There have been quite a few posts written about this meme in the past few weeks. 

I think that Paul Kedrosky got the discussion started with this post. Chris Dixon wrote an interesting response. And yesterday John Boyd wrote a thoughtful post on the topic.

John makes a point in his post that I want to second and add to. He says:

While many businesses require a lot less capital to start, they don't require less capital to grow.

Did you know that there are over 1.5 million non-profits in operation in the U.S. which accounts for a staggering 8.11% of all wages paid in the U.S. (Source: National Center for Charitable Statistics).

If you are passionate about a cause and can find a like-minded group of people to help you share the significant responsibilities of operating a non-profit, then the philanthropic and entrepreneurial rewards can be significant – if you know what you are doing.

Starting a non-profit is very similar to starting a for-profit business – and requires a solid understanding of business planning, tax law, marketing, financing options and leadership.

Here is a basic checklist for how to start a non-profit organization (NPO), while ensuring you pay attention to important legal and regulatory processes:

1. Define Your Mission

To ensure that everyone is singing off the same hymn sheet, it’s critical that you define your mission statement, (i.e. the purpose of your non-profit and the need it addresses) early on in the start-up phase. At the same time, realize that it will evolve over time as other stakeholders take shape and provide input – so keep your mission statement reasonably high level for now.

What ails Europe’s innovation machine? Bureaucratic procedures are high on the list, as is the EU’s intellectual property framework, according to a new survey of European Union and Brussels opinion leaders commissioned by GE.

Other deterrents to innovation include lack of clarification on important policies, and the inability of public officials to identify projects.

GE released the survey on the current state of innovation policies in the EU in Munich today (July 15), at the European launch of its $200 million private sector bid to speed the development of smart electricity grids.  

The project, “GE ecomagination Challenge: Powering the Grid,” unveiled in San Francisco on Tuesday, pioneers open innovation in energy technology on a global scale.

But GE’s open innovation competition will not involve government funds, despite the billions of euros set aside by national governments over the past two years for clean technology R&D.

If the EU is to meet its targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, integrating renewable energy sources, and being more energy efficient - while at the same time guaranteeing energy security - its electricity transmission system needs a fundamental and far-reaching modernisation.

Last month saw the official launch of the European Commission’s smart grids initiative, which aims to do just this, upgrading and equipping Europe’s electricity network for a sustainable future, by building intelligence into the existing passive delivery system.

The European Electricity Grid Initiative (EEGI) has high ambitions, though there are still many questions as to how exactly it will become reality.

There has been a huge drop in venture capital activity in the UK over the past two years, with the number of exits falling by 40 per cent and the total amount of VC raised falling by 50 per cent, according to new research by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA).

‘Venture Capital: now and after the Dotcom Crash’ compares current venture activity trends withwhat happens after the dotcom crash, and finds this crisis has been compounded by the challenges facing entrepreneurs since 2002.

In particular, two new trends affect today’s market:

• The time taken to successfully exit, through a floatation or takeover, is getting longer. Across the world this averages almost seven and a half years, the longest period seen over the past two decades. This global trend is reflected in the UK market and is making it harder for funds to attract further investment.
• Both the dotcom bust and the current financial crisis resulted in a significant reduction in the number of new venture capital funds established. Current fundraising activity is considerably lower than levels seen after the dotcom crash and stands at the lowest level seen in the last decade.

I’m a morning person. Like to get up around 6. Turns out my career is likely enhanced by my proclivity to be up with the roosters.

If you’re a night owl, on the other hand, you might be more creative and intelligent than us up-with-the-sun types, but your rhythms are out of sync with the corporate clock.

“When it comes to business success, morning people hold the important cards,” writes Christopher Randler in the Harvard Business Review article, The Early Bird Really Does Get the Worm. Randler is a biology professor at University of Education in Heidelberg, Germany

Dear SBIR Gateway Insider,

As many of you know, without reauthorization or another continuing resolution (CR) to extend the SBIR & STTR programs, these programs will expire for all agencies EXCEPT the DoD, on August 1, 2010. The DoD SBIR & STTR are safe until they expire on October 1, 2010.

