According to entrepreneurs, three factors are most important for enabling a company’s growth. In 2011, the World Economic Forum released a report that included a powerful new statistic: the top 5% of the fast-growing companies produce more jobs and generate more revenue than the other 95% of firms. Our team recently worked with partners at Stanford University, Ernst & Young, and the Forum on a new project that builds on this finding.

Image: http://www.ecosysteminsights.org/ 

A new program has helped a small European city increase the amount of foreign investment that local companies receive by more than 500% in just three years.

In 2010, Micah Gland, the CEO of the Helsinki Business Hub, began identifying ways to improve the business climate in Helsinki, the capital of Finland. Although the city is the home to one of the world’s largest mobile phone manufacturers, Gland found that access to private finance for local, early-stage companies was quite low. “Greater Helsinki is the growth engine driving Finnish foreign investment and there is a critical need for new investment in our country,” he said.

Seed funding is an important first step for many entrepreneurs. However, few of these founders realize how much farther they will have to go.

Our team used new data from an investment tracking service to create the chart below. It illustrates how many seed-funded companies raise additional rounds of financing. It also shows the number of these businesses that “exit” via acquisitions or mergers, and the number that do not reach an exit or earn more investment. (Our experience suggests that most companies in this last group quietly go out of business.)

After decades of government, nonprofit, and private funding of translational scientific research, there is a glut of early stage life science companies with great deal of promising data ready to go on to the next stage of preclinical and clinical development. However, many of these life science start-ups lack the capital to take the next steps toward commercialization for three main reasons.

Venture investors in Silicon Valley are frequent prey of startup founders who spot them in public places — and semi-public places — and start pitching. Last night, a discussion about awkward pitches led four VCs on a panel for the Silicon Valley Business Journal's annual Pitch event to tell tales from the mens room. The consensus? There's no good way to do it.

Image: http://www.bizjournals.com/ - When do shake hands during a bathroom pitch? Pondering awkward moments at our annual pitch event, from left, Senior Technology Reporter Cromwell Schubarth, Arif Janmohamed of Lightspeed Venture Partners, Rick Yang of New Enterprise Associates, Sunil Nagaraj of Bessemer Venture Partners and Boris Silver of FundersClub. 

It’s a beautiful afternoon as I write this post at the Dineen coffee shop in Toronto.

I’m also instant messaging a co-worker in New York City, about to get on a Skype call with our Community Manager in the Netherlands, and sending an email to our development team in Paris.

Image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net

The average tech CEO works about 300 days a year, 14 hours a day. That’s 4,200 hours a year. The stats for most other tech leaders and startup employees aren’t too far off. It sounds like a lot of time, but for most, it’s not enough. Nearly 30% of that time gets sunk into email. Another third gets spent in meetings--and studies show that half of those hours are completely wasted.

Image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net

Americans stay chained to their desks and smartphones for long hours, and many view a 40-hour workweek as "slacking." But are we really getting more quality work done? Not necessarily, according to research from PGi.

Korea clocked the most hours--nearly 2,700 annually--while Denmark worked the least at less than 1,500, followed by Sweden, which only logged around 1,550. Sweden's experiments with shorter workdays, set to begin earlier this month, defy the overworking standard we experience in the U.S. They support of the notion that more work doesn't always equal more productivity.

Joachim Low was a mediocre professional soccer player. As a coach he had only middling success.

When he was promoted from assistant to head coach of the German National Team in 2006 he followed in the footsteps of the much-revered coach Jurgen Klinsmann. Low was a tactical mastermind. As Klinsmann’s chief game strategist and as head coach himself, Low had ditched the static and defensive style of the German team and replaced it with a relentless fluid style of attacking football.

Image: http://www.fastcompany.com/ 

Venture capital investment continued its surge in the second quarter with $13.84 billion invested, the most since the fourth quarter of 2000, as investors piled into later-stage financings. The amount was 21% higher than in the strong first quarter of this year and 60% higher than in the second quarter of last year, according to industry tracker Dow Jones VentureSource.

