Entrepreneurs waste a lot of time soliciting professionally managed venture funds. Venture capitalists operate according to their own largely unwritten rules. In order to play the funding game, you must learn these rules. Below, I've listed some of the most-common mistakes. They won't tell you everything you'll need to know, but these simple rules should help you understand the VC process and avoid an enormous waste of time, energy, and opportunity.

Rule #1: Choose the Appropriate Audience

VC funds collect huge sums of cash, and managers must put it to use within four or five years, or risk losing it. Despite their vast resources, venture funds' staffing is generally lean and mean — managers cannot afford to look at investments that involve, from their perspective, trivial amounts of funding. If you're looking for very early-stage funding (the so-called "angel round") or financing under, say, $5 million, don't go to a professionally managed venture-capital fund. Find angel investors instead. They specialize in taking a company from inception to the next round of financing.

As I've noted many times before, entrepreneurship is a key driver of innovation and economic growth. But we also know that entrepreneurship is spiky — not everyone becomes an entrepreneur, and not all places foster this kind of growth.

Economists, mayors, and economic development officials as well as venture capitalists, technologists, and business leaders have long sought to track the key characteristics of successful entrepreneurs, who are at the core of game-changing companies like Apple, Google, and Facebook. These same groups of people have also been working to identify the factors that drive the success of certain entrepreneurial regions, such as Silicon Valley.

Eight minutes: this is approximately (1) how long it takes sunlight to reach the earth; (2) how long it takes to hard-boil an egg (if you eat them) and (3) how long medical residents — doctors in training — spend with patients per day on average.

What’s more, researchers from Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland have found that those eight minute are less than the amount of time that residents used to spend with patients (and make the standard 15 minutes allotted to a medical office visit seem generous).

Isn’t entrepreneurship about having an amazing idea and building a living around it?

…yes, except every advisor and blogger admonishes ”your idea sucks,” you prima donna pompous asshole, so your job is to use an “idea” as a foil to find out what is actually an amazing idea and then go follow that path, whatever that might be. The only thing we’re sure of is that you’re wrong and you need get that fixed.

Every organization evaluates the performance of its employees in some way, whether that process is formal or informal, or on a regular cycle or an ad-hoc basis. At a small start-up, feedback is likely to be informal and spontaneous, while larger organizations are likely to have structured systems including competency models, specific evaluation criteria, and a technology platform that enables quantitative and qualitative input to be collected, aggregated and stored.

Reflecting upon an internship with Wal-Mart last summer, Daniela*, an MBA student, raved to me about her manager and how much she learned on the job. She was encouraged to keep a running list of questions about how the mammoth retailer's operations worked, and she discussed them with her manager during weekly calls. Then, whenever feasible, the manager put her in touch with the people directly related to her inquiries. By the end of the summer, Daniela had a strong handle on Wal-Mart, and had built up a stable of contacts and connections internally to help her think strategically about next steps in her career.

The latest edition of the annual Internet Trends report finds continued robust online growth. There are now 2.4 billion Internet users around the world, and the total continues to grow apace. Mobile usage is expanding rapidly, while the mobile advertising opportunity remains largely untapped. The report reviews the shifting online landscape, which has become more social and content rich, with expanded use of photos, video and audio. Looking ahead, the report finds early signs of growth for wearable computing devices, like glasses, connected wrist bands and watches - and the emergence of connected cars, drones and other new platforms.

BioHealth Innovation, Inc. (BHI), a regional private-public partnership focusing on commercializing market-relevant biohealth innovations and increasing access to early-stage funding in Central Maryland, is proud to announce the publication of the Central Maryland BioHealth Entrepreneur's Resource and Finance Guide 2013.

The Guide was developed by BHI, the Economic Alliance of Greater Baltimore and the Montgomery County Department of Economic Development, in collaboration with the Baltimore Business Journal. The Guide serves as a compendium of resources to biohealth innovators and entrepreneurs working to start and grow new companies and technologies in the region. This essential entrepreneurial resource includes a compilation of information on financial resources, university facilities and programs, economic development programs, and existing federal laboratory facilities and programs, as well as how to work with these assets. The Guide is one of the many projects BHI is developing to successfully transform the regional environment for biohealth startups through harnessing Central Maryland's biohealth assets and establishing an entrepreneurial ecosystem.

The European Commission will give Latvia on Wednesday the go-ahead to become the 18th member of the eurozone from the start of next year, European Union officials said on Monday (3 June).

The EU executive will publish a report on whether the small Baltic state meets all the criteria for membership of the single currency, which include low inflation and long-term interest rates, a stable exchange rate and low public debt and deficit.

The Western Cape region, which includes Stellenbosch and Cape Town is colloquially referred to as “Silicon Cape”, a nod to the legendary Silicon Valley in the United States.

