I deal often with early-stage startups, and many of these don’t have any customers yet (but wish they did), so it’s not surprising they still don’t think of customers as their friends. More disturbingly, others do have customers, but the customer service program consists of an informal focus on “problems,” rather than a proactive effort to establish a positive relationship with friends.

The right time to put a formal customer service program in place, with measurements, is before the first sale of your product or service to a customer. You can’t manage what you don’t measure, and customer satisfaction these days is one the most critical success factors to every business.

Dave McClure’s 500 Startups crew is at it again, with another group of companies joining its Accelerator program. The fourth group of startups in the 500 Startups Accelerator follows a lot of the same trends from previous participants, as McClure & Co. continue to bet big on female entrepreneurs and international startups. There’s also the continued focus on revenue-first startups, rather than those which need to hit “critical mass” before monetizing.

But before I get into all that, check out this video. Seriously. Watch it.

Your personality says a lot about you. To categorize people by their disposition, psychologists have long relied on questionnaires. Now, however, researchers may be closing in on a tangible view of character in the brain. According to a recent study in PLoS One, resting brain activity varies with a person’s scores on a well-established personality test. When awake but not engaged in a task, each subject displayed activity patterns distinct from those found in someone with different traits.

Even at rest, the brain hums with neural activity. Re­search­ers think these resting-state patterns reflect how the brain typically operates when we interact with the world. “You can think of it as showing which connections in the brain are on speed dial and which ones aren’t,” says Michael Milham, a psychiatrist at the Child Mind Institute in New York City, who led the study.

This calculator might have a future in our underperforming schools:

From the moment pupils start using calculators they stop using their heads – for all quantitative work. The detrimental effect on maths education is well known.

Calculators, however, cannot be removed from classrooms anymore- they are indispensible because many results can only be received from calculators (e.g. root7, cosine70 etc.)

Dear Mark,

Congratulations!

Through vision, grit, persistence and brilliance, you are about to launch the largest IPO in American history.

You have understood our needs and desires for connection and communication better than we understood them ourselves.

You have gathered a great management team around you, hired the brightest and most motivated employees, and maneuvered through a competitive landscape that is unprecedented in its complexity and pace of change. You are a great entrepreneur who will now define and personify our ideal of American innovation. You have made history and changed history, not just on Wall Street but on streets around the world. You have altered everything from teenagers' social lives to tyrants political calculations.

The NVCA and Cambridge Associates released venture performance data through the end of last year today, and it should no longer pain VCs or their LPs to read.

That’s the most generous thing to be said about it at this point.

Though the firms’ data shows that the asset class is now actually outperforming public market indices across some (very) long-term periods, LPs have still done poorly in recent years, particularly considering the hefty sums they pay out in management fees.

In venture, three-year-returns as of December 31 were 10 percent, for example. That’s fantastic compared with where three-year venture returns were at the end of 2010, at an ugly negative 0.2 percent. Still over the same three-year period ending December 31, returns for the DJIA, Nasdaq Composite, and the S&P 500 were 14.9 percent, 18.2 percent, and 14.1 percent, respectively. (Whoops.)

It is hard to find an industry that is as highly centralized as the Venture Capital industry: centralized in the US, and specifically in one street in Silicon Valley: Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park. However, this is gradually changing as the VC industry is developing fast in many sometimes unexpected places. You might call them ‘Valleys of the East’: Silicon Valley type areas that are emerging across Asia Pacific and present a huge opportunity for technology innovation and investments:

Fortitude Valley and the Silicon Beach initiative in Australia Bandung’s developers that feed the startups in Jakarta, Indonesia Silicon Gulf around Davao City, and the outskirts of Makati & Manila in the Philippines Bangalore Valley in India Zhongguancun in Haidan district, Beijing, often referred to as China’s Silicon Valley.

This week's Boston Globe column focuses on six reasons to be proud of our state's innovation economy, and four reasons to be concerned. (I'm more optimist than pessimist.)

Among the reasons to feel good:

Boston is already home to MassChallenge, an entrepreneurship competition that attracts more than 100 fledgling companies from the United States and abroad and awards $1 million in prize money with no strings attached. And several new programs are getting started this year, including Bolt, which will focus on entrepreneurs trying to design physical products (as opposed to mobile apps or websites), and Rock Health, for teams interested in devising health-care-oriented software. There’s also Boston Startup School, taking place for the first time this summer, which aims to make recent college grads more appealing hires for young tech companies.

Startups can often barely afford proper office space, marketing budgets or, according to Mark Zuckerberg, even the time to write a business plan. In an always-be-shipping environment, it’s challenging enough to manage the traditional bottom line of profits, let alone the “triple bottom line” of social and environmental impacts.

But increasingly, tech startups and investors are supporting business models that make companies accountable to not just their shareholders, but also their customers, workforce, environment and greater community.

Starting a small business can be psychotherapy meets MBA. It is challenging on practically every front, including having to make tough decisions and have tough interactions. Reprimanding an employee, getting very specific about money and dealing with setbacks will all be part of your existence as a small businessperson.

Looking back at my own entrepreneurial career, I know the challenges I struggled with in the early days would amount to a minor blip in my day now. I learned the hard way how to enforce my boundaries, demand clients pay me what I’m worth (instead of trying to negotiate a better deal) and navigate the countless icky conversations you encounter as an entrepreneur. Here is my list of lessons and advice about what you'll need to do to survive and thrive in small business.

When the president signed legislation that reauthorized the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and the Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs for six more years, entrepreneurs and scientists across the country breathed sighs of relief.

