When I started out as an entrepreneur, I made plenty of decisions without knowing what the outcome might be. I still do. But back then, I didn't have the same level of experience to guide me. Looking back, these were four of the toughest but most critical lessons I learned during those first few years when the learning curve was the steepest.

Image: Flickr user Heisenberg Media

The National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Journal of Technology Transfer have launched a new prize challenge that seeks participants to develop impact studies on technology transferred from federal laboratories.

Interested parties will write a paper that describes the economic and/or societal impacts of technology created in federal labs and transferred outside of those facilities, NIST said Tuesday.

When Salesforce announced a new $50 million fund in June, it also disclosed that it would open a new startup workspace in downtown San Francisco.

The new space, called the Salesforce Incubator, finally opened on Wednesday. Located in San Francisco's SOMA district, where a lot of startups open shop these days, Salesforce Incubator will house 14 startups for the next 5 months for free.

Salesforce, which happens to be San Francisco's largest tech employer, sent us these pics of the new space. Check it out:

Image: Salesforce Incubator - Salesforce

Within 5.5 miles between the upscale neighborhood Westover Hills and the much poorer Gilpin in Richmond, Virginia, there's a 20-year difference in average life expectancy.

Richmond is far from unique, as these maps dramatizing life-expectancy differences across cities show. In Philadelphia, you can travel five miles from Society Hill to North Philadelphia and get 20 years taken off your life. Or what about Chicago? Just seven stops on the "L" train will produce a 16-year difference.

Image: https://www.fastcoexist.com

Google has made a series of announcements that make one thing very clear: it plans to take India’s Internet by storm.

The company is no stranger to working in India, with its railroad station Wi-Fi project already proving to be a notable success. But today it announced a series of new products and projects squarely aimed at the Indian market, signaling its intent to tap a market of 1.25 billion people where only 200 or 250 million are currently online.

The federal Liberal government is strongly hinting to the tech sector it may launch a sequel the previous Conservative government’s Venture Capital Action Plan.

The venture capital industry has been clamouring for a repeat of the program, introduced in 2013, which saw the government commit $340-million to four venture capital “fund of funds” firms, alongside another $112.5-million from Ontario and Quebec.

Anytime you talk to a current entrepreneur or even someone thinking about starting their own business, usually one of the biggest motivations is wanting to be their own boss.

The idea of "working for the man" has lost its luster, and the pursuit of freedom to do what you want, when you want is extremely sexy and appealing.

Image: HBO - Thomas Middleditch featured in Silicon Valley an HBO original

September 28, 2016 Today, the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced $10 million in awards to 10 "Big Data Spokes" projects to initiate research on specific topics identified by the Big Data Regional Innovation Hubs (BD Hubs).

Project topics range from precision agriculture to personalized education. The data spokes reflect the unique priorities and capabilities of the four BD Hubs, which represent consortia from the Midwest, Northeast, South and West of the country.

If entrepreneurs grew like mushrooms, it’d probably be near impossible to navigate all the economic “disruption.”

The harsh reality is that almost anyone can come up with a novel business idea. Transforming that idea into a budding enterprise takes a lot more, including the right support structure, tools, resilience, mindfulness, guts — and maybe even a dash of luck.

Image: Credit: Photo by Jay Mantri - Back to the Roots founders Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez.

Innovation and entrepreneurship are hot topics in New Mexico, but the state’s largest metro area may have a ways to go before they impact overall job creation.

Startups created 1.9 percent of all jobs in and around Albuquerque in 2014, according to data released this month from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Image: http://www.bizjournals.com

"Microsoft was born to do a certain set of things. We're about empowering people in organizations all over the world to achieve more. In today's world, we want to use AI to achieve that."

That's Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, crisply explaining the company's artificial-intelligence vision to me this afternoon shortly after he hosted a keynote at Microsoft's Ignite conference for IT pros in Atlanta. But even if Microsoft only pursues AI opportunities that it considers to be core to its mission, it has a remarkably broad tapestry to work with. And the examples that were part of the keynote made that clear.

