Entrepreneurs: born or made?

Whether you’re a C-suite pro at a large company with hundreds of workers or you’re the founder of a startup that has only a few employees, you can benefit from thinking like an entrepreneur.

While some believe that entrepreneurs are born rather than made, anyone can at least learn some of the characteristics that make entrepreneurs what they are. There is no single definition of what an entrepreneur actually is, but the term usually refers to someone who, among other things, spearheads a venture, makes decisions on how to proceed, secures the capital needed to make the venture a reality, and shoulders most or all of the associated risk.

One of the biggest challenges for new entrepreneurs (and even many experienced entrepreneurs) is overcoming their fear of failure. Obviously no one wants to fail, no matter the stakes, but could there in fact be a right way to fail? One that lessens the fear and increases the learning?  

Beneficial failure, the kind that teaches you along the way, requires a trial-and-error approach, where you make small, increasingly informed bets until you’ve learned enough to seize a larger opportunity.

The Earth Awaits is a search engine that tells you where in the world you can afford to live, given your budget. The site's creator is a Silicon Valley engineer with a sideline blog about thrifty traveling, a blog which itself grew from a plan to eliminate debt, save every penny, and retire at 40 to travel the world. Readers were particularly interested in the retirement part, and blog posts on the cost of living in various cities proved popular. But blog posts go out of date, so the anonymous authors built a search engine to do the job.

Most of us use products made in China every day and are aware of its growing economic power as a factory to the world.

But China intends to become a developed nation by mid-century and integral to this ambition is its intense focus on innovation.

In a very few decades, Chinese companies had evolved from imitators to imaginative and effective innovators.

When an entrepreneur pitches to an investor for a business idea, there is a very short window of time to be compelling and build trust. There are so many pitfalls to avoid during this crucial stage of building a business.

Real Estate guru and serial entrepreneur Cole Hatter spoke with Benzinga and dissected the five biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make when they pitch to a potential investor.

"We had gunfire in our Harlem neighborhood. We have daily gunfire here, but it's from hunters and gun enthusiasts," explains Hans Hageman, a creative marketing consultant and strategist. A New York native who remembers an earlier, grittier incarnation of the city, he's doing today what would have been hard to conceive of earlier in his career—living in a rural area and working for himself.

At one point, Hageman was living in a brownstone and making six figures as a nonprofit executive, but he wanted a different life.

Most executives and their employees dread corporate reorganizations, as we can personally attest. During our combined 35 years of advising companies on organizational matters, we’ve had to duck a punch, watch as a manager snapped our computer screen during an argument, and seen individuals burst into tears.

Cori Bargmann’s new job description includes “to help cure, prevent or manage all diseases by the end of the century.” That’s quite a lofty goal.

Bargmann is a neuroscientist and president of science for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the joint venture of pediatrician Priscilla Chan and Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg. The couple pledged $3 billion to solve major medical problems by helping scientists and engineers collaborate long term, over 25, 50, even 80 years.

Some of the biggest pharmaceutical companies, including Astra Zeneca and GlaxoSmithKline, are investing big in the development of "smart" asthma inhalers that use sensors to track how patients are faring and if they're using these devices properly. To achieve their goal of improving medical outcomes, these firms have announced partnerships with technology vendors ranging from startups like Propeller Health to big brands like Qualcomm. Today, IBM Watson announced that it is throwing its hat into the ring by teaming up with Teva Pharmaceuticals, a drug maker with a large respiratory portfolio including a "smart" inhaler it acquired last year.

This post is part of an occasional series examining state and local incentive evaluation reports.

Last month the Louisiana Legislative Auditor issued, “Tax Incentive Reporting. Follow-up on Agency Compliance with Act 191 of the 2013 Regular Session.” This report actually examines whether state agencies are complying with tax incentive reporting requirements. Those requirements include providing information on whether the incentive met its intended purpose, if the state received a positive return on investment, and whether there were any unintended effects caused by the incentive.

If you’re not using deep learning already, you should be. That was the message from legendary Google engineer Jeff Dean at the end of his keynote earlier this year at a conference on web search and data mining. Dean was referring to the rapid increase in machine learning algorithms’ accuracy, driven by recent progress in deep learning, and the still untapped potential of these improved algorithms to change the world we live in and the products we build.

