For all the coverage we in the media give it, you'd think venture capital is the only game in town for startup entrepreneurs.

But there's another way, and it doesn't involve begging on the street corner or at your friendly local megabank branch. Nor do you need to pray to angel investors. As Collis Ta'eed—cofounder and chief executive of Envato, a network of websites—writes, you can bootstrap.

His reasons for following your own path, laid out at Alister & Paine, include:

In my last company, Advanced Diamond Technologies, there was a time between equity financing rounds when we needed bridge financing. This is very common among young companies. I don’t recall now the circumstances under which we needed to raise money quickly, but it has always been the accepted wisdom that if you need to raise money quickly, use a Convertible Note.

A Convertible Note is a loan to the company made by investors. In our case we tapped existing investors. To avoid the transaction costs of an equity financing, and to avoid the need to negotiate a valuation on the company with the equity investors, a Convertible Note essentially says the following:

University of Pittsburgh Medical Center has announced a five-year, $100 million investment to create a comprehensive data warehouse and analytics system, Becker's Hospital Review reports (Roney, Becker's Hospital Review, 10/15).

Details of Data Warehouse The data warehouse will contain administrative, clinical, financial and genomic information from more than 200 entities across UPMC, UPMC Health Plan and other affiliated groups.

To collect, process and manage the data, UPMC is patterning with several technology firms, including:

Maryland must align its universities, public resources and private-sector companies to further its goal of being the “epicenter of cybersecurity,” Gov. Martin O’Malley said Tuesday. As cyber threats continue to grow and the urgency of attacks become more well known, Maryland is in a position to grow its economy as a hub for cybersecurity, O’Malley said at the opening session of the CyberMaryland 2012 conference in Baltimore.

We got our first glimpse of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer today! At the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, Mayer served as a judge for the startup competition. She's played a similar role at previous conferences, and she's evaluated companies for her own personal portfolio. She's an angel investor in Square, One Kings Lane, and other startups.

I read an article last week asking if a business leadership background is essential for performing the job of the President. (If I could remember where, I would give the citation, but by now there are probably a few thousand expert opinions on the subject.) And, of course, my first thought was, hiring by resume? How will that tell you what kind of Teamability the applicant will demonstrate when they’re hired?

It got me thinking. How does the top leader of our nation need to team? With who? In what circumstances? Like any job in the leadership of an organization, there are three key teaming relationships:

Incubators are now an industry segment in their own right. Before starting YouWeb Incubator in 2007, I began to explore the idea of an incubator with friends and colleagues. Most people told me that Idealab and CMGI had tried the model in the 1990s and didn’t really work out (with the exception of Overture, which spun out of Idealab). CMGI imploded in the dot-com bust.

However, I noticed one model gearing up: Y Combinator by Paul Graham. At least in Silicon Valley, YC was pretty much the only well-known incubator. Today the total number of incubators (broadly defined to include incubators, accelerators, and “seed starter funds”) must be in the hundreds, each one slightly different from the other — versus a few years ago, when the space had YC, TechStars, YouWeb, Idealab and a couple of others.

In working with entrepreneurs and other business people over the years, I often hear stories of entrepreneurs who were so close to success, but somehow let it slip through their fingers. They could always give a rational excuse, like the market changed, but somehow it seemed that they were actually afraid of success, so they subtly undermined their own efforts.

I couldn’t really believe that anyone would be afraid of success, until I recently finished a self-help book by Patrick Daniel, “Finding Your Road to Success.” This is billed as a must-read for any entrepreneur who needs a shot of optimism. Relative to my suspected entrepreneur fear of success, Patrick outlines six rationales that my positive-thinking mind would never even consider:

Investment in biomedical innovation is not what it once was. Millions of dollars have fled the life sciences risk capital pool. The number of early venture deals in biotech is smaller than ever. Public markets are all but closed, biotech-pharma deals increasingly back-loaded with contingent, rather than upfront, payments. Paths to market are more winding and stonier. Government cuts are closing laboratories and culling blue-sky research. Never has there been a more pressing need to look beyond the existing pools of funding and talent to galvanize biomedical innovation.

This issue highlights several new ways of thinking about funding life sciences innovation in academia. It explores the increasing prominence of corporate venture funding—and the potential of university-based venture funding.

Young Entrepreneur

This is the ideal forum for any entrepreneur seeking information, help, ideas or feedback. Being an active member of the forum, I know first hand that they have one of the most helpful communities out there.

Retire At 21

Michael Dunlop, an incredibly successful young, online entrepreneur created this forum for all entrepreneurs. If you’re looking for general discussions on entrepreneurship or website critiques in particular, this is the place to go.

