When I was new at Venture Capital I was trying to figure out the business. It was a fun period for me because everything was new and I was curious. What kind of deals should I be doing? What stage? What price? With which other investors? Should I focus on geographies or industries? Should I trust my instincts for founders and products or should I be more focused on the market size or business plan? One of the major calibration pieces for me was where to find deal flow. As a VC you want to feel like you have “proprietary sources” of deal flow. Otherwise you’re a stock picker, which in this business isn’t a good thing.

Are would-be entrepreneurs letting the funding-equals-success myth stand between them and true success?

Too many startup founders crave the validation of big-name investors and end up buying into the idea that getting venture capital somehow means their business has a better shot.

I became an entrepreneur to own my business and operate it in a way that puts my customers first — not the board. Bootstrapping isn’t for everyone or every business, but the tips below might just help you go the distance.

In my last post, I wrote about the best startup advice I've ever gotten — think bigger. Truly the best advice I've ever gotten and I encourage you to read that post if you haven't already.

And in my first post, I talked about the entrepreneurial gold rush going on in Detroit and why I moved here from San Francisco. Another great post to get even more perspective.

But so what?

I didn't just move here to be part of rebuilding Detroit through entrepreneurial fire.

I didn't just move here to think bigger.

A $50-million venture fund dedicated to the Maritime provinces will fill a critical missing link in regional development, an official representing one of the fund’s major investors said Friday.

Paul Kirkconnell, executive vice-president of BDC Venture Capital, said the new fund will have huge implications for startup companies in the region.

“What we’re doing is putting a venture capital anchor into the region. It’s something that has been missing too long,” Kirkconnell said in an interview.

A new study finds that states are employing and supporting new and innovative policies to support small businesses in a diverse, rapidly changing economic environment. The fourth annual Enterprising States study, commissioned by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation and prepared by Praxis Strategy Group, was unveiled today at the U.S. Chamber’s Small Business Summit.

“Small business is already leading the recovery, but with the right policies we can move past the recovery stage and on to revitalization,” said U.S. Chamber President and CEO Thomas J. Donohue. “We need more policies like those outlined in the Enterprising States study to drive stronger growth, competition, and success among small businesses across the country. When these businesses succeed, America succeeds.”

Ronald Perelman is betting that it can. The billionaire CEO and chairman of MacAndrews & Forbes is giving $100 million to the Columbia Business School to create a new facility aimed at creating the next generation of entrepreneurs and business leaders.

Ronald Perelman is betting that it can. The billionaire CEO and chairman of MacAndrews & Forbes announced on CNBC Thursday that he's giving $100 million to the Columbia Business School to create a new facility aimed at creating the next generation of entrepreneurs and business leaders.

Entrepreneurship. Small business. Startups. Tech. Innovation. All different things, all tricky to define and trickier to measure. All generally viewed as good for the economy. But the imprecision with which we discuss these things - I'm guilty too - leads to a lot of sloppy discussion. Some of this is basically unavoidable; I can't change the fact that patents are an imperfect measure of innovation, or that few good metrics exist to track high growth startups.

But there is one easy, obvious distinction to be made: "startups" and small businesses aren't the same thing, even when the latter are new. This is outlined nicely in a new brief from the Kauffman Foundation, which distinguishes between “innovation-driven enterprises” and “small and medium enterprises." Here's how the former is defined:

Did you ever wonder why some entrepreneurs always seem to have all the luck and success, while others never seem to catch a break? As an Angel investor, I quickly learned that luck has very little to do with it, and I now look for some personal characteristics and leadership styles that separate the potential winners from the losers.

These differences are the reason that investors say that they invest in people, rather than ideas. As I was reminded recently in a recent book by Dennis Perkins, “Leading at the Edge,” this isn’t a new concept. He illustrates this by comparing the acts of numerous teams which faced the edge of life and death as early Antarctic explorers in the 1800s.

When I was new at Venture Capital I was trying to figure out the business. It was a fun period for me because everything was new and I was curious.

• What kind of deals should I be doing? 
• What stage? What price? With which other investors? 
• Should I focus on geographies or industries? 
• Should I trust my instincts for founders and products or should I be more focused on the market size or business plan?

