For the past few years, I have read over what seems like hundreds of blogs and thousands of tweets that either directly claim or indirectly hint at a disruption of traditional venture capital. For some, the factors relate to the economy, that limited partners and institutional investors were reviewing their investment approaches. For others, it seemed as if there was too much money in the asset class, that there was too much money chasing too few real opportunities. There seemed to be a long laundry list of why venture capital was undergoing this shift, but never any thread that could lay out all the factors and synthesize just how each factor contributed to shift, until now…

Almost every technological and medical innovation in the world has its roots in a scientific paper. Science drives much of the world’s innovation. The faster science moves, the faster the world moves.

Progress in science right now is being held back by two key inefficiencies:

The time-lag problem: there is a time-lag of, on average, 12 months between finishing a paper, and it being published. The single mode of publication problem: scientists share their ideas only via one format, the scientific paper, and don’t take advantage of the full range of media that the web makes possible.

On the surface, value propositions seem incredibly straightforward. I’d argue that this is why, in practice, they’re often given such short shrift.

In reality, getting a value proposition right requires some focused thinking and structured analysis, some of which I’ll preview here. Given my particular background, much of what I recommend will have a bias to B2B startups — though, in many instances, I think that you’ll find applicability to virtually any endeavor.

I learned last week that Worcester has hired some people from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Department of Urban Studies and Planning to help develop a plan to boost startup activity. An MIT student, who is a candidate for a master's degree in city planning, called me on April 16 to ask for my assessment of Worcester's advantages and disadvantages for startups, and my thoughts on what the city could do to attract more startups.

In a nutshell, here are my answers: My favorite idea for how to attract more startups is for the University of Massachusetts Medical School to hire a researcher with a reputation as the world leader in the most promising field in biotechnology. In my view, Worcester's strengths for startups are its relatively low commercial rents and salaries, and a lower cost of living. Worcester's weaknesses are its lack of world leadership in many areas of technology, its challenges in attracting venture capital, and its relatively limited economic opportunity.

Every tech company tries to hire the best talent available, but there is a lot more to building a great team than just putting a group of talented individuals in a room. I’ve worked on a number of teams and witnessed varying degrees of cohesion. So when I joined Stripe as our first engineer, I brought with me a conviction that we should obsess over our team’s personal interactions. And when I started building our recruiting program, I made sure we spent as much time thinking about how new hires would affect our culture as how they would perform at their jobs.

I’ve strived to create an environment of happy, productive people who are excited to show up to work in the morning (or afternoon, as appropriate!). I’ve found that this environment, while being extremely positive in its own right, also gives us a competitive advantage in recruiting. The following points are the most important takeaways that I’ve learned while heading up recruiting.

The United States recently passed a law known as the JOBS Act (an acronym for the poetic “Jump-Start Our Business Start-Ups” Act), which signals a significant change in the country’s approach to private placements, which are essentially company financings that are exempt from most securities-related regulatory requirements. One interesting feature of the JOBS Act is that it now makes it possible for “crowdfunding” to assist startup companies with capital fundraising.

Crowdfunding is a phenomenon whereby people use the Web to raise funds for various causes by aggregating large numbers of small donations. One successful example of crowdfunding was the American public’s response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster. By harnessing the power of the Internet, donors were able to raise significant funds for disaster relief. U.S. President Barack Obama used a similar approach to fundraising in his first-term election campaign.

I’m convinced that people who have fun at work are more innovative, as well as happier. I don’t have any big scientific studies to prove this, but in my considerable business experience, I haven’t seen many successes come out of a group of fearful pessimists or unhappy people.

As I was looking through the literature, I did find evidence that many strong business leaders, like John D. Rockefeller, knew how to laugh at themselves. Humble leaders with this trait seem to create cultures that don't take themselves too seriously; cultures willing to take risks; cultures capable of creating and supporting a greater number of ideas.

Stanford University is so startlingly paradisial, so fragrant and sunny, it’s as if you could eat from the trees and live happily forever. Students ride their bikes through manicured quads, past blooming flowers and statues by Rodin, to buildings named for benefactors like Gates, Hewlett, and Packard. Everyone seems happy, though there is a well-known phenomenon called the “Stanford duck syndrome”: students seem cheerful, but all the while they are furiously paddling their legs to stay afloat. What they are generally paddling toward are careers of the sort that could get their names on those buildings. The campus has its jocks, stoners, and poets, but what it is famous for are budding entrepreneurs, engineers, and computer aces hoping to make their fortune in one crevasse or another of Silicon Valley.

We would all like, no matter our discipline, to increase the quality and quantity of our work. Some artists, writers and business leaders have established routines that help them to get into a creative mode daily. Perhaps the artist shows up at the studio every morning at 8 a.m. and doesn't leave until lunch, or the CEO takes several afternoons away from the office to write up a strategic plan. But what lies beneath the commitment to create? How can we position ourselves in ways that elevate our work?