CALGARY — Naheed Nenshi, the mayor of Calgary, thinks he knows why his city’s entrepreneurial culture is becoming so robust, despite the cold winters Calgarians endure.

“The line I usually use when people ask me why Calgary has fostered such an entrepreneurial culture is this is a place where nobody cares who your daddy is or where you went to school. I say it so often that it sounds a bit trite, but I don’t think it is true everywhere,” he said, gazing briefly at the September sunshine bathing his private city hall veranda to reflect on his answer before continuing.

Ryan Holmes, founder of Invoke and the CEO of HootSuite, one of British Columbia’s fastest-growing start-ups, made something of a revelation at a recent presentation at the Beedie School of Business. He told our students how early investors urged him to move his company to the Silicon Valley — where it would be plugged into a bigger pool of talent and venture capital, and a more robust environment for start-ups.

That Holmes has chosen strategically to remain in Vancouver — Invoke now employs over 200 individuals and continues to grow rapidly — is important because it is to some extent unusual.

In a few short years, the technologies found in today's mobile devices—touch screens, gyroscopes, and voice-control software, to name a few—have radically transformed how we access computers. To glimpse what new ideas might have a similar impact in the next few years, you need only to have walked into the Marriott Hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts, this week. There, researchers from around the world demonstrated new ideas for computer interaction at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology. Many were focused on taking mobile devices in directions that today feel strange and new but could before long be as normal as swiping the screen of an iPhone or Android device.

Our world is shrinking.  Not geographically.  Not geologically.  But certainly in economic terms, our world is getting smaller and smaller… and regions and nations are becoming more dependent on one another.

Technological advances in communications and transportation are playing a huge role in that interdependence.  While data and information move at the speed of light, tangible three-dimensional products are moving faster and in greater volumes than ever before.

Workday, the enterprise software maker, has wowed investors with an IPO on Friday that really popped. For one savvy venture capitalist, it was a particularly nice payday. Norwest Venture Partners investor George Still tried to get his firm to back Workday. When it turned the company down, Still invested his own money—a stake that's now worth $40 million after Workday soared from an opening price of $28 to $48 on Friday.

I’ve said before that I don’t think Chicago is well positioned to become some type of dominant tech hub, but should only seek to get its “fair share” of tech. However, as the third largest city in America, Chicago’s fair share on tech is still pretty darn big. If you look at what’s been happening in the city the last couple of years, I think you’d have to have to say it’s something real. Built in Chicago lists 1145 companies in its inventory, and that’s definitely something. I’ll give a bit of a mea culpa by admitting that the tech community has done better than I probably thought it would a couple years ago, though I still stand behind the statement I made at the beginning of the paragraph.

Part of what has happened in Chicago is the general decentralization of technology in America. It used to be that tech in America was heavily concentrated in the Bay Area and Boston. In an era when pretty much literally anybody can start a company, you simply don’t need to be in any particular place to be successful these days.

For our inaugural App, we are delighted to feature the thinking of Don Tapscott. We chose Don because he has done more than just about anyone to help business people understand the implications of the digital world.

In today's fast-paced and competitive operating environment, and the backdrop of the global economic downturn, small businesses may feel under pressure when it comes to securing finance.

Yet despite this, figures from the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) show that the overall cost of financing is now lower than before, thanks to the decline in the Bank of England bank rate. For example, average variable rate lending interest rates were 5.39% in November 2008, compared with 3.5% in November 2011.

There’s a story going on in biotech venture capital, and it’s about a slow and painful death. Four years after the start of the Great Recession, and after a decade of too much promising and too little delivering, the majority of biotech VCs are struggling to stay afloat. Firms are shutting their doors, forcing partners out in brutal political battles, or quietly fading away as they fail to raise new funds.

This ongoing theme resurfaced in the past week, when I wrote about the demise of Kirkland, WA-based OVP Venture Partners, the $750 million venture fund that has been betting on high tech, biotech, and cleantech companies for 30 years. This firm, like many others, waited and waited for a home run to save its portfolio, but it never happened. For OVP, Mountain View, CA-based Complete Genomics (NASDAQ:GNOM) was the one that just never came through in the clutch.

The commenting period for the SBIR and STTR policy directives (PD) closed on October 5, 2012 and the fur is flying from the 80 published comments from about 35 people and/or organizations. There are probably more comments, but that's all that was published at this time.

All of us, including the agencies, are struggling with the new rules, regulations and administrative burdens brought about by the legislation and the SBA's policy directives. The extent of the SBIR comments are beyond the scope of this publication, but I'll give you some highlights as well as links to the full text of some.