The amount  of money that it takes to finance the startup costs of a business is  jaw dropping. It can depreciate your budget overnight and unless you  have access to financing options, it’s going to put you in considerable  debt. Small businesses have to use new, cool ways to finance their  startup or they won’t be able to survive in today’s competitive economy.

1 – Integrate consultancy services

If your product or service takes a considerable investment in order  to get going, why not integrate consultancy services into your  offerings? Being a consultant is cost free. It takes very little  investment to offer this to your customers and consultants have enormous  value. If you are in an industry where consulting services are greatly  needed, there is a lot of profit that could be made. You could use this  revenue to finance your startup. This allows you to get going with your  business, without having to commit to a loan and put yourself in debt.

Having spent the past two years building a company in Hong Kong, I can testify that it is f**king hard. In the beginning, ignorance is bliss. You allow your sexy PowerPoint slides to seduce you into believing your big idea is flawless. Your projections are up and to the right and you feel invincible. You sleep great at night and have the energy and ego to believe you will change the world.

It’s not until you quit your job, realize you have no health insurance, absorb the fact that VCs don’t respond to your emails and that you only have US$2,000 left in the bank when reality sets in. You have been totally unaware of how misguided and flawed your plan really is. You are not sleeping quite so well… but you are resilient. You put your head down and execute. There is nothing glamorous about losing track of day and night, writing code, structuring a company, lawyers, tax law or fundraising. But you persevere.

What if you had just three days to conceive, build and launch a startup?

That's exactly what 152 entrepreneurs did on the StartupBus, a the 72-hour hackathon that takes place on seven buses as they make their way across North America to Austin for SXSW.

The teams had just a few minutes to pitch their ideas to the judges. So, who stood out and why? We caught up with Robert Scoble, panel judge and prominent tech blogger, to get his thoughts on what makes the perfect startup pitch.

W. Mark Crowell, executive director of U.Va. Innovation and associate vice president for research at the University of Virginia, was honored by the Association of University Technology Managers Feb. 28 for his lifetime contributions to advancing academic innovations.

Crowell received the association’s 2013 Bayh-Dole Award, “given in recognition of the recipient’s untiring efforts to foster and promote intellectual property activities on behalf of the university and nonprofit community.”

Since his arrival at U.Va. in 2010, Crowell has worked to expand and raise the visibility of the University’s innovation and entrepreneurship programs and testified before Congress on matters pertaining to technology transfer and the role of small business in innovation and job creation.

Post-investment, VC firms spend a lot of time with the new company. We start by agreeing to goals and milestones for the company to achieve.  

This could be addressing issues raised in the due diligence process prior to investing, developing a revised business plan, or restructuring teams to meet plans to scale.  

Sometimes the headline figure you see in the press is tranched, meaning the company will need to meet certain milestones, such as a number of paid users, or revenue targets, with the funding split into chunks, to be released as each milestone is reached.

An interview with Bruce Nussbaum, professor at Parsons The New School of Design and author of Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire.

It’s the first week of March, we all knew this post was coming:

GAN at SXSW!

It’s time for tech’s annual pilgrimage to Austin for free tacos, bbq, keg beer and more tech talk, launches and gossip than you can shake a stick at. Many of our members are headed to TX for the fun and several are hosting events, speaking on panels or holding office hours.

GAN member happenings at SXSW:

Many startups are having a difficult time convincing investors to give them money right now. But as any investor will tell you, the best startups are having no problem getting funding. So, which new companies are attracting VC dollars in droves? "Tinder and Wanelo are the most sought after deals right now," one says.

There’s so much emphasis personal branding as a “critical” job search skill. Yet so many of us genuinely suck at branding ourselves.

And for most of us, there’s one simple reason for our shortcomings: our endgame is unclear. We haven’t identified – and in some cases, even thought about – our goals for why we want to engage in personal branding.

We have… no clear purpose.

“Simple,” you may say… “my ‘purpose’ is to get a job!” So you create a Linkedin account, and lurk on twitter chats. You get an About.me page and join BeKnown and Google+. Depending on your chosen career field, you may even develop an online portfolio to show off your work, blogs and your smiling face in a professional headshot. You are the perfect personal brand. Right?

How many people will be using the internet in 2016?