I accepted my first management role early in my career, heading up a 15-person team at GE Global Research's semiconductor laboratory. It was a big step at the time, but today I manage 28 labs of over 500 people, in addition to our research headquarters with around 2,000 people on site. Making that first shift from contributor to leader wasn't easy, but it set me up for the other big changes I'd go on to make in my career.

Venture investors often demand proof of concept in the marketplace before they’ll pour precious capital into a technology start-up.

If you’ve helped grow successful companies in the past, however, it turns out all you really need is your resume and a few co-founders.

That’s what happened when a little-known company called Expel, Inc. popped up in Herndon earlier summer. Despite having no customers, no office and only a few employees, the company has already attracted $7.5 million from well-known local technology funds Paladin Capital Group and New Enterprise Associates.

Xconomy New York —  As the child of a military physicist, Richard Lifton was forced to move around a lot, from Washington D.C., to Albuquerque, New Mexico to Ankara, Turkey. As an adult he settled in Connecticut, where he became a renowned geneticist at Yale University.

Now he’s on the move again, relocating to New York, where he faces perhaps his biggest challenge yet: serving as president of one of the city’s famed research institutions, Rockefeller University, and in so doing taking over for Marc Tessier-Lavigne, someone widely seen as igniting the city’s biotech scene.

Image: http://www.xconomy.com

Sequoia, a multibillion-dollar venture capital firm and an early investor in the likes of Apple and Google, has shut down a dedicated investment fund for Israeli startups, according to local news site Calacist (via news aggregator No Camels) and multiple sources.

Sequoia Israel — which raised five funds to invest specifically in Israeli startups, with the last two funds in the region of $200 million (£154 million) — will be folded into Sequoia’s US operation in Silicon Valley. That means Sequoia will continue to back startups in Israel but investments will be made out of Sequoia’s global fund as opposed to a fund operated out of Israel.

Even as signs emerge that the stock market is peaking, investors are pouring money into venture capital funds at the fastest rate since the ill-fated dot-com boom that reached its height in 2000. The lure: venture capital investments have brought investors returns far superior to the overall market.

Hot VC Sectors Already this year, venture capital funds raised $22.9 billion during the the first six months compared to $28.2 billion during all of 2015. The pace was especially brisk in the first quarter of 2016, with about $13.0 billion raised. Large investors have been attracted by a 10-year average annual rate of return of more than 4 percentage points above that produced by the S&P 500, according to the Wall Street Journal.

FARMINGTON HILLS, Mich., Sept. 27, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Tel Ganesan, president of TiE Detroit, a non-profit entrepreneurial organization, and managing partner of Kyyba Ventures, a technology and healthcare investment firm, has announced that TiECon Midwest is offering a platform of investment opportunities up to $1 Billion for start-ups with ideas that can improve health on a global scale.

The $1 Billion investment is nearly five times larger than the largest venture capital fund in the state of Michigan's history and is open to entrepreneurs globally in health and wellness in the non-pharmaceutical arena.

One of the axioms of the entrepreneurial community is that the working world consists of two basic types of people: born entrepreneurs and born employees.

I don't think it's necessarily that simple, but it's true that the vast majority of people go to work for a fairly set number number of hours each week and they receive benefits and a paycheck.

I have heard that entrepreneurs are born but some people say they are made. Which is which? I have a desire to enter into business but my worry is, Am I cut for it? How can I know if I will succeed? — Richard

A lot of people have wondered whether they will be successful in business based on their personality or abilities, hence the question, “what makes entrepreneurs entrepreneurial?” Prof. S. D. Sarasvathy of the University of Virginia was pondering over the same question over a decade ago and came up with the best conclusion I have come across so far.

“The table stakes for (venture capitalists) has never been higher,” says Judith Elsea,  co-founder of the fund-of-funds Weathergage Capital, in our latest interview.

With the rise of stronger and stronger operational models, like Andreessen Horowitz, the value add VCs must provide has increased significantly. So in this world of heightened competition for LP money, what do LPs want to see in prospective fund investments? According to Elsea this can be broken down into three key elements.