When you’re running a small business, time is literally money. Without a salary or a clock to punch, the only time you’re making money is when you’re working. Unfortunately, this leads too many small business owners to work extra hours – and eventually burn out.

This infographic from Maven Link demonstrates the value of time for small business owners. A few highlights:

• 72 percent of small business owners work evenings and weekends. 
• 53 percent say the hardest thing about their business is wearing multiple hats – and 46 percent fill 3 to 4 employee roles on a given day. 
• 25 percent, or 1 in 4, say that one extra hour in a working day is worth more than $500 to them.

Getting angel investment or venture capital has always been tough for entrepreneurs. One reason is that it’s simply hard to find investors willing to plunk down money on your company, unless they are family or friends.  The options are especially limited for startups based outside of venture meccas such as Silicon Valley.

But the legal door just opened a crack, to make it easier for investors and startups to find each other and come together — using online platforms.

Before Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates became a billionaire, he had to apply for jobs just like the rest of us. Seattle's Living Computer Museum held an event last night at which they displayed Bill Gates' resume from when he was just 18 years old. 

The best part of the rise of online education is that it forces us to ask: What is a university for?

Are universities mostly sorting devices to separate smart and hard-working high school students from their less-able fellows so that employers can more easily identify them? Are universities factories for the dissemination of job skills? Are universities mostly boot camps for adulthood, where young people learn how to drink moderately, fornicate meaningfully and hand things in on time?

Following a down year for U.S. venture capital in 2012, the slump in fundraising could be over, at least for some companies. A new study by Ernst & Young found there’s now money flowing into companies that are perceived as lower risk. “The companies that are attracting greater VC interest are those that provide a service and are getting paid for it, rather than those that have a good idea, but have difficulty monetizing it,” the firm said. Overall, U.S. VC investment activity declined by 15% last year to $29.7 billion. The complete report is available at the link below.

When it comes to innovation, Canada is often criticized for being well behind the pack.

In fact, we are almost dead last, according to a report released Thursday.

The Conference Board of Canada says this country ranks second-to-last among the world’s leading economies in both venture capital investment and spending on business research and development. Norway was dead last.

Finland is turning to venture capital financing as it searches for ways to jolt the economy out of a recession without jeopardizing its AAA rating.

The northernmost euro member wants to attract investors for a new 1 billion-euro ($1.28 billion) program and help startup companies without adding to its budget deficit. Finland is promising that investors who buy into the venture will take the lion’s share of potential profits. The program will also target growth companies.

It's been exactly one year since President Obama signed the JOBS Act into law. After passing with flying colors in the House and Senate, the President called the new legislation a "potential game changer" for its ability to alter the fundraising landscape for both startups and small businesses. Of the law's many facets, the section pertaining to crowdfunding has gotten the most attention from both legislators and media. But after 12 months of waiting, crowdfunding proponents have had little to cheer. The crowdfunding element of the law continues to sit in legislative limbo.

Players from the crowdfunding and innovation community came together Thursday at the General Assembly campus in New York to announce a new accelerator called Crowdfundx (stylized as CROWDFUNDx).

Folks from Startup Weekend, Social Media Week, the Startup America Partnership, the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council, and Crowdfunder will serve as the backbone for Crowdfundx. The accelerator’s goal is to bring together local entrepreneurs, investors, and businesses across country and around the world.

The German language (Deutsch, for the purists) has apt compounds for awful things: You may know schadenfreude, joy from others' suffering; weltschmerz, sadness arising from realizing that the world can never match your ideals; or doppelgänger, a thing eerily like another thing. But you may have not yet encountered another, more nefararious portmanteau: Burolandschaft, or office landscaping.

As this superb BBC thinkpiece sketches out, Burolandschaft was actually a revolt against Nazism. Burolandschaft was an office design movement in 1960s Germany that hoped to make office space mimic ebbs and flows of social interactions--it was "somehow organic," with lots of plants, and, strikingly, a carpet, like the paradigm-dismantling feng shui that the futurists over at Steelcase meditate on.

MILLENNIALS WILL DEFINE OUR ECONOMY FOR MANY DECADES TO COME--AND THESE THREE GENERATIONAL PRIORITIES WILL BEND TIME-TESTED RULES OF THE MARKETPLACE. 