Finally, the uncertainty brought on by years of Congress’s spoon feeding temporary extensions (14 since 2008), was over.

The new law also remedies another long-standing issue with the program. Previously, program rules stated that to be eligible for these awards, a business had to be “at least 51 percent owned and controlled by one or more individuals who are citizens or, or permanent resident aliens in, the United States, except in the case of joint venture.”

THESE REMARKABLE CHARTS SHOW THAT OUR EATING HABITS DETERIORATE AS THE DAY GOES ON. PSYCHOLOGY OFFERS SOME FASCINATING REASONS WHY.

I’ve always found it easy to start my day healthy. Greek yogurt and fresh fruit are incredibly satisfying at 8 a.m., punctuated by a carefully crafted cup of black coffee that revs my brain. But by 8 p.m., everything changes. I’m a ravenous satyr, craving the flesh of fatty charred meats and the comforting toasty bite of calorie-laden IPAs. Melted cheese has a particular flare that would nauseate my 8-a.m. self, and the same could be said about anything fried or coated in buffalo sauce.

The Financial Times featured an article last week calling the patent system the curse of innovation.  Patents have become weapons of mass destruction in certain industries, most recently in the smartphone category.

"Escalating courtroom battles over intellectual property – whether evidence of an efficient market in ideas or a sign of a broken patent system – are placing a mounting burden on the (technology) sector…In smartphones alone, an estimated $15 to $20 billion has been spent buying patents for both defensive and offensive strategies.  Legal bills are conservatively estimated at $500 million." 

This "colossal squander" is spreading to stable industries like food, autos, and mining.  All face dramatic increases in patent lawsuits.

I'll bet you don't know where the Center of NY's Tech Community and Center of Creativity is.

Give up?

It's in the Financial District--right at 55 Broad Street.  It says so right on their website.  In fact, it is "well-known internationally as the original home of New York's technology community."

I'll bet you didn't know that--mostly because it never was.  Back in the late 90's, a lot of money and real estate brokering went into trying to make it so, however.  Names like Sun and Cornell (ironically, given the new tech campus) were brought in to try and tech-ify NYC's downtown area.

Last summer, Pipedrive was fortunate to be part of Angelpad, an accelerator run by a few very smart ex-Googlers. The 3 intensive months thoroughly changed our understanding of how to build a successful  product, and a successful company. And more importantly, it boosted our growth to the next level. Here are the five most important lessons I learned from this crazy time.

1. Be open to being challenged, be prepared to be wrong

Running a startup is like being punched in the face repeatedly.

Paul Graham

The Angelpad team and mentors challenged us in many ways. “You have too many things on your home page” was something we didn’t agree with at first, but we’re happy to test. And it turned out we had been wrong indeed. We removed 80% of the content, and left one sign-up button and one Learn More link on the home page. Conversion to sign up increased by 300%.

Most entrepreneurs expect to face the “normal” challenges of starting a business, which include finding the right opportunity, building and executing a winning plan, and financing their venture. But many forget the pitfalls associated with traditional business jobs which can apply even to the smartest and most dedicated people running their own business.

Often these facets of entrepreneurship don’t rear their ugly head until well down the road. Yet before you start, you should think about what the impact might be on your psyche, and how to neutralize these challenges in your own plan. I’ll summarize them here, but you can see more detail in an article by David Finkel in D&B Small Business Solutions:

Manufacturing jobs in the U.S. have grown by just over 3 percent in the past two years, according to a report released today by the Brookings Institution. And while that number seems minute compared to the dramatic nationwide losses since the end of the 1970s, there’s evidence that manufacturing is on the path for a long-term rebound.

Between January 2009 and December 2011, the country gained about 350,000 manufacturing jobs, with the fastest growth occurring in the Midwest, according to the report. Along with the South, Midwestern states had suffered huge job losses — sometimes exceeding 40 percent — in the manufacturing sector between 2000 and 2010.

Demographers were stunned last month when new data revealed a trend reversal: immigrants are no longer flocking to the U.S., and some have made a U-turn and returned home. Data from the Internal Revenue Service show that 1,800 people, mostly living abroad, either renounced their U.S. citizenship or handed in their green cards—more than the total number of people who did so in 2007, 2008, and 2009 combined. A few made the choice to avoid paying U.S. taxes on income earned abroad, but others are seeking greener pastures in the global economy. 

With the U.S. facing a shortage of skilled workers, the wave of immigrants who are turning their backs on America is foreboding. A growing population of highly-educated Americans and foreign nationals educated in the states are less committed to living and working in the U.S., preferring to return to their homelands, many of which are emerging economies.

What is Open Innovation? For any entrepreneur innovation is crucial to success, but if innovations are developed in isolation, the benefits can be limited in comparison to the effort.

At a recent event in Norwich, our speaker Stephen Clulow, kicked off the discussion (See photos) with a brief introduction about the meaning and importance of innovation. Innovation is the commercial application and successful exploitation of an idea. Innovation means introducing something new into your business. This could be a single major breakthrough – eg a totally new product or service – or it can be a series of small, incremental changes.

Fact: Thanks to the new crowdfunding legislation, it soon will be easier for any entrepreneur trying to build Instagram for Cats to raise $10 million than it is for an experienced venture capitalist to raise a new fund. In fact, thanks to increased scrutiny of investment funds in a post-Madoff world, this imbalance will probably get bigger and bigger.  The laws are written with the view that it's worse to lose your money from fraud than it is from your run-of-the-mill, poorly-executed bad idea.  You know, because sometimes startups just simply don't make it (shrug) but you gotta watch out for those financial hucksters who are looking to take your money and run off to kick it in Fiji.