Venture capitalist Kate Mitchell encourages entrepreneurs to seek out a wide range of mentors to gain a full picture of individual strengths and weaknesses. Trust is a two-way street when it comes to mentor relationships, says Mitchell, so make it easy for mentors to offer feedback and to tell you "the hard thing."

Image: http://ecorner.stanford.edu 

Hemant Shah, co-founder and CEO of RMS, discusses having "the humility and the self-awareness to not stand in the way of what's needed to build a real business and grow." Shah shares a powerful insight about learning when to ask for help from others, and then standing aside to let them teach you.

Image: http://ecorner.stanford.edu/ 

Mention legal risk to an SME business owner and you can literally see them cringe. While the perceived challenge of legal and compliance issues can seem overwhelming for a business owner, it is the unseen legal risks that can rapidly destroy a business. Often those risks come from where you least expect them – your own shareholders and team. With risk management being a critical part of effective governance, legal risk should be a key focus area for any SME.

Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/28552335@N00/3044867827 

A single exposure to loud but not deafening noise may be enough to precipitate irreparable harm to nerves in the auditory system. This is the take-home from a new line of research that may help explain why many people, particularly as they age, have difficulty in picking out a conversation from the wall of background noise that is a requisite accompaniment to any football game or meal at a family-style restaurant.

Tech giants are struggling to protect your privacy. More to the point, they’re struggling to protect themselves from public criticism.

And security experts say the biggest companies of them all aren’t doing nearly enough to safeguard consumers. Instead, they’re piling on the features and benefits to distract us from the loss of freedom and privacy — smearing layer after layer of lipstick on the proverbial pig.

Image: A photo composition of National Security Agency headquarters in Maryland, U.S. Image Credit: Wikipedia & Harrison Weber / VentureBeat 

It’s one thing to install connected devices in your house. But things can get more interesting when such devices sit all around your neighborhood.

Hudson Yards, a major mixed-use real estate project on Manhattan’s West Side, will be outfitted with sensors, to give residents and workers accurate information on metrics like energy use, air quality, and foot traffic.

Image: JasonParis/Flickr 

Digital technology has enabled the creation of new industries and upended many more. In this video interview, Silicon Valley entrepreneur and author Eric Ries explains how individuals with minimal funding can now challenge incumbent companies, and he argues that the response of most organizations to this threat is flawed because they continue to measure—and reward—the wrong performance. This interview was conducted by McKinsey Global Institute partner Michael Chui. An edited transcript of Ries’s remarks follows.

Image: http://www.mckinsey.com 

Aside from putting pressure on seed capital sources such as the St. Louis Arch Angels and Cultivation Capital — two investment groups that have filled a majority of St. Louis’ pre-Series A needs lately — the national trend toward bulkier Series A funding rounds also puts a premium on state funding.

Image: http://www.bizjournals.com - Jay DeLong, vice president for new ventures and capital formation with the St. Louis Regional Chamber. 

I had the opportunity to sit down and interview Topher Morrison. He is the Managing Director of Key Person of Influence - USA, a growth accelerator firm that has worked with over 1,000 companies, globally, to help them dominate their market share.

Jairek: Of the 25,000 - 60,000 people who apply to get on the hit TV show, Shark Tank, only a small percentage make it through to the auditions. So I have to ask, how did you get one of the original sharks, Kevin Harrington, as a business partne

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

Mobile device advertising is growing so rapidly the industry doesn't even know what to do about it, a Manhattan venture capitalist said Thursday.

Ads on smart phones and tablets generated $7.08 billion in revenue in 2013, more than doubling the mobile spend from the prior year for the third straight time. Mobile revenue now makes up fully 17 percent of all digital sales, itself a rapidly growing category, according to a major report(PDF) published Thursday by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a New York-based trade group, and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Image: You spend a lot of your time looking at that little screen. Advertisers know it, but they're only beginning to appreciate what it can mean. Stephanie Novak 

Is unbridled innovation good for society? Can we trust the internet? Can we afford not to? These are some of the big picture questions being asked right now at the annual Institute for New Economic Thinking conference in Toronto. It’s a George Soros-sponsored academic shindig that has become a touchstone for the key economic policy conversations in the year ahead. This year, the topic is how to manage the societal fallout from our rapidly expanding digital world. At a time when much of what happens on the internet–from NSA snooping to runaway viruses like the Heartbleed bug to cyber-warfare with China–makes people scared, how do we craft a digital world that feels safer and more secure? And how can we make sure that the benefits of the digital economy–which currently accrue mostly to the top quarter of society–are more equally shared?