There are some hopeful signs on the near horizon, but significant danger as well. We also have several other positive areas of SBIR news to report. However, at the risk of sounding like "Poor Johnny One Note" we will start with reauthorization.

In this issue:

• House Finally Responds To Senate Compromise
• To Compromise Or Kick The Can And Roll The Dice
• DOE Announces New "XLerator" Program - $30m Phase III Funding
• NIST SBIR Program Manager Change
• Progress On DOD's Rapid Innovation Program
• Nydia, SBA & Heroes Of Small Business??

Background for our new readers: Back in July of 2009 the House & Senate passed their own vastly different SBIR reauthorization bills H.R. 2965 and S.1233. Technically the Senate took the House's H.R. 2965 and substituted the House's language with Senate's S.1233. At this point in the legislative process, the House & Senate were to form a "conference committee" to resolve any differences, compromise and reconcile the language into a final bill that can be passed by both and sent to the President. In this case the conferencing was to be done by senior staff members of both small business committees. The House refused to negotiate, and in October of 2009 the Senate sent the House a very generous (some say overly generous) compromise offer. The House would not even acknowledge the offer, and the SBIR program has been kept alive by a series of short term extenders sometimes referred to as continuing resolutions (CR).

Venture capitalists are typically some of the most optimistic people on the planet, touting how new technologies will change the world. But ask American VCs about their own industry and that optimism just flies out the door. A new survey finds that more than 90 percent of U.S. venture capitalists expect the number of venture firms to decline in the next five years. That's hardly a vote of confidence, but it speaks to the big challenges facing an industry suffering from weak returns and lackluster exits.

The 2010 Global Venture Capital survey -- conducted by Deloitte and the National Venture Capital Association -- also found that a majority of venture capitalists in emerging markets in China, India and Brazil expect the industry to expand.

The Spring/Summer 2010 Pepperdine Private Capital Markets Project Survey Report is now ready for download! You can download the complimentary report here: Spring/Summer 2010 Report.

Austin holds a handful of top rankings in innovation, intelligence, friendliness, fitness and environmentalism, but what about in terms of business, real estate, and the economy?

The self-proclaimed “Live Music Capital of the World,” Austin boasts over 1700 live music venues and is home to the musical festivals Austin City Limits and South By Southwest (SXSW) as well as the Austin Film Festival. In 2009, SXSW generated $99 million for the city. “Keep Austin Weird,” has become the city’s unofficial slogan and attempt to maintain this creative economy by supporting “Austinite’s” creative flare and local businesses.

Large corporations like Dell and Whole Foods, both headquartered in the metro area, also boost the city’s economy. Additionally, Apple, Inc., IBM, Intel, Google and Facebook have operations in Austin. Austin’s businesses are supported by fresh minds, cutting edge technology and innovation, which the city’s institutes of higher education, most notably the University of Texas at Austin.

Symantec Hosted Services says New Brunswick is the most spammed province in Canada: 92.5% of email there is spam.

Not that there’s much difference between worst and first. Newfoundland is the least spammed province, with a spam rate of 86%.

According to Symantec’s MessageLabs, 90% of spam is sent by five to six million private computers that have been compromised by cyber-criminals. Organized into automated robot networks, or botnets, these computers send an estimated 120 billion emails each day.

One prefers the unknown, the other can’t stand it. Now more than ever, we have to find a way to get along.

In the past, I have heard there was conflict between the “two cultures” of science and the humanities. I don’t see a lot of evidence for that type of conflict today, mostly because my scientific friends all are big fans of the arts and literature. However, the two cultures that I do see a great deal of conflict between are those of science and engineering.

Being at a national laboratory, I am probably exposed to this cultural dissonance more than my university colleagues. Here, the engineers are not off by themselves in another department, but are working at our sides.

“What’s your protectable advantage?”

