion.

HP’s CEO ouster. Facebook’s coming war with Google. Skype’s IPO. What do these headlines have in common? One man: Marc Andreessen.

As the baby-faced cofounder of Netscape, Andreessen gave birth to the dotcom boom. His Web browser granted the masses access to the Web. And Netscape’s amazing 1995 initial public offering broke the rule that tech companies had to show years of profit before going public, letting ordinary investors bet on the growth of the Internet.

Now, at the age of 39, he’s an elder statesman of Silicon Valley, on the board of eBay, Facebook, Hewlett-Packard, and Skype — four companies that bridge generations of innovation. His new venture-capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, has vaulted into the top ranks of Sand Hill Road on the strength of his connections and influence.

A few years ago companies trusted their social media campaigns to interns. Part of this was because interns equaled cheap labor for a non-trusted task, but part of it was also because interns, frankly, were better at social media then their superiors.

Let’s face it, CEOs may have the power, but interns are the better characters. And that’s what social media (and the USA Network) is based on – giving characters a voice and customers someone to hold on to.

I wouldn’t advise that you hand off all your social media interactions to an intern*, but do start thinking like an intern. Because while your paycheck may be greater, your intern is trumping you in sheer number and depth of social media skills.

LISBON — Five years ago, the leaders of this sun-scorched, wind-swept nation made a bet: To reduce Portugal’s dependence on imported fossil fuels, they embarked on an array of ambitious renewable energy projects — primarily harnessing the country’s wind and hydropower, but also its sunlight and ocean waves.

Today, Lisbon’s trendy bars, Porto’s factories and the Algarve’s glamorous resorts are powered substantially by clean energy. Nearly 45 percent of the electricity in Portugal’s grid will come from renewable sources this year, up from 17 percent just five years ago.

Land-based wind power — this year deemed “potentially competitive” with fossil fuels by the International Energy Agency in Paris — has expanded sevenfold in that time. And Portugal expects in 2011 to become the first country to inaugurate a national network of charging stations for electric cars.

Whenever I visit an emerging market the following introduction is made, always in a hushed tone: "Mr Haque, this is one of our leading industrialists." It's a phrase that speaks volumes. In developed countries, "leading" and "industrialist" are an oxymoron — because, of course, their economies are supposed to be post-industrial.

But here's the funny thing. It's 2010, and we still don't know how to describe the archetypal magnates of the next economy. We don't have a word for it, so we resort to awkward neologisms, like "information entrepreneur" or "green mogul." It's as if we're still not quite sure just what kinds of "capital" tomorrow's tycoons will be "ists" of. What are the kernels of tomorrow's prosperity?

It's a vital question — because, as the eminent Jeff Sachs has recently argued, yesterday's conspicuous, debt-fuelled, binge-and-crash hyperconsumption shouldn't (and won't) be America's (or the world's) great engine of more sustainable, meaningful growth. Instead, investment must replace consumption. Like many today, Sachs concludes that the government should kickstart investment in clean-tech, high-speed rail, and a lot more besides. In other words, the economy's real capital gap — its critical shortage of productive assets — is in better, cleaner machinery: physical capital, next-generation infrastructure. While that's no doubt very necessary, I'm not convinced it will be enough. So what should we invest in?

You often hear people saying “entrepreneurship takes guts.” The reason it’s true is that every successful entrepreneurial story starts with grappling with many unique failures and fears. One of the first questions you need to answer is: Are you one of the rare breed of fearless entrepreneurs?

From the time we are born, we were constantly being told how to do things, what not to do and the importance of being careful. Be it the electric switch or the water-park slide, we were cautioned by protective and well-intentioned parents and guardians all the time. We were told that we should study hard so as not to fail. Failure is considered so bad that some students’ commit suicide under exam pressure every year.

'Place-based colleges' are good for parties, but are becoming less crucial for learning thanks to the Internet, said the Microsoft founder Bill Gates at a conference on Friday.

"Five years from now on the Web for free you'll be able to find the best lectures in the world. It will be better than any single university," he argued at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, Calif. "College, except for the parties, needs to be less place-based."

An attendee captured the remarks with a shaky hand-held camera and posted the clip on YouTube.

Part 2 of our Venture Capital Human Capital report looked at founders of VC-backed companies and their gender and education demographics. For those engaged in the startup ecosystem, there is a debate about the value of MBAs at a startup. Generally, the commentary is not particularly favorable towards MBAs.

