The SEO industry is wrought with folklore. Much of what is said doesn’t come with the evidence to back it up. Granted, we’re not immune to truisms of our own, and sometimes it’s not a bad idea to put intuition first. But there’s a difference between truisms or ethical stances and opinions masquerading as facts. I’d like to debunk a few SEO myths today, so let’s get started.

Are you planning a move to another state? You probably already know how to change your mailing address or switch your cable service. But how do you legally move a corporation or LLC from one state to another?

When a corporation or LLC conducts business in any given state, it must register with that state. So, if you’re planning to move your business to a new state, you’ll need to register it with that state.

We’re all accustomed to the generic narrative of hero vs. villain. We see it in Westerns, childrens animations, action films and even soppy romances. The story of email reputation management is not much different. Picture yourself as an innocent civilian in the cyber space world of content. Your need for survival? To share and receive relevant content. Your helpful tools? Email, mobile and social.

The tech industry is fast-paced and always looking for that Next Big Thing. So tech companies have come up with a lot of great tricks to boost their employee's creativity.

Let’s face it: courses in entrepreneurship at the undergraduate university level aren’t turning out entrepreneurs. Marc Zuckerberg never took “Entrepreneurship 101” during his Harvard days, and even the young entrepreneurs who aren’t billionaires (yet) aren’t taking these classes.

I don’t want to generalize by bucketing every entrepreneurship class offered at the undergrad university level, so let me define the average undergrad entrepreneurship course: a business plan oriented course; a course taught out of a textbook and a series of team deliverables that culminate in a business plan that equates to the course’s final and highest percentage grade.

Key points

• Every Syndicate Room deal has an experienced lead investor, or business angel, putting their own capital into the equity pitch– and the crowd can invest smaller amounts alongside. The crowd has the same economic terms and rights as the business angel; if the lead investor makes money, so does everyone else. 
• The types of companies that Syndicate Room typically deal with are post-revenue SMEs, with a proven business plan. Typically, they are SMEs looking for growth capital and looking for angel investment opportunities. In general, business angels actively engage with proven companies that are eager to grow. 
• Syndicate room is ‘sector agnostic’. Some investors prefer to invest in only certain sectors, other prefer to build up a wider portfolio with investments across several sectors. 
• Having a business angel investor with experience tends to minimises risk for the crowd investors as the angel will carry out due diligence associated with angel investments. Although the crowd cannot rely exclusively on this, it shows that the lead investor is confident in the project and willing to put their own money at risk. 
• Syndicate Room carries out basic legal due diligence for all companies on the platform. Checks include money laundering checks and ensuring that the company is correctly registered. It is also easy for investors to compare and carry out due diligence on the team through social media resources. Syndicate Room also administers a detailed questionnaire to SMEs, which all potential investors have access to during the active pitch.

The most frequent complaint I hear from entrepreneurs in the emerging markets is the lack of risk capital in their country; investors willing to finance start-ups and early stage companies.  Many founders travel to America seeking money and connections in the US venture ecosystem.  While a few are able to raise cash, most don’t—and return home empty handed—to face an unknown future.

With trillions of dollars invested in food & beverage, fast moving consumer goods, retailing, wholesaling and construction to name just a few, plenty of money exists in the developing world—from Beijing to Buenos Aires to Bangalore—and from Moscow to Manila to Mexico City.  So if there is so much capital seeking opportunities, why is it such a struggle to get local investors to open their pocketbooks and finance technology, 1st time entrepreneurs and early stage SMEs? And what actions can entrepreneurs implement to ‘shape’ their business models to the risk attitudes and behaviors of investors + learn to ‘sell risk, then opportunity’—to raise $ for their ventures?

Let's start with a depressing fact: even though more and more young people are hedging their bets on the entrepreneurship dream in India, the fact is that most start-ups die or struggle to survive within their initial years. One of the key reasons is aspiring entrepreneurs do not have the right guidance. This is where incubators and accelerators step in.

The best incubators in India are attached to academic institutions and are supported by the government but they are skewed towards the development of science and technology. They also have to survive on meagre grants and often have a long gestation period.

Unless you’ve been frozen in carbonite for the last half year, you have surely heard the big news.  Three—count ‘em, three—new Star Wars movies are coming.  Kathleen Kennedy, the superstar producer, now runs Lucasfilm.  J.J. Abrams, who directed Lost and the last Star Trek film, is overseeing Episode 7.  Michael Arndt, who won an Oscar for writing Little Miss Sunshine, is penning the script.  These talented people seriously rock.

Yes, the Star Wars franchise is firing on all thrusters!  Middle-aged adolescents (that is, my peers) everywhere are rejoicing.  The forums are abuzz.