What follows are useful qualities anyone can develop to help them along a creative path.

When you work inside a startup with lots of clever and motivated staff you’re never short of good ideas that you can implement.

It’s tempting to take on new projects, new features, new geographies, new speaking opportunities, whatever. Each one incrementally sounds like a good idea, yet collectively they end up punishing undisciplined teams. I like to counsel that the best teams are often defined by what they choose not to do.

Let me explain.

This is the story of how a young Irish fine artist accidentally became a materials scientist, founding a high-growth company that created a whole new product category. It’s also a parable for how great entrepreneurs systematically create their own luck.

Jane ni Dhulchaointigh is the founder and CEO of Sugru, a London-based startup that makes an amazing moldable adhesive for repairing any physical object. It’s a cross between silly putty and duct tape, a space age rubber that can be molded into any desired shape by hand, and that sticks to a vast array of surfaces. With customers in over 100 countries, and all seven continents, Sugru has taken the world by storm.

Do you dream of being your own boss? Fantasize about making heaps of money and setting your own hours? If so, you’re not alone. As many as 70 percent of the individuals who seek help from a business broker or franchise consultant have the same dream, but many will never achieve it because of one thing: fear.

Fear, by definition, is attributed to a lack of knowledge. So—put simply—while investigating entrepreneurship, one must become informed about the challenges and good, old-fashioned hard work that comes with making that leap.

There’s a phenomenon that everyone in business needs to be aware of: reverse innovation. In fact, as authors Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble write in their new book Reverse Innovation: Create Far From Home, Win Everywhere: “Whether you are a CEO, financier, strategist, marketer, scientist, engineer, national policymaker, or even a student forming your career aspirations, reverse innovation is a phenomenon you need to understand.”

After reading Reverse Innovation, one must conclude that they are right. The dynamics of the world market are indeed changing. It used to be that innovations flowed from developed nations to developing ones. That’s no longer the case–they increasingly flow in the opposite direction.

Want to start a company... but you're short on ideas? There's an incubator for that.

Well, actually, it's called a "foundry."

What is a foundry?

Chicago-based Sandbox Industries recently opened a new start-up foundry in San Francisco. Managing Director Millie Tadewaldt says unlike a traditional incubator that brings in early-stage start-ups already working on idea, Sandbox simply looks for talented people — often with no entrepreneurial experience. It gives them mentorship and capital and tasks them with identifying promising new start-up ideas through testing, market research, focus groups — whatever it takes to figure out which ideas have legs.

On Dec. 31, President Obama signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012. The NDAA included a six-year reauthorization of the Small Business Innovation Research and the Small Business Technology Transfer programs, which direct federal research and development dollars to small firms. Since September 2008, these programs had continued only through a series of 14 consecutive temporary extensions. The long-term reauthorization contained in the NDAA represents a major legislative victory in Congress that will provide much-needed certainty to companies that compete for SBIR and STTR grants in order to develop and commercialize innovative technologies and create new jobs in America.

A big part of the tech boom in New York has been the arrival of several accelerators and incubators which are minting new classes of top tier startups. Today, in a presentation at Google Ventures in Manhattan, DreamIt Ventures announced its newest class of 15 companies for its New York Accelerator.

DreamIt Ventures is also moving into the old office of Fab.com, following in the footsteps of TechStars, who took Foursquare’s former office in search of some magic startup mojo.

I returned a few days ago from Silicon Valley. It was like a breath of fresh air. I talked to people who were involved in creating companies with hundreds of millions of dollars of value, within a few years after incorporation.

There is a constant stream of new start-ups and projects, an excitement in the air. A recently incorporated company was sold to Google for a billion dollars. And it got me thinking about how entrepreneurship is viewed so differently in Central Europe compared to the United States.

In the last few days, I’ve been writing mainly about bad workplace practices of the 20th Century, such as basing a corporate culture on competitiveness or on public hangings.

Today, let’s look at the other end of the spectrum. What does the workplace of the Creative Economy of the 21st Century look like? An interesting picture emerges from The Valve Handbook for New Employees which has become available on the Internet.

What makes us happy? Good health? Good relationships? Money? If the latter, can money really buy you love and/or happiness? And what exactly is happiness anyway?

Such questions are frequently pondered deeply, but rarely answered with certainty and consistency. In reality, everyone is happy (or unhappy) for a different combination of personal, demographic, gender, cultural and spiritual reasons. Some people are comfortable with their lot, while others are always looking to keep up with the Jones’es, or increasingly the Zhangs or the Singhs.

Question: Most VCs commented that they can not fund current cap table where the CEO and COO would get 10% equity once fully vested while the current investors have 80%. We talked to our investors and they have agreed to rework the cap table, however, I would like to understand from you what should I change my cap table to?