Millennials have a somewhat schizophrenic relationship with the media. Depending on the study cited, they’ve been called everything from the most community-minded to the most narcissistic generation. The most entrepreneurial to the least financially literate. Name your bipolarity and there’s plenty of research papers happy to park Millennials firmly at either end.

THERE ARE AS MANY THEORIES ON KEEPING TO-DO LISTS AS THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO KEEP THEM. THAT SAID, THERE ARE A FEW RULES THAT SHOULD ALWAYS APPLY IF YOU EVER HOPE TO CROSS ANYTHING OFF THEM. BY: 

The to-do list is necessary part of brain hygiene. And like showers and shaving, if you don't make them part of an everyday ritual, things can get a little gnarly.

Yet we have a terrible time with the to-do; seems we're often stuck in some Sisyphean situation. Nearly 90 percent of respondents to a recent LinkedIn poll said they couldn't finish up their list in a given day. And judging by the ever-expanding inventory of articles about how to hack your to-do--including excellent ones like this, this, and this--there are as many ways of seeing your to-do as there are people who keep them. But this is a good thing: If there were just one way to to-do, it would be like having a universal shoe size or sleep schedule.

Perhaps the biggest fad to sweep through management in the last decade was the strengths movement. Its message was that you should build on natural talent to maximize strengths rather than try to improve weaknesses. It was the brainchild of Donald Clifton, the late grandfather of Positive Psychology, but is associated in the popular culture with Marcus Buckingham, Clifton's coauthor of Now, Discover Your Strengths (2001).

Like any successful movement, the strengths movement drove a single issue and inevitably left out a lot. Although several important things got overlooked, we want to call attention to a very real danger: Strengths can become weaknesses when overused.

Among 400 applications from 22 countries, 13 early stage healthcare companies have been chosen for a three-year entrepreneurship class run by StartUp Health and GE, according to a statement from the companies. The class members will each be assigned a GE mentor who matches their business model and get access to the resources the Fortune 50 company can wield to help scale their consumer health innovations. That could include working with GE Healthymagination, GE Healthcare, GE Capital, or some of its business units, depending on the members’ specific needs.

This fall, the nation will mark five years since the onset of the biggest global economic collapse in more than a generation.

The unhappy milestone of those turbulent autumn weeks, which ushered in a stormy era of bank bailouts and credit crises before giving way to a frigid drizzle of financial uncertainty, will be celebrated by few.

Digital health incubator Rock Health released data today that shows an increase in funding for med-tech startups in the first quarter of 2013.

Thirty-seven health deals were valued at a total of $365 million, which is 35 percent higher than the first quarter of 2012, “suggesting that 2013 will be another record year for the digital health industry,” the blog post reads.

Investments, like the ocean, can come in waves, but that doesn’t mean they should.

A “tranched investment” is an investment that is split into one or more parts. In order for the company to receive the latter parts of a tranched investment, it usually has to achieve goals or objectives set as part of the conditions of investment. A typical example of a tranche is: the investors give you half the investment amount right now, and half the investment when your revenues reach ‘x’.

Entrepreneurs come in all shapes and sizes. But the most successful pioneers tend to share certain traits. Entrepreneurs are driven, innovative, persistent, resilient, and, as The New York Times’ David Segal suggests, just the right amount of crazy.

The daunting venture of building a company from the ground up requires a type of mania, a type of desire that, on occasion, borders on obsession. An entrepreneur’s startup really is like his or her baby, demanding constant love and attention.

Despite the times of austerity and the threat of a triple dip recession, many new businesses are actually thriving, especially online. The ones that are succeeding are those that are flexible and able to adapt to the wants and needs of their target market; being able to source talent online is also helping start ups to cut costs. On marketplaces like PeoplePerHour, businesses can buy  services such as web design, marketing campaigns or sales calls in an instant for less.

With this positive information, here are five crucial steps to starting your business making sure you have all of your bases covered.

Apple’s massive new spaceship-style headquarters in Cupertino is not on-budget or on schedule, according to a new report at Bloomberg Businessweek. The article provides an inside look at what exactly the project requires, down to specific standards around the perfection of surface finishes put in place by Steve Jobs. Blowing past budgets with building projects is pretty much guaranteed, but Apple’s has reportedly added an additional $2 billion to an already high $3 billion projected spend.