But some hard data from our Venture Capital Human Capital report suggests MBAs might be deserving of a bit more respect.

The data indicates that amongst founders with Master’s degrees, 58%, of teams only have founders with an MBA. So based on this data point, an MBA is not a liability when raising funding.

Phoenix Suns point guard Steve Nash is looking for nothing but net returns as he checks into the venture capital game.

The basketball star has teamed up with advertising executive Mike Duda to launch a hybrid marketing consultancy and venture capital firm. The New York firm, Consigliere, will offer fee-based marketing services, as well as seed-stage capital. Duda said he and Nash are raising $20 million and will invest up to $250,000 in consumer products that can benefit from creative marketing.

The life of an entrepreneur is a 24 x 7 dash for customers, investors or lenders. For the first year or two of a start-up, it's a race against the burn rate. Every day you are spending money on employees, rent, supplies, whatever. The goal is to reach break-even before you run out of cash.

And so every start-up entrepreneur runs a race - trying to get more cash in the door than is going out. Trying to get to break-even while there is still something in the bank.

The race is especially hard during the month of August.

The race is about getting people who have money - consumers, investors, lenders - to part with it and hand it over to you, the entrepreneur. People are always reluctant to do that but in August, the last thing they are thinking about is a new product, a new venture or a new borrower.

The whole thing began by accident, says David Baker, a biochemist at the University of Washington in Seattle. It was 2005, and he and his colleagues had just unveiled Rosetta@home — one of those distributed-computing projects in which volunteers download a small piece of software and let their home computers do some extracurricular work when the machines would otherwise be idle. The downloaded program was devoted to the notoriously difficult problem of protein folding: determining how a linear chain of amino acids curls up into a three-dimensional shape that minimizes the internal stresses and strains — presumably the protein's natural shape. If the users wanted, they could watch on a screen saver as their computer methodically tugged and twisted the protein in search of a more favourable configuration.

Thousands of people were signing up for Rosetta@home, says Baker, which was gratifying, but not entirely surprising; this kind of digital citizen science had become almost routine by then. It was first popularized in 1999 by the SETI@home project at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB), which harnessed volunteers' computers to sift through radio telescope data in search of alien signals. And in 2002, UCB engineers had released a generalized version of the software known as the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC). By 2005, there were dozens of active BOINC projects — Rosetta@home among them — and hundreds of thousands of users worldwide.

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Recently I began to buy eBooks for the Kindle application on my iPad. While I still love paper books, the digital wiles of eBooks are looking increasingly attractive to me. Below are five eBook features that may tempt you to buy electronic books too.

I should note that I wasn't a hold-out on eBooks for moral reasons. I simply couldn't access them until recently. Amazon's Kindle, Sony's Reader and Barnes & Noble's Nook have all been either unavailable to people outside the US, or the eBook stores to populate them have been inaccessible. However with the Kindle for iPad, I've finally been able to enjoy the forbidden fruit of eBooks.

When IBM recently polled 1500 CEOs across 60 countries, they rated creativity as the most important leadership competency.

Eighty percent of the CEOs said the business environment is growing so complex that it literally demands new ways of thinking. Less than 50 percent said they believed their organizations were equipped to deal effectively with this rising complexity.

But are CEOs and senior leaders really willing to make the transformational moves necessary to foster cultures of real creativity and innovation?

Here are the six fundamental moves we believe they must make. In all my travels, I've not yet come across a single company that systematically does even the majority of them, much less every one.

"We're growing dramatically," Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory staff scientist Ryan Wiser said of the wind industry's 2009 performance. "We're on a path to achieve much higher levels of wind." This is in stark contrast to wind's 2010 first half performance, which American Wind Energy Association CEO Denise Bode characterized as "dismal."

The 2009 Wind Technologies Market Report, by Wiser and Mark Bolinger of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), describes a record-breaking 2009. Yet a 71 percent drop in installation in the first half of 2010 forebodes a completely different kind of year. Things will pick up in the second half, but the forecast is for a 20 percent to 45 percent year-on-year reversal. Careful scrutiny of the LBNL report turns up possible telltale signs of the turnaround that are an indication of things to come.

