Most tech startups are hostile territory for MBAs. Startup people take pride in building things — and MBAs aren’t known in the startup world as builders.

But that dogma is increasingly out-of-date. As venture capitalist Ben Horowitz, a don of the Silicon Valley engineering culture, pointed out last year, today’s MBAs are less arrogant, and the good ones actually … well, help build stuff.

The day you make up your mind to start a business, that’s the day your name will be written in the ‘’book of world changers’’.  Being an entrepreneur isn’t as easy as some people think. If it was, we would have a high number of job opportunities.

If you’re an entrepreneur or small business owner reading this content, congratulations! You’re indeed a blessing to the world.

The single most important issue in the life sciences space today is that traditional sources of capital have slowed, creating a void, and fundraisers are left navigating using outdated maps & trying to play catch up. Anyone who has recently attempted to raise capital knows that this causes a lot of frustration and churn. Times have changed, and adjustments must be made. There is a distinct sentiment that the old funding models were broken to begin with (which I won’t belabor here), and the past investor segments aren’t going to return. The new landscape is substantially different, and new investor breeds are emerging across the space. Enter the Venture Philanthropist.

The irony of getting away to a remote place is you usually have to fight traffic to get there. After hours of dodging dangerous drivers, you finally arrive at that quiet mountain retreat, stare at the gentle waters of a pristine lake, and congratulate your tired self on having “turned off your brain.”

“Actually, you’ve just given your brain a whole new challenge,” says Thomas D. Albright, director of the Vision Center Laboratory at of the Salk Institute and an expert on how the visual system works. “You may think you’re resting, but your brain is automatically assessing the spatio-temporal properties of this novel environment-what objects are in it, are they moving, and if so, how fast are they moving?

It’s one thing to read a leading tech investor’s new book on building entrepreneurial ecosystems, and another thing altogether to host him in a sweet living room art gallery with a couple dozen of San Diego’s tech leaders, investors, and entrepreneurs.

With help from the Cooley law firm and the commercial real estate firm Hughes Marino, Xconomy arranged for Brad Feld to meet with some of San Diego’s local tech leaders during a stopover yesterday.

For a nice visualization of the changing funding environment for emerging healthcare companies, check out this this graph of VC deals over the past five quarters.

Early-stage healthcare funding – defined as seed and Series A rounds – accounted for 30 percent of the VC deals done in the first quarter of this year, according to a new analysis by CB insights, which tracks venture capital firms. That percentage has dropped consistently over at least the past five quarters, from 41 percent in Q1 of last year.

“If it’s not growing, it’s going to die.” Michael Eisner, Former CEO, Walt Disney Company

The relationship between politics and business growth has long been a flashpoint between competing political ideologies.

Reinforcing the idea that growth is political, terms like sequestration, quantitative easing and austerity are now being viewed as the determining factors in whether companies can grow in the future. This is, of course, a myth.

Twitter is becoming the new job board. It is also becoming the new résumé.

Fed up with traditional recruiting sites and floods of irrelevant résumés, some recruiters are turning to the social network to post jobs, hunt for candidates and research applicants.

GlaxoSmithKline, Britain's biggest drugmaker, is placing a small but important bet on a new way of treating diseases by targeting electrical signals in the body.

The company said on Wednesday it would offer a $1 million prize to stimulate innovation in the field, as well as funding up to 40 researchers working in external laboratories.

The initiative is a long-term gamble on the promise of a new kind of medicine, using electrical impulses rather than the chemicals or biological molecules found in today's drugs.

Three influential venture capital firms are teaming to find and finance entrepreneurs who want to create applications and other accessories for Google Glass. That’s an Internet-connected device that is setting out to turn wearable computing into the latest fashion trend.

The partnership announced Wednesday will join Google’s own venture capital arm with two other investment firms, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Andreessen Horowitz.

This is really an eye opener about a possible direction in which modern medicine is moving...eric topol seems to be a physician willing to marry todays technology with patient needs (cheaper, faster) which will p/o the medical machine...one problem with dr topol's approach -- how will the hospitals pay off/profit from the expensive equipment after it's been replaced with an app!

The UK Government has asked the chief executive of GlaxoSmithKline to help foster innovative relationships between business and universities.

In a move that underlines the importance of Sir Andrew Witty and GSK - Britain’s biggest pharma firm - to the UK economy, the government is asking Witty to provide “practical steps” for building stronger relationships between universities, local companies and regional growth bodies.

First Round Capital Partner Phineas Barnes on helping college students become entrepreneurs.

Your top three business expenses are your employees’ wages, inventory and rent. According to an infographic from Bolt Insurance, 1 in every 5 dollars your business earns goes toward paying your employees. That’s a tough expense to cut, but there’s a lot you can do to reduce your costs on equipment, taxes, utilities, phone service and shipping.

You might not save a lot on your business expenses right away, but these kinds of savings add up once you’ve implemented a few of them. Bolt offers us 16 ways to save on the top 10 business expenses. Some of the those tips include:

African entrepreneurs are increasingly looking for mentorship. Locally, a study by the Silicon Cape initiative, revealed that access to business mentors was the second most sought after resource. Now, VC4Africa (Venture Capital for Africa), the African entrepreneurial hub, is launching the Mentorship Marketplace, a peer-to-peer marketplace where entrepreneurs can add “mentor requests” that are searchable and actionable by a pool of registered mentors.

Can San Diego re-invent itself as a capital of innovation?

San Diego established itself as an innovation hub decades ago—understanding early on the importance of technology clusters in creating a critical mass of self-sustaining innovation. Today it is still renowned as a hotbed for hundreds of life sciences startups (We Are the Wildcatters) and as the home of Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) the world’s largest wireless chipmaker.

Even though it has been a long haul, it’s nice to see some optimism surfacing in 2013. Earlier this year, a new study “2013 Business Outlook Survey: A New Reality Of Cautious Optimism” was published by EKS&H. It shows a return to cautious optimism despite growth lower than expected in 2012, and much improved perspective from the record-high pessimism of the last few years.

According to earlier studies from Forbes Insights, many entrepreneurs not only feel the lessons learned during the past few years have helped them survive, but the recession also exposed flaws in their business strategies that were previously not apparent, and they could fix. Here are some financial planning areas of emphasis derived from multiple studies:

New glimmers of competition are coming to the Internet fiber-to-the-home business in the United States: Google is branching out from its Kansas City experiment and staking a claim in Austin, Texas.

The company has  been saying that its surprisingly cheap one-gigabit-per-second fiber service in Kansas City (see “When Will the Rest of us Get Google Fiber?), which provided about 100 times the speed for around the same price as the average service in the United States, was more than a PR stunt. The new actions, announced here, back up those words.

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius joins Ellen Murray, the Assistant Secretary for Financial Resources (ASFR), and HHS agency leaders to announce the President's HHS budget for Fiscal Year 2014.

CEOs have taken on new significance in this era of economic stagnation: they are the self-starters who are building businesses, creating jobs and stimulating the economy. The impulse to dissect their personalities and motivations to see what they have in common is therefore quite natural. If we can learn what makes the best and the brightest so successful, then aspiring entrepreneurs and future business leaders can learn from that, which will lead to even more economic growth.