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

Governor Deval Patrick announced Thursday the proposal of a Global Entrepreneur in Residence Program. Or rather, a plan to keep highly-skilled international students in Massachusetts post-graduation.

Patrick's proposed legislation represents a loophole in federal immigration law, and could bolster the number of H-1B visas the state is allotted as a means of attracting and retaining talent. With the help of public agency MassTech, students who are eligible for an H-1B visa but unable to obtain it due to a federal cap will be dubbed an "entrepreneur in residence" if they have plans to start or grow a business locally.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

THE TRANSFORM, FROM MIT'S TANGIBLE MEDIA GROUP, CHANGES SHAPE DEPENDING UPON HOW USERS INTERACT WITH IT. IMAGINE A CHAIR THAT COULD TRANSFORM FROM AN UPRIGHT ROCKER TO A SUMPTUOUS LOUNGE, JUST BY DETECTING YOUR MOOD.

Image: http://www.fastcodesign.com 

It seems as though most every place that isn't actually Silicon Valley lays some claim to being the next Silicon Valley. Fair enough: Tech companies are the future, and it doesn't seem to be getting any harder to raise money to run new ones. Venture capital firms passed out more money at the beginning of this year than they have at any time since 2001, according to data released April 10, 2014 by investment researcher CB Insights. The CB data show that companies raised just under $10 billion in 880 separate deals over the first three months of this year.

Image: ERIN LUBIN/BLOOMBERG 

If you were to ask most early-stage companies what they’d consider to be a decent prize from a group of investors for a well pitched device or service, they’d probably say money. But at an entrepreneur forum at Penn Medicine, the rewards were as varied as the groups offering them. Venture capitalists, angel investors, accelerators and incubators each offered a different take on what a reward should look like.

“Cambridge is a chaos of entrepreneurial activity,” says Hanadi Jabado. “It’s a brilliant chaos and that is its strength, but there hasn’t been a structured approach to supporting entrepreneurs and helping them to take their ideas to the next stage.”

As director of Accelerate Cambridge, Jabado is committed to filling that perceived gap by providing support to at least some of the fledgling businesses emerging from the city and its university. Established by the Cambridge Judge Business School around 18 months ago, the accelerator’s mission is to ‘enable venture creation’ by helping entrepreneurial teams through the process of turning ideas into viable and sustainable businesses.

Image: http://www.forbes.com/  - Trevor Clawson

The entrepreneurs I see are always talking about “disruptive innovation” ideas, but the plans I read are more often linear extensions of a current hot offering, like one more social network with the best of Facebook and Twitter, one more dating site dimension, or another “must-have” accessory for smartphones. Perhaps hard questions need to come before ideas, rather than after.

A great intern can be a huge win for your work life. You have another set of hands on board to help with unfinished projects or tackle the much-needed research that just seems to sit there waiting for you to have time for it. You’ll have a few extra hours in the day to get to those bigger things you’ve been wanting to. You’ll have the opportunity to serve as a mentor and coach and develop your own leadership and managerial skills.

Image Courtesy of Ambro / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

While most of us 9-to-5ers hunch over in boxy, fluorescent-lit cubicles, feeling lucky if our office has a snack machine, the Google employees of the world are zooming around on scooters, slipping down tube slides, playing on their indoor putting greens, and gloating about the awesomeness of their offices. If they can even be called offices--the designs of these nerd playgrounds so outclass your average corral of homogenous desks that we had to round them all up in a grand, jealousy (and sometimes eye-roll)-inducing slide show, on the occasion of Google unveiling its new Mexico headquarters. As one Google spokesperson told the New York Times, designers of Google offices have but one goal: “to create the happiest, most productive workplace in the world.” Marvel at the most over-the-top workspaces of Google’s big happy techie family and lament not being better at computer science.

Image: http://www.fastcodesign.com 

There has been an increased public interest in the pursuit of entrepreneurship, the activities of individuals and companies in this arena, and the collective attempts to create a better work/life balance within the entrepreneurial space. This involves the ability to adapt, as well as the ability to cognitively harness time and be more productive. A byproduct of honing these traits is increased problem solving; needed for disruptive innovation and promoting change.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net