Pulling off a successful pitch and actually getting an investment from a venture capital firm is a huge feat. While the pace of venture capital investing remains strong — the second quarter of 2016 marked the 10th consecutive quarter in which VCs invested more than $10 billion — as an entrepreneur, the odds are stacked against you. VCs typically finance only one or two percent of the business plans they see.

What technologies are venture capital (VC) firms betting on today? The top 10 industry verticals in terms of capital invested so far in 2016 are: mobile ($14.4 billion), SaaS ($13.4 billion), E-commerce ($8.7 billion), LOHAS (Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability, or green living & technology; $7.5 billion), life sciences ($6.8 billion), big data ($3.8 billion), oncology ($3.5 billion), Fintech ($3.4 billion), manufacturing ($2.4 billion) and cybersecurity ($2.2 billion).

Some headline-grabbing technologies rank lower: artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are 13th ($1.4 billion), virtual reality (VR) is 16th ($1.1 billion), robotics and drones are 19th ($695 million) and autonomous cars are 23rd ($353 million). This analysis, through October 26, 2016, was developed for Investopedia by PitchBook, the official data provider of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA). Note that a given deal may fall into multiple categories, if the firm being funded operates in multiple verticals.

For many, art can be hard to get into. When you spend $50 to get into an exhibit that only shows a huge block of paint on the wall, you can’t help but wonder: what did I just pay for? But when tech is added to the situation, it makes things a bit more interesting. And considering the modern world has the attention span of a goldfish, interesting and innovative twists are 100% necessary. Below are eight innovators that combined tech, art and culture to create something you really have to see to believe.

Your phone has just become home to a tiny little collection of modern art.

On Wednesday, the Museum of Modern Art announced that it had acquired the original set of 176 emoji for its permanent collection.

These glyphs, designed for pagers made by the Japanese mobile provider NTT DoCoMo and released in 1999, were the first pictographs to make their way into mobile communication. It would take another decade for emoji to explode into an American phenomenon, when Apple integrated its first emoji set for the iPhone in 2011. There are now nearly 2,000 standardized emoji.

Winter is coming—and the question of whether you’re in for a snowy season or a sunny one will largely be decided by where you live. The latest National Weather Service forecast predicts wide variation in temperature and precipitation this winter across the U.S., capping off a year of record-breaking heat.

Residents of the southern part of the U.S. from Los Angeles to Atlanta should expect above-average temperatures and below-average precipitation, while people in northern states from Washington to the Midwest should expect below-average temperatures and above-average precipitation, according to the forecast. Forecasters expect most of the remaining U.S. to experience an average winter.

MIT is getting into the incubator business in a big way with “The Engine,” a major fund and accelerator space aimed at nurturing early-stage companies solving big, difficult problems in tech and science. After The Engine raises its targeted $150 million fund, up to 60 companies at a time will benefit from the university’s equipment, services and considerable pool of expertise.

While many details are yet to come, it’s clear this is serious business for the Boston-area mega-school. The language of the announcement indicates that establishing the city as a hub for commercialized innovation is a major secondary goal.

The Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday unanimously adopted new and amended rules to update and modernize companies’ ability to raise money from investors through intrastate and small offerings.

The final rules adopted Wednesday are designed to further facilitate access to capital in cross-state and regional securities offerings.

New rule Rule 147A as well as an amended Rule 147 include the following provisions:

The business owner sitting across from me was so angry he was shaking as he shared his story. It seems that another customer had sent him an email ending their relationship. I asked what he meant by ‘another’.

His voice rose and the shaking intensified as he went on about the “lousy customer who doesn’t appreciate the quality of my products and all my company does for them.” And yes, there were others. In fact, there were regular customer bailouts which, I wasn’t surprised to hear, took a lot of time, effort, and cost to replace.

WHAT WOULD it be worth to society to have a treatment for Alzheimer’s that actually worked — and via portable, noninvasive technology? Or a radically low-cost method for early detection of cancer, or Ebola, or Zika, that was as quick and simple as a home-pregnancy test? Or an ingestible robot that enabled surgery with no incision? How about grid-scale batteries that would make solar energy more dependable than the sun? Or carbon-free energy from nuclear power that was inherently meltdown-proof? Or biodegradable plastics made without fossil fuels?