Are women more likely than men to choose the brand of potato chip the family buys?

What percentage of the world's population will speak Spanish in a decade?

Everyone's talking about mobile, it's the next big thing...

If you're General Electric or Yahoo or a presidential candidate, long term trends might matter. If you need not just a majority but a plurality to make your numbers, then by all means, pay attention to these tectonic shifts.

Most successful entrepreneurs will tell you that their primary motivation is to “change the world” and to build something lasting, not to make a lot of money. But the conventional wisdom is that employees work for money, above all else. Yet my own experience, and a relevant McKinsey survey, leads me to believe that non-cash motivators may be more effective in the long term than financial incentives.

I agree with Charles P. Garcia, who ties motivation most strongly to leadership, in “Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows,” based on this group of more than 600 prominent leaders from every sector of American society. They assert that employees value having strong leaders, who incent them to do their best, just as much if not more than money.

THE recent decision by Marissa Mayer, the chief executive of Yahoo, to eliminate telecommuting for all workers brings her company back in line with most of corporate America, where working from home is more illusion than reality. Although many — some estimate most — American jobs could successfully be performed at home, only roughly 16 percent of American employees actually telecommute in any given year. And that figure is reached only by using a very generous definition of telecommuting — working from home at least one hour per week.

A new entrepreneurial training program for inventors in Michigan aims to fast-track technologies to market and boost the economic impact of research conducted in the state. Launching this spring, the Michigan I-Corps program will help researchers from across the state identify and assess potential applications and business opportunities for their technologies.

In the spirit of entrepreneurship, 60 Chilean businesses will participate in the the interactive portion of the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas from March 11 to 13. The participating businesses will be showcased through the combined efforts of the Chilean government’s ProChile and Start-Up Chile entrepreneurial campaigns.

With the world getting more digital every day, users have become a lot more accustomed to the internet over the last couple of years, especially when it comes to parting ways with their cash. It is now very common to expect clients to have weighed their options online and asked for recommendations from their network before making a purchase. Users interested in buying are flocking to various review websites to find information from other users in order to make the final decision. What does this mean for businesses? It means that online reputation management is becoming extremely important. Companies all over the world need to be more transparent than ever before, making sure that they are producing the best quality service and products possible for their clients.

Who should lead innovation in education—teachers or entrepreneurs? That key question was in the air here at this year’s South by Southwest Edu conference, which brought together a mix of entrepreneurs and educators for four days of panels and a competition for education start-ups.

In the keynote address on Thursday, Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, made the case for why more venture capitalists and businesses should invest in building education products and services to kick-start new ways of teaching with technology. He displayed a chart showing a recent rise in such investment but noted that education still accounts for only 1 percent of all venture-capital investment.

The transcontinental railroad. The highway system. The Internet. These are all examples of "platforms" upon which our economy is built. They're also each the product of profound waste on behalf of government, which built, funded, or supported each platform's construction to its massive short term loss. In his new book, "Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy: Markets, Speculation and the State," Warburg Pincus partner Bill Janeway explains that what we need right now is for the government to waste more money like that.

Most startups are happy to find any customer, and will hang on for dear life to every one. Only later do they realize that some of these cost more than they are worth, or lead into commitments they can’t sustain, but no business wants to violate the golden rule that every customer needs to be treated as if they were the only customer.

In reality, the real world is full of pragmatics. Every smart entrepreneur needs to realize that trying to treat every customer the same, with limited resources, may mean that you are treating them all poorly, or at least limiting your own growth. Mike Michalowicz, in his latest satirical book “The Pumpkin Plan,” makes some excellent points with the analogy of how growing a business is like a farmer who struggles to grow championship-size pumpkins.

The Economic Alliance of Greater Baltimore (EAGB) and BioHealth Innovation (BHI) in collaboration with the Baltimore Business Journal are proud to announce the publication of the Central Maryland BioHealth Entrepreneur’s Resource and Financing Guide.

This Guide will be a compendium of resources to BioHealth innovators and entrepreneurs working to start and grow new companies in the region. A wealth of resources exists in Maryland to support emerging BioHealth companies, however, they are not always readily accessible or captured in one place. The Guide will compile information on financial resources, university facilities and programs, economic development programs, and existing federal laboratory facilities and programs and how to work with them.