Sam Duboc made his name on Bay Street with successful private equity investments in unfashionable companies such as Hair Club for Men. Then he himself fell out of fashion, after the sale of his firm Edgestone Capital Partners to brokerage GMP Capital turned into a disaster for the buyer.

Now Mr. Duboc is working on an ambitious turnaround project: Fixing Canada’s woeful venture capital industry.

Sure, entrepreneurs can eventually succeed without mentors. But it will cost extra time and wasted resources. So, how does a small business start-up find a mentor? Or, better yet, a handful of them?

With a little time and pick-and-shovel work, a stable of mentors can be signed up. Soon they will change your business life for the better. Some might talk with you weekly; others once or twice a year; others only once in your business life. All of those conversations will be valuable; the mentors you choose will have been down the road you are seeking to travel. Chances are they can make your trip vastly more efficient.

At the immigration law firm where I worked during graduate school, I saw case after case of extremely talented individuals who, despite their many contributions to the U.S., faced the threat of returning home because of their immigration status.

One such case involved the immigration struggles of a highly successful postdoctoral fellow from a top-five university whose work had led to a patent for a medical treatment for metastatic cancer. Another client, the founder of a multimillion dollar high-tech startup, had fallen out of legal status because immigration law lacked clear-cut visa categories for early-stage entrepreneurs. After working on such cases, I periodically would joke to clients that I wasn’t sure if the law firm could help them, as the immigration agency would not even allow cancer curers to remain in the country.

How many times have you participated in a brainstorming session, only to be underwhelmed by the utter lack of follow up?

Unfortunately, in most businesses, this is often the norm.

Here's why:

1. The output of the session is underwhelming.

2. No one has taken the time, pre-brainstorm, to consider follow-up.

3. No criteria established to evaluate output.

Successful business leadership is about the ability to create a compelling vision that is backed up by strong values, a strong sense of purpose and that inspires other people to help you to achieve it. In order to do this it is essential that, as a leader, you create an environment where people are encouraged to work harmoniously together using their own unique talents and skills to achieve common goals.

It sounds fairly straightforward doesn’t it?

However, great leadership requires a complex set of skills which have to be continually honed and fined tuned. Great leaders all share common characteristics which make them successful. They operate based on truths which underpin all of their behaviors and actions.

Finally. Facebook has been hovering around the 955-million active user mark for a while now… but Mark Zuckerberg has just confirmed that more than a billion people access his social network every month.

In a short note, the hoodied one expressed his thanks to all the users who have made his startup a worldwide success: If you’re reading this:

thank you for giving me and my little team the honor of serving you.

Helping a billion people connect is amazing, humbling and by far the thing I am most proud of in my life.

I am committed to working every day to make Facebook better for you, and hopefully together one day we will be able to connect the rest of the world too.

A recent study highlighted by the Wall Street Journal claims that baldness may lead to business success.

The research by Wharton's Albert Mannes found that bald men were viewed as more masculine, dominant, taller, and stronger than those with thinning or full heads of hair. 

What's interesting in the study is how that effect works.

I Agree!

It's official! The best state in the U.S. for entrepreneurship is Massachusetts, according to State Entrepreneurship Index, or SEI, which tracks core economic measures in all 50 states. This is for the second time in a row that the Bay state with a score of 3.01 has bagged the No. 1 spot in the SEI.

The SEI score is calculated based on percent growth in employer establishments; percent growth in employer establishments per person; business formation rate; patents per thousand persons and average income per non-farm proprietor in each state.

More than half a century ago, a classic article by the economist Benjamin Chinitz in the American Economic Review, "Contrasts in Agglomeration: New York and Pittsburgh," sought to answer a vexing question about the mechanisms of regional economic development. He pointed out a connection between a region’s industrial structure and its ability to generate entrepreneurship, innovation, and new growth.

"For a given size of area," Chinitz wrote, "the entrepreneurial supply curve is also a function of certain traditions and elements of the social structure which are heavily influenced by the character of the area’s historic specializations." And he continued: "The proposition I offer is this: An industry which is competitively organized—in the neoclassical sense of the term 'competition'—has more entrepreneurs per dollar of output than an industry which is organized along oligopolistic lines."

Early on in Wednesday night's presidential debate, Republican Mitt Romney asserted that "new business start-ups are down to a 30-year low."

"Over the last four years, small business people have decided that America may not be the place to open a new business," he said.

Getty Images That remark stood out to some, given the many cultural signs that appreciation for U.S. entrepreneurship is rising—from the growing public fascination with young tech company founders, and the recent heavier emphasis on teaching entrepreneurship at American business schools.

As an entrepreneur just starting out one crucial step on your checklist is raising your initial funds or ‘seed capital’. There are several ways out there to help you and the following are what we call the ‘ABC’s for funding your business’

Is electric car maker Tesla a “loser” company, as presidential candidate Mitt Romney charged in Wednesday’s debate?