The Western Cape is generally acknowledged as having South Africa’s strongest entrepreneurial ecosystem. The Digital gateway to Africa report recently jointly published by Wesgro, City of Cape Town and PwC, shines a light on exactly why the region has become so attractive to both intrepid capital seekers and providers.

We’ve gone through the lengthy 88-page report and picked out six reasons why the fairest Cape of them all is worthy of parallels to Silicon Valley.

The UIC Chancellor's Innovation Fund is pleased to announce the launch of the Proof of Concept (POC) Awards Program focused on helping advance UIC inventions towards commercialization. The POC Awards Program, through funding committed by the Chancellor to the UIC Chancellor’s Innovation Fund, is expected to include $1,000,000 per year for the next five years for competitive grants that will help reduce the technical or commercial risks related to UIC inventions and improve the chances for successful commercialization. The POC Awards Program is administered by IllinoisVENTURES in partnership with the UIC Office of Technology Management and the UIC Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research. 

Apple introduces the latest “i”-gadget; Samsung takes the reins as the world’s leading smartphone provider; Blackberry mounts an all-or-nothing comeback.

Just a typical day of tech headlines, right? Dig deeper, however, and you have to wonder what impact all of these new multimedia devices will have on the networks that give them life. Short answer: Real-time streaming video and other large-byte-size content are gobbling up bandwidth on the Internet, a network of networks originally designed to share documents and data.

Open Innovation relies on collaboration to achieve success. To determine which firm is the best suited to be an innovation partner, small and medium-sized entities (SMEs) should consider using an approach modeled on the “Want, Find, Get, Manage” methodology developed by Alliance Management Group (AMG). Because of their unique characteristics, broadly summarized as limited resources,SMEs should substitute “want, find and get” with “need, know and negotiate.” Capable and stable management remains a constant.

Sometimes, it is more efficient to operate independently. Bees would waste a lot of time and energy if fifteen of them ganged up on the same flower at one time, for instance. In a variety of circumstances and because technology is developing so much, working remotely has become a practical means of getting jobs done faster. A blog post from PDU 4 PMP gives us eight tips on how to better manage project teams remotely:

Amid a crackdown on tax avoidance, the European Union has backed new rules requiring the extractive industries to disclose payments made to governments on a country-by-country basis.

Ministers backed the rules in Brussels this week following opposition from EU countries with strong interests in the oil and gas sector, such as the United Kingdom, EurActiv can reveal. The Netherlands was also blocking the deal before a sudden U-turn in which it expressed full support.

Russell Poldrack, a neuroscientist at the University of Texas at Austin, is undertaking some intense introspection. Every day, he tracks his mood and mental state, what he ate, and how much time he spent outdoors. Twice a week, he gets his brain scanned in an MRI machine. And once a week, he has his blood drawn so that it can be analyzed for hormones and gene activity levels. Poldrack plans to gather a year’s worth of brain and body data to answer an unexplored question in the neuroscience community: how do brain networks behave and change over a year?

Entrepreneurship is about failure just as much as it is about success. That's the idea behind Ideaneurs, a new monthly magazine that launched last month to feature the ideas and talents of 10 young “ideaneurs” in each issue. Each issue will feature the failures that led these entrepreneurs to success, says founder and CEO, Ahmad Issa of Invenst Ventures Boutique.

Before supporting entrepreneurs, Essa began his career as an industrial engineer. After working in the marketing field for several international companies outside of Egypt, he returned to Egypt, and founded Invenst in 2011. The support organization offers training and services for ventures with a social impact, to help them attract venture investment.

Entrepreneurship is the new economic gospel, offering its disciples the promise of redemption in the form of freedom from the dull, plodding and ultimately meaningless work that characterizes an old-fashioned “9 to 5.”  Don’t get me wrong.  Few would disagree with the notion that a life spent as a wage slave to a dead-end job in a large corporation is a wasted life, or at least, a slow, painful endurance contest to retirement.  I, myself, loathe the cynical “bare minimum” attitude of employees and executives who populate bureaucracies, both from the perspective of a customer and as a former employee.

Two years ago, I moved from being a venture capitalist to an entrepreneur in India. Although I had started my business in the US, the entrepreneurship journey in India was very different. Here entrepreneurship is like standing in a sandstorm — you do not know your path ahead and are constantly buffeted by strong winds. In the US, it is more like a foggy day — the path ahead is unclear, but you have a strong support system.

One key cog of entrepreneurship seems to be doing more to hinder than help startups in India — venture capitalists. Here's why:

Grace Hsia is passionate about saving infant lives. So passionate she decided to become an entrepreneur and enroll in the University of Michigan's inaugural Master of Entrepreneurship class.

When Hsia was a materials-science engineering student at the university, she discovered some sobering data from the World Health Organization: Nearly 4 million low-birth weight infants die annually. She learned that many of these deaths are caused by hypothermia because hospitals in developing countries cannot afford incubators and heat lamps, which can cost $500-$20,000.