Named after KU’s former technology transfer director, the Baxendale Commercialization award recognizes a KU faculty member who excels in translational research and research commercialization, i.e., translating academic discoveries into commercially viable products that benefit society. The award was first presented in 2005 to Val Stella, University Distinguished Professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, as the KU Technology Transfer Leadership Award. It was renamed in 2012 and will now be given annually.

Building on her more than 15 years of experience in the area of diabetes research, Stehno-Bittel co-founded Likarda LLC in 2012. The startup company, located at the Bioscience & Technology Business Center at KU Medical Center, has successfully cured diabetes in laboratory rats by transplanting its engineered cell clusters, known as Kanslets. Eventually, with further testing and development, the clusters could be transplanted in companion animals using a minimally invasive surgical procedure.

There may be a better way than charting your child’s lemonade stand profits to know whether you’ve got a future entrepreneur on your hands. Much like predictors used to study diseases--diet, family history, or drug use, for example--researchers have begun to identify early-life predictors for entrepreneurship.

In a study published in the journal Developmental Psychology, Ingrid Schoon and Kathryn Duckworth, post-docs from the University of London, looked at 6,000 employed adults from the 1970 British Cohort Study, which had followed a group of people born in the same week in 1970 from childhood to adulthood.

In difficult markets and uncertain times, entrepreneurial ideas thrive. But ideas can only get you so far and many entrepreneurs fail when they come to the major hurdle: how to find the money necessary to get their business off the ground.

Show Me The Money is about enabling you, the entrepreneur, to understand smart money and the people who provide it so that you can access the right type of funding for your venture as easily as possible. Between them Alan Barrell, David Gill and Martin Rigby have many years’ experience of entrepreneurship, managing venture funds and banking, which they have drawn on here to create this invaluable guide to building a business case and uncovering the capital required to start or grow a business.

Download the PDF

One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is to do things that don't scale. A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don't. You build something, make it available, and if you've made a better mousetrap, people beat a path to your door as promised. Or they don't, in which case the market must not exist. 

Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off. There may be a handful that just grew by themselves, but usually it takes some sort of push to get them going. A good metaphor would be the cranks that car engines had before they got electric starters. Once the engine was going, it would keep going, but there was a separate and laborious process to get it going.

OPINION: Governments are often perceived as slow and difficult to deal with, so they're not an obvious source of help for a startup owner.

Picking the right time to engage the government matters. Once you've built a credible board of advisors and can demonstrate your product or service, you'll be more confident about seeking government assistance.

Engaging with government is easier than ever before. Startups and governments now form powerful partnerships and have an equal interest in making those partnerships work.

Oftentimes, entrepreneurs think the success of their company depends on their ability to catch the ear of investors and raise capital. But the truth is, pitching your company to venture capital and private equity firms is about as effective as buying lottery tickets.

With a continuously growing population of start-ups to invest in, VC and PE firms have become increasingly selective in deciding which companies are worth their time and money.

It’s not enough to be another founder with a great idea. What will separate your company from others is the quality of your product–not the money you have backing you.

For several years now the Obama administration has actively promoted regional economic cluster initiatives—various growth-driving projects comprising local networks of large and small firms, university researchers, regional economic organizations, investors, and training groups. 

So do they work? Do cluster grants and local initiatives really deliver material benefits to individual firms and regional economies? Let’s review the record.

Led by the Economic Development and Small Business administrations, more than 50 pilot projects have been funded around the country. These projects draw inspiration from the strong body of experience and research Bruce Katz and I summarized here; in doing so they seek to convene diverse resources in regions to accelerate growth. For the most part the buzz has been good though few serious evaluations have been available.

The fever for startups is now planetary. Every city seems to have a growing scene of young software companies. And if they don’t, they want one.

It’s a practically a social movement, and a movement needs a theorist. That’s Brad Feld.

Feld is a partner at the Foundry Group, which invests in startups, and a widely followed blogger. And he believes he knows what it takes to create a vibrant startup community just about anywhere. Feld calls his theory the “Boulder Thesis,” after the Colorado city where he lives and that, with his help, has become a notable startup scene.

Manufacturing was once widely recognized as the outstanding strength of America and the basis of its prosperity, but manufacturing has a more recent history of being almost a pariah. This newer view equated computer chips with potato chips, asserted that manufacturing is better left to others, and suggested that the United States is actually fortunate to be losing manufacturing, replacing it with design, research and services.

But many Americans, witness to the loss of jobs and the devastation of what had been major industrial centers, have not been converted to this new perspective. Polls have clearly shown that most Americans still think that manufacturing matters, and these polls had an impact last year at election time. Politicians of every stripe suddenly rediscovered manufacturing, with high-ranking government officials quickly writing respectable economic studies that cast a more favorable light on manufacturing.

Slides for my keynote at FounderFuel's Accelerator Rally in Montreal.