Getting venture capital funding is difficult.*

VC investors look at hundreds of deals for every one they actually fund.  Have you ever wondered about the "science" of how they pick their deals and the thought processes that go into deal flow and deal selection? 

VC Taskforce offers an opportunity for entrepreneurs seeking VC funding to pitch in front of a panel of investors with a greentech focus.  It's free and on a first-come basis at the law offices of Wilson Sonsini in Palo Alto, Califorina.  It's a regular event -- the one I attended was held a few weeks ago.

Coimbatore Krishnarao (C.K.) Prahalad would have celebrated his 69th birthday on August 8, 2010. He was one of the most influential and original strategic and management thinkers of the last 50 years. He was also a friend to strategy+business and, most significantly, a friend and mentor to management thinkers and practitioners all around the world — particularly in India, where he was born and educated, and in the United States, where he lived for most of his career until he passed away from a sudden lung illness on April 16.

Starting in 1977, Prahalad held a post as professor (the Paul and Ruth McCracken Distinguished University Professor of Strategy) at the University of Michigan’s Ross Business School, while building a body of groundbreaking work on the most significant themes in business today: strategy, emerging markets, innovation, and organizational structure. His book Competing for the Future (Harvard Business School Press, 1994), coauthored with Gary Hamel, established core competencies as a strategic enabler, and strategic intent as a managerial purpose; The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid (Wharton School Publishing, 2005) anticipated the remarkable growth of emerging markets; and The New Age of Innovation: Driving Co-created Value through Global Networks (McGraw-Hill, 2008), coauthored with M.S. Krishnan, proposed that the most value-added corporate activity would occur across hierarchical boundaries. Along the way, C.K. wrote three of s+b’s most prescient articles: “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid” (First Quarter 2002, coauthored with Stuart Hart), “The Innovation Sandbox” (Autumn 2006), and “Twenty Hubs and No HQ” (Spring 2008, coauthored with Hrishi Bhattacharyya).

Even if employment somehow does recover to pre-recession levels in the next few years, some jobs won't ever return.

These doomed jobs come from industries in decline. Already fading, the recession was a death blow for manufacturing, administration and other work that can be done cheaper by foreigners and machines.

The double hit of recession and secular changes means employment will NOT come back easily. America's unemployed are stuck with the wrong skills and little to contribute to modern industry.

BEIJING, Aug. 9 (Xinhuanet) --The Governor of the People's Bank of China (PBC) Yi Gang recently mentioned that China had overtaken Japan to become the world's second largest economy. Some UK researchers believe that at current GDP growth rates, China will overtake the U.S. to be the world's top economy within nine years. The forecasts sparked heated debate worldwide. Some people think the figures are faked and do not take the forecasts seriously; others agree that, sooner or later, China will become the world's biggest economic power.

The accuracy of China's GDP figures need not concern us much. Given the rate of economic growth over the past 30 years and the current exchange rate of yuan, the national figures for GDP are quite believable. Some provinces may exaggerate the figures, but on the other hand in some developed areas the figures may be understated. This makes the final figure released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) more or less accurate.

What concerns me most is that, although China's overall GDP is high, its per-capita GDP lags far behind the west. China's per-capita GDP is around US$3,800, less than one tenth that of Japan or the U.S., and less than one sixth that of France and the UK. Even among developing countries, China occupies only a mid-to-low-ranking position.

They are the mad scientists, the game-changers, the contrarians. Whatever you choose to call them, they represent a new economy driven not by products and profits, but rather by people willing to take a chance on a new idea and make it happen. They are the innovators, moguls of the entreprenurial economy.

Barbers turn to other barbers when they need a trim. Doctors consult other doctors when they get inexplicable aches and pains. And lawyers — well, we all know the adage about the wisdom of lawyers who represent themselves.

But what about venture capitalists, the people who provide seed funding to early-stage companies with big ideas but small, or even nonexistent, bank accounts? Where do venture capitalists go to get venture capital?

They look to other venture capitalists, of course.

In 2005, the state of Ohio created the Ohio Capital Fund — “a fund of funds” — to help promote and facilitate that process. Simply put, the Ohio Capital Fund issues taxpayer-backed bonds to raise private money to invest in other venture-capital funds, in Ohio and elsewhere. Those funds, in turn, invest in fledgling companies.

The only caveat: At least half of the Ohio money has to go to fledgling companies in Ohio.