In a blog post written a few hours before the debate, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said no — the company will in fact be profitable by the end of next month.

Musk felt journalists and analysts were reading too much into the company’s forecast last week of slower manufacturing of its Model S sedan (pictured above), and says he thought the press also misinterpreted the reason why the company wanted to raise an additional $150 million.

Healthcare is a hot-button issue in America right now -– partly because it’s election season and partly because our healthcare system faces some legitimately major problems. On this episode of The Valley Girl Show, we sit down with Dr. Robert Pearl, the executive director and CEO of the Permanente Medical Group, to discuss the role that technology will play in the future of healthcare. And he is optimistic about new developments.

Pearl also talks about Kaiser Permanente’s iPhone apps, which are designed to help patients manage their care. One allows you full access to your personal medical record, and another lets you schedule and modify or cancel appointments. It also can push messages or alerts if, for example, you have allergies and the pollen count is high.

Great innovation takes talent, time and money. Yet in recent years, technology has simultaneously driven down the costs of innovation and opened up new opportunities for people to fund their ideas.  

The 19th annual National Association of Seed and Venture Funds (NASVF) conference will explore funding mechanisms for today's innovations. Titled "Advancing Innovation: Seeding Tomorrow’s Opportunities," the event will be held in Cleveland from October 15th-17th, drawing innovation experts from across the country to the Midwest.

THE GADGET’S MAIN LURE IS THAT IT RIDS YOU OF THE EMBARRASSMENT OF A BIKE HELMET, BUT TESTS HAVE ALSO SHOWN IT TO BE REMARKABLY EFFECTIVE.

If we have any chance at weaning ourselves off of the dead dinosaur juice that fuels our planet, sustainable transportation, like bicycles, are going to have to be part of the solution. In fact, cities like Copenhagen have already toward a model in which bikes, not cars, rule the road; on the bike highways there, 68% of adults ride their bikes at least once a week and 55% of children cycle to school on a regular basis. The latter statistic is particularly heartening. But as bikes become an increasingly integral part of our green future, bike safety must be considered as well. A biking revolution invites us to think about a correlated upheaval: a revolutionary bike helmet.

Many investors will assert that company culture trumps strategy every time, in predicting the long-term success of a new startup. Obviously, both are important, so it behooves every entrepreneur to start early in setting the right tone for his own company, and every new team member should be gauging both of these relative to their own interests, prior to signing on.

What is a company culture, anyway? Probably the best definition is the oft-quoted view that culture is simply “the way we do things around here.” It’s always amazing to me how different that can be between two companies in essentially the same business. There is no ultimate right or wrong in a culture, but there are attributes that will be right or wrong for you, or your investors.

Maryland will be giving away $300,000 to promising entrepreneurs in a business competition.

The contest, called the InvestMaryland Challenge, is part of the state’s venture capital initiative that raised $84 million for seed and early-stage companies earlier this year.

The competition’s prize is $100,000 for the most impressive companies in three categories: information technology, life sciences and general.

Much has been made about waste in healthcare, with a new government report tallying $750 billion in unnecessary costs each year – enough to insure 150 million American workers.  The digitization of healthcare, from the introduction of electronic health records to the application of high tech data analytics to reveal patterns that can point to more effective treatments, is rapidly gaining ground as a force of change. Yet despite the economic opportunity this poses for our region, which is rich in both healthcare and technology talent and innovation, we may be forfeiting it to others.

While the Puget Sound region should stand to benefit through high paying jobs that blend the best of our healthcare and technology know-how, these two colossal segments of our local economy operate largely in adjoining, but walled, gardens. Now is the time to forge collaborations between the two to spur health IT leadership, entrepreneurship, and job growth.

Many smart venture capital observers have lamented the emergence of VC "megafunds," like those managed by my firm New Enterprise Associates.  For example, the Kauffman Foundation recently issued a report claiming that "big VC funds fail to deliver big returns," while Silicon Valley Bank said that "small funds have a better performance profile than large funds."

Yet the trend over the past decade has been unmistakable: Even as new limited partner (LP) commitments to the overall VC market have contracted, LPs have concentrated ever more capital among fewer firms with larger funds. How can the LPs be so mistaken if the superiority of small funds is so obvious?

After more than two weeks crisscrossing the state with stops in Ocean City, La Plata, Hagerstown and pretty much everywhere in between, the bright yellow Pitch Across Maryland bus rolled into Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia on Friday.

There was music, booze, advice for entrepreneurs and, of course, more business pitches in the make-shift studio in the back of the bus.

Organizers expected to collect 40 or so pitches total at the 25 stops across the state when the bus pulled out of Columbia on Sept. 11 to start the tour.