A decade ago, Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson's task force on immigration approached the Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs at Cleveland State University for data and analysis to help city officials explore immigration as a means of growth for the city. Based on our research, we concluded that investing public resources to attract immigrants is not a magic bullet for regional economic development. In fact, it might not be a wise use of scarce public resources on which to pin hopes for rebuilding the city. Instead, a people-focused approach to accommodating the needs of immigrants is more likely to be successful. That is because of how immigrants make their location decisions.

UIC will launch a $10 million fund to move technologies devised by faculty, students or staff from research to commercial use. The Chancellor’s Innovation Fund will make grants totaling $2 million a year for five years. About half the funding will finance proof-of-concept grants of up to $75,000 for projects just emerging from basic research. The other half will provide equity funding of $150,000 to $250,000 for start-ups that have moved beyond proof-of-concept and are closer to commercialization.

Accelerator Corp., a Seattle company that provides management, space and financing to biotech start-ups, is coming to New York. Sometime this year, the company will set up its second location, probably at the Alexandria Center for Life Sciences, CEO Carl Weissman announced at Thursday's NYC Tech Connect's Emerging Technologies Summit. New York won the bid over seven other finalists, including San Diego, Houston, and London. "New York has a great critical mass of academic institutions," Mr. Weissman said. "It is underserved in terms of capital and management for biotech startups," which is what Accelerator provides.

Most of the 89,000 leadership books offered on Amazon.com focus on traditional interpersonal leadership: the relationships between leaders and followers. Interpersonal leadership sets up an expectation that leaders must be in dialog or at least in view of their followers. Yet this style of interaction is less likely as work stretches across locations and company boundaries as we telecommute, crowdsource, and take on joint ventures. Modern leadership may be as much about facilitating strategy through hiring, training, technology, and focused tasks and goals, as it is about face-to-face interaction.

Teenagers with high blood pressure appear to have better psychological adjustment and enjoy higher quality of life than those with normal blood pressure, suggests a study in the May issue ofPsychosomatic Medicine: Journal of Biobehavioral Medicine, the official journal of the American Psychosomatic Society. The journal is published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a part of Wolters Kluwer Health.

“This is the first report linking elevated blood pressure to quality of life and psychosocial adaptation in a large epidemiological study of adolescents,” according to the report by Dr Angela Berendes of University of Göttingen, Germany, and colleagues. The authors speculate on some possible reasons for their surprising results—including “repressed emotions” or even a “stress-dampening effect” of high blood pressure (hypertension).

At last week’s The Next Web Conference it was interesting to hear how entrepreneurs are changing their goals.

At previous events we would often hear about monetization, scalability and the Long Tail. Starting at last year’s event, entrepreneurs seemed to give more attention to building 100 year companies, doing what’s best for the customer, and working ‘from the heart’. These aren’t ‘new age’ entrepreneurs who found Zen or don’t care about revenue anymore, but it seems like a lot of entrepreneurs are starting to agree that doing whats best for the customers, doing what feels good for the entrepreneur and building companies to last ends up being damn fine business practice.

Within the last decade, e-commerce has crept its way into our daily lives as the Internet market has boomed. Online stores pop up every day, making it difficult for retailers to distinguish themselves among the masses. How can you make your mark in the e-commerce realm and avoid the common missteps of many entrepreneurs? Here are some tips for maximizing your online retail platform:

1. Do Your Homework

Before starting an e-commerce business, do as much research as possible. The world of e-commerce is both exciting and complex. E-commerce entrepreneurs need to be Internet gurus, developing expertise in everything from SEO to analytics analysis. It’s important (and more wallet-friendly) to understand these concepts yourself so you don’t have to rely on third-party companies.

Download the PDF

In the first of a series of video interviews, Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt explores the technologies likely to have the greatest disruptive impact on economies, business models, and people. Later this month the McKinsey Global Institute will publish an assessment of the probable economic impact of disruptive technologies.

Why do some cites and metros grow faster and better than others? It's a subject of considerable, often heated debate. Some say that growth is a product of innovation and productivity that comes from the density of talent and business clustering. Others counter that growth is powered more by resources, home-building and extractive industries and continues to be driven by sprawling suburbs and metros in the Sun Belt and Plains.

Imagine a time when having a bachelor’s degree absolutely guaranteed you would land a great job after graduation.

A bachelor’s degree used to mean much more than it does today, and the higher supply has led to some unfortunate employment prospects. These days, it’s not uncommon to see college grads working in shopping malls and coffee shops.