The Erie County Industrial Development Agency is gearing up to get back into the venture capital business.

The agency is finalizing plans to create a $1 million venture capital fund aimed at helping early stage businesses get hard-to-find funding as their companies evolve from an idea to an operating business with products or services to sell.

Image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net

Tekes Venture Capital Ltd invests in venture capital funds, which invest in companies in Finland in their early stages of development.

Tekes Venture Capital Ltd is a state-owned company and its ownership steering is the responsibility of Tekes – the Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation.

From the moment Dan Shipper (on the left, above) stepped foot on the University of Pennsylvania’s campus, he knew he wanted to learn how to build a real software business with paying customers and steady revenue. He passed with flying colors last month when he both graduated from school and sold his company Firefly (the first company backed by Dorm Room Fund) to Pegasystems for multiple millions.

Image: http://firstround.com/ 

In early 2011, I gave a TEDx speech. Because I wanted my ideas around dreaming and disrupting to come alive in a way that’s not possible in writing – and because of my nagging performance anxiety – I started working with a speech coach. Since then, I’ve given a series of talks across the country. But it wasn’t until early in 2014 when I had a true breakthrough, one as much about being a great leader as it was about giving speeches.

Image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net

Recently I’ve been having a very hard time talking to students, executives, and business leaders about information technology.

Even though I’ve spent most of my life in and around technology, thinking about information flows and their implications in a business context, having to use the term “information technology”—even the abbreviation “IT”—fills me with dread, almost a self-loathing, because the term is no longer appropriate in a business context. To borrow a computer-science term, the denotational semantics are all wrong.

Image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net

Hospitals and health systems can use patient satisfaction data and carefully calculated outcome-focused metrics to both improve the patient experience and achieve the best possible health results, according to Vivian Lee, CEO of University of Utah Health Care.

Image: Dr. Vivian Lee, CEO of University of Utah Health Care, at MedCity’s CONVERGE. Read more: http://medcitynews.com/2014/07/patient-satisfaction-real-cost-key-hospital-success/#ixzz37libjfSc 

Investment in Minnesota life science companies saw a significant increase in the second quarter of 2014, according to a report from the state’s largest med-tech association. The Minnesota Life Science Investing Report, Q2 2014, finds a 65% increase in life science investments over the second quarter in 2013, with companies raising $110.5 million in 2Q, up from $75 million in the first quarter of this year. The report is released on a quarterly basis by LifeScience Alley, Minnesota’s trade association for med-tech and life science businesses. 

 Image: http://medcitynews.com/

Google's YouTube is said to be finalizing a $1 billion acquisition of Twitch, making the San Francisco-based video game streaming service another start-up success story. But just as when Facebook purchased WhatsApp earlier for $16 billion, there will be both celebration and hand-wringing.

On one hand, blockbuster acquisitions inspire millions of Americans to try entrepreneurship every year. Conversely, WhatsApp and Twitch employ fewer than 200 people combined, reminding us that entrepreneurs, even when they create enormous value, do not always create enormous numbers of jobs, particularly for the middle class.

Image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net

You've probably heard the figure before: the average full-time working woman earns just 77 cents for every dollar a man earns. This, despite the fact that since 1967, the number of women working in the United States has been steadily rising--from 29% to 46.9% in 2012. Women continue to make strides in workforce participation, yet not all female laborers are treated the same across the country. It turns out, where women live impacts how much they make and how equal their earnings will be to their male counterparts.

In the summer of 2012, Efrem Weiss, the CEO of YouGift, a social-media site for gift giving, relocated his startup team from New York City to upstate New York to join a three-month accelerator program. Like most accelerators, this one offered a common workspace, a program of classes and seminars, access to top business mentors, and an opportunity to pitch to investors at a Demo Day. The founders also received $18,000 of funding, in return for a 6 percent equity stake.