Send out a handwritten letter to your customers to let them know how important they are to you.

How good do you feel when someone goes out of their way to send something nice to you? Pretty good, I’d say! I love receiving cards off people, it makes me smile, it makes me like them more and it makes me want to do something nice for them (the law of reciprocity!). So why not make an effort this month and send your customers a beautiful handwritten card to thank them for being so great! You could even mention about what new and exciting things you’re up to at the moment as well. It’s a great way to build lasting relationships.

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I am sure that there are many more qualities that one needs. But three (4) Rs come to mind.

1. Be Relevant – if your work is not relevant, it will not be recognized. Questions to think about are: (a) what problem (s) are you solving? If you are relevant and solving a problem, I strongly believe that you will create impact.

2. Be Relatable – Can people identify with your product or service? Do you have a target audience or market? Are you providing good customer service? These are some of the questions that you need to think about as you become relatable to your market segment.

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What made you an entrepreneur: nature or nurture? Can you really ‘catch’ the entrepreneurial bug?

For me, entrepreneurship was not a conscious decision. I was raised by immigrant parents who highly valued hard work and independence. My father always told me, “Don’t be a doctor or lawyer; work for yourself. Be an entrepreneur.” He ran an analytical chemistry laboratories from the time I was 2 years old, so it was little surprise when I launched my own lab shortly after graduating college. That path led me from technology startups to launching LabDoor, and it has been an amazing journey.

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As a leadership coach for some of Silicon Valley’s leading startup CEOs, I get a peek into the internal workings of some of the most brilliant and accomplished entrepreneurial minds in the world. And one of the things I’m finding there is giving me cause for alarm.

Driven by "Not Enough"

One of the primary drivers of the frenetic striving and Herculean accomplishments of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs is a deep sense of not being good enough. Not smart enough, not brave enough, not creative enough. Somehow, in some way, not enough. This sense of lack, and the compulsion to anesthetize it through achievement, combined with the right combination of smarts, guts, and ecosystem are creating a boom in the startup world. Billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of jobs are being created. And that’s a great thing.

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Building a startup can be as tough as “chain-sawing your way out of a great white shark’s stomach,” at least according to angel investor Dave McClure. Often it’s angel investors who are there to help entrepreneurs take those first steps out of the shark’s stomach.

Angel investors are a critical part of the startup ecosystem. They provide cash, make connections, and offer encouragement to help develop nascent ideas into actual businesses, or at least into a business that can attract funding from venture capitalist firms down the road. Angel investments are high risk — the odds of a positive return are less than 50 percent, and angels are often motivated by factors other than money (although this is, of course, a factor). They are often entrepreneurs and executives passionate about supporting the next generation of innovators.  A study conducted by researchers from Harvard and MIT found that angel-funded startups are significantly more likely to survive at least four years and raise additional financing.

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You may not realize it but interns are really entrepreneurs; they have limited resources, take risks, and search for potential investors. While entrepreneurs are typically trying to get people to invest in their business ventures, interns are doing all they can to get people to invest in their careers.

Trying to be a business leader by instilling fear in your employees and partners is never a good approach, but it is particularly devastating in a startup. Yet I see this approach used all too often by new entrepreneurs, most of whom are not natural tyrants, but who are fighting to mask their own internal fears and insecurities about starting a business.

In a recent book titled “Leading Without Fear,” Laurie K. Cure, PhD, helped me understand that fear is a natural reaction to the risks associated with a new venture, and different people handle this fear in different ways. Some are able to read the danger signals, and catapult themselves and everyone around them into action without fear, resulting in progress and success.

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Every entrepreneur wishes that he could predict whether his idea could be the “next big thing,” before he spent his life savings and years of energy on it. Investors, on the other hand, typically don’t even look very hard at the product or service, but prefer to evaluate first the entrepreneur, and secondly the business plan.

I define these products and services as “solutions” (customers buy solutions to a problem), but Guy Kawasaki more generically calls them causes, meaning any new idea, company, or service. Yet we can all agree that the quality of the solution or cause is very important, and there are attributes that reduce the business risk and make it more likely a success in the marketplace.

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During the first annual Connected Health Symposium at the University of Pennsylvania in April, faculty members and entrepreneurs spent a day showcasing new mobile tools that patients can use to communicate with their physicians, chart their progress reaching health goals and interact with other people who are facing similar medical challenges. This is the essence of the connected health movement -- a groundswell of mobile apps, wireless devices, and websites designed to bring patients together with the people who want to keep them healthy. The symposium ended with a provocative question posed by Ralph Muller, CEO of the University of Pennsylvania Health System: "But do consumers want to be so connected?"

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As a fledgling student, your reputation in the cafeteria depended on your food gear — specifically, your lunch box.

Whether you strutted around with the Hulk or Strawberry Shortcake, your lunch box said more about you than if your mom packed Fruit Roll-Ups or baby carrots. You couldn't trade away your PB&J carrier, so you made sure to flaunt something cool.