It’s often the first question a potential investor asks a startup, but it’s a bad one. Besides being unrealistic and confusing for most companies, attempting to create a protectable advantage stifles creativity, hurts communication and generally diminishes an entrepreneur’s prospects for success.

Here’s what investors mean when they ask for your protectable edge in the market: They want to know if you have any patents or secret algorithms that your competitors can’t touch. It makes sense for them to ask: They want to minimize as much risk as possible, and having an effective monopoly on technology is a great start.

Trilliant, a California-based provider of smart grid solutions that enhance energy efficiency, utility operations, and renewable resource integration, this morning announced that it has secured a whopping $106 million in funding from a global syndicate of industry and financial big-names.

The round was led by Investor Growth Capital, VantagePoint Venture Partners, ABB and GE and will reportedly by used to ramp up growth in North America and abroad.

The Smart21
In the autumn, ICF announces its Smart21 Communities, an initial group of honorees that are semi-finalists for the Intelligent Community of the Year. Selection is based on review of nominations submitted by communities since the summer. The Smart21 are communities or regions with a documented strategy for creating local prosperity and inclusion using broadband and information technology to attract leading-edge businesses, stimulate job creation, build skills, enerate economic growth, and improve the delivery of government services.

If you're like many of today's angel and venture funded companies, you are doing more with less and your team is distributed hither and yon. Your programmers are in India, your test team in Guatemala, and your sales force in 5 cities across the U.S. Even your management team is spread between Portland, San Francisco and Seattle.

You are certainly saving on office expenses and utilizing the most talented and cost effective resources, but how do you keep your team on the same page? How do you lead a distributed workforce and provide transparency within and between teams?

Technology solutions have certainly enabled organizations with distributed teams to work in new and wonderful ways. Just being able to see the person you're talking to, face-to-face, on Skype is a huge advantage -- as long as you remembered to get fully dressed that morning, of course. In fact, a morning (for the local timezone) video conference will ensure that everyone is up early, dressed, and ready to roll. There are plenty who will disagree, but I believe that working in pajamas or sweat pants is not a productivity enhancer.

If the electric car is to succeed, it needs charging stations that are both easy-to-use and well designed--a clunky infrastructure will quickly turn off potential drivers. That's why GE brought in fuseproject's Yves Behar to design its upcoming WattStation, a sleek EV charger for city streets that can juice vehicles in just four to eight hours. Today's standard "level 1" chargers take 12 to 18 hours to fully charge a car.

Behar factored in a number of considerations when designing the WattStation: visibility from the street, ability to withstand various weather conditions, and general attractiveness.

The 22 statistics that you are about to read prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence in America.

The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer at a staggering rate.  Once upon a time, the United States had the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world, but now that is changing at a blinding pace.

See proof of the Middle Class extermination -->

So why are we witnessing such fundamental changes?  Well, the globalism and "free trade" that our politicians and business leaders insisted would be so good for us have had some rather nasty side effects.  It turns out that they didn't tell us that the "global economy" would mean that middle class American workers would eventually have to directly compete for jobs with people on the other side of the world where there is no minimum wage and very few regulations.  The big global corporations have greatly benefited by exploiting third world labor pools over the last several decades, but middle class American workers have increasingly found things to be very tough.

My husband often says he’d like to work for my next company. I can’t imagine anything worse. But I know what he means: we don’t have much time together, and he thinks it would be more fun if we did. So the answer’s simple: build a business together. Right?

Maybe. Many couples do find this the ultimate solution to the eternal work/life balance questions, and there are nearly 4 million copreneurs in the United States alone. Estee Lauder was started by a husband and wife; the world would be short of a lot of handbags and shoes if Kate and Andy Spade hadn’t followed suit. I’ve interviewed copreneurs who are richly satisfied with their lives — but I’ve also interviewed former couples who feel that, if they hadn’t worked together, they might still be married today. The first bunch see copreneurship as an ideal blending of work and life; the others see it as a catastrophic risk. Which are you?

Bendis' Presentation for ASTRA

July 15, 2010

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