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The Hawaii Strategic Development Corp. is putting its focus on research commercialization and is looking for partners to join in the investment.

HSDC President Karl Fooks told me research commercialization is the next stage the corporation is focusing on. Its last big project was the Launch Akamai Venture Accelerator program, which was designed to provide funding for venture capital accelerator programs. It did that through Henk Rogers’ Blue Startups. The other two accelerators the HSDC selected did not get off the ground. One couldn’t raise the matching funds and the other’s management team couldn’t work together. But Rogers’ Blue Startups has gotten off to a strong start.

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Among urban planners, there is probably not a more revered urban area in the world than Portland (Oregon). The Portland metropolitan area and its core urban area , principally located in Oregon, stretches across the Columbia River into the state of Washington (Figure 1). Nearly four decades ago, the state of Oregon adopted strong urban planning requirements, including the requirement of an urban growth boundary. Two principal purposes of the resulting policies (referred to as “smart growth,” “urban containment, “compact cities,” etc.) were densification and transferring travel demand from cars to transit.

No rules.

Rules get in the way.

This was the guiding principle under which John S. and James L. Knight Foundation CEO and president Alberto Ibargüen launched the Knight News Challenge seven years ago, a contest that has vastly amplified the influence of the 73-year-old foundation, which is dedicated to funding and promoting innovation in journalism.

Eric Newton, an advisor at the foundation, remembers walking into Ibargüen's office seven years ago to talk about rules and conditions for the fledgling contest, which was Ibargüen's idea. Here's how Newton remembers the exchange they had:

In the recently released Global Innovation Index 2013, published by Cornell University, INSEAD and the World Intellectual Property Organization, the US reclaimed its spot among the world’s five most innovative nations after a brief time out in the cold.

Once again, Switzerland came out on top, followed by Sweden holding onto last year’s second spot, while the UK climbed to third place from 5th in 2012. Australia was in 19th place, up from last year’s disappointing 23rd place.

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Earlybird Venture Capital has closed its fourth early stage fund at $200 million (€150 million).

Best known for providing capital to startups like Auctionata (which was started by an eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY (FREE Stock Trend Analysis)) PowerSeller) and EyeEm (which recently secured $6 million), Earlybird Venture Capital is one of the most successful venture capital partnerships in Europe.

The company's total capital under management now stands at $800 million (€650 million).

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Just as there's a difference between typing and writing, convulsing and dancing, and noshing and tasting, there's a difference between emailing yourself about every project you're worrying about and making an effective, actionable, stress-reducing to-do list.

TO-READ LIST The 1-3-5 Rule For More Doable To-Do Lists A List Of The 6 Best Alternative To-Do List Apps Not All To-Do Lists Are Created Equal--Here's How To Do Yours It's a matter of cultivating our taste for productivity, appreciating the nuance of getting your day well done. And Divya Pahwa at the ooomf blog has done some homework on the high-brow hustle--let's dive into it below.

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You spend about 28% of your time answering the 70 or so emails you get a day, Jennifer Senior reports for New York, and what's worse is the psychological effects: According to the research of email management startup SaneBox, we need 67 seconds to recover from every message.

"E-mails, after all, are disruptive," Senior observes. "It takes start-up energy to read them; it takes energy to reorient and reboot once we’re returned to the task we’ve left. Over the course of a week, the price can be measured in hours."

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A study released Wednesday shows that Portland's creative work force continues to grow, but the organization that paid for the analysis says more needs to be done to attract artists, professionals and entrepreneurs to Maine's largest city.

click image to enlarge In this May 2013 file photo, comic book illustrators and visitors interact at Maine Comics Arts Festival at The Ocean Gateway in Portland. study released Wednesday shows that Portland's creative workforce continues to grow, but the organization that paid for the analysis says more needs to be done to attract artists, professionals and entrepreneurs to Maine's largest city. Tim Greenway / Staff Photographer Select images available for purchase in the Maine Today Photo Store Attracting more workers who value and support the arts and the city's cultural assets will only strengthen the city's economic development plan, says Jennifer Hutchins, executive director of Creative Portland.

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Two white papers, released today by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, demonstrate how entrepreneurship education programs now reach students in disciplines across the curriculum, teaching them how to become innovative problem solvers, whether or not they ever start a business. These papers are accompanied by a series of essays written by university and college leaders, as well as a collaborating foundation, from campuses that participated in the Kauffman Campus Initiative.

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Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley of the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program are two of the more optimistic voices on Detroit these days. “In midtown and downtown, there’s a sense of incredible energy and optimism,” says Bradley, founding director of the program and coauthor with Katz of The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy. Both spoke in Washington, D.C., last month as part of their book tour.

Image: Detroit's Midtown (Photo Credit: Ara Howrani)