I just answered a question on Quora. You may not be familiar with this website, but I have a special place in my heart for it. People ask – and answer – questions there. Sometimes the questions are tough, sometimes they are touching. And sometimes I am drawn to answer them, before I think through exactly how I actually know the answer I’m giving.

So the question was, What are the top 10 interpersonal skills found in great leaders?

I was drawn to answer because of that key word: interpersonal. I didn’t even check to see who asked it.

When President Barack Obama arrives in Silicon Valley on Sunday to fundraise and stump for his tax-the-rich budget plan and jobs-creation proposals with a bit of fist-pumping populism, he might want to steer clear of 198 Champion Court in San Jose, home of Cypress Semiconductor.

"He has the image of a desperate president trying to campaign his way out of a problem,'' said T.J. Rodgers, Cypress' shoot-from-the-hip CEO and an outspoken libertarian. "This week, he's got a jobs plan. Last week, he was going to spend more money on computers in schools. And tomorrow, we'll have yet another ill-conceived program du jour.''

On the other hand, in between the two private fundraising events and the "town meeting'' with LinkedIn on Monday morning in Mountain View, the president would be more than welcome at 1250 Elko Drive in Sunnyvale, home of Serious Energy.

If you're looking for a guy who understands the potential for Silicon Valley to lead the way in creating good jobs in the United States, you could do a lot worse than Bill Davidow.

Davidow, who co-founded Mohr Davidow, has been in the valley venture capital game for nearly 30 years. He's partly responsible for launching dozens of companies that provided thousands of jobs. He's heard, of course, the talk about the need to jump-start job creation and how many in Washington, D.C., are looking to Silicon Valley and its startup culture to get things going. Which is why his take on that likelihood is so significant and discouraging.

"We are creating great opportunities again, but the thing that concerns me is that we don't have trickle-down anymore," Davidow said recently. "We used to create a job at the top and we'd create 10 jobs at the bottom. I worry that technology no longer has the leverage on the economy to pull the United States out of its problem."

There is a global challenge and need today to bring new innovations to market. The University Funds is a new kind of Venture Accelerator, focused on addressing this need by forging strategic partnerships with individuals and formative companies who are pursuing the commercialization of emerging technologies that demonstrate disruptive potential in large markets. Our focus areas include Healthcare-Life Sciences, Alternative and Renewable Energy and Advanced Computing / Communications.

The University Funds has a sophisticated business model that connects emerging technology to market needs by building relationships across the entire commercialization eco-system. To optimize returns and mitigate risk, we have assembled an impressive network of Entrepreneurs Investors, University and Laboratory Partners, Business Services Partners, Executive Partners and Capital Funding sources. To leverage these key partner resources, we operate our centralized Business Accelerator. Run by a team of veteran business executives, the Accelerator serves as the commercialization agent by providing pre-formation IP sourcing and assessments, basic business administrative services, operations support and streamlined operational processes for each Portfolio Company — employing best practice models at each stage of the process.

Economic development officials in states, counties and cities are exploring new ways to woo entrepreneurs and businesses in the flagging economy.

The Governor's Office of Economic Development in Sacramento lists a wide range of advantages, assistance, tax benefits and other strategies in its California Investment Guide.

Riverside County's supervisors have backed initiatives such as the EB-5 visa program to encourage foreign investment.

The Coachella Valley Economic Partnership hopes to generate 260 company leads during the 2011-12 fiscal year and generate as many as 500 jobs.

So NOW you tell us . . . As a group of entrepreneurs and small-business types was making its pitch for yet more state involvement in job creation, thoughts naturally turned to the jobs bill.

You know, the big bill that raced through the Legislature this year, filled with $538 million in tax cuts and other incentives for job creation. The bill Kirk Adams is touting as he runs for Congress, not to mention almost every Republican in the Legislature.

Well, according to this new group of supplicants, thanks but . . . not so much.

"We are not helped by cuts in taxes," said John Adam Kowalski of the Arizona Growth Foundation,which promotes business startups. What these groups really need, he told lawmakers last week, is capital. The savings from tax cuts, while nice, aren't enough to prod an entrepreneur into bankrolling a few employees, he said.

This latest pitch raised the antenna on Sen. Ron Gould's B.S. detector (as in "be scared"), who said he has a "sixth sense" about anything called a jobs bill. He was one of only four Republicans (out of 61) to vote against it.

Yesterday I saw a Tweet from Chris Sacca fly by that prompted me to want to write a blog post helping entrepreneurs understand why they should push back against VCs asking for “super pro-rata” rights. I’ll explain what they are and why you should avoid them if you can.

A primer on “pro-rata” rights Institutional investors will always insist on pro-rata rights. This is not something to be concerned about. All it says is that the VC has the right (but not obligation) to invest his/her proportional ownership in the next round of financing. Typically this means, for example, if the investor owns 20% of your company from the A round they have the right to take 20% of the next financing (and continue provided that this right survives the next financing).

AS Congress considers President Obama’s job package, one measure seems to have rare bipartisan support: a proposal to loosen some of the outdated securities regulations that hamper small businesses in raising capital.

The Obama administration, not surprisingly considering its own success in gathering small donations during his campaign for the presidency, is supporting crowdfunding, a financing model that relies on collecting small sums of money from many people over the Internet.

Crowdfunding has the sort of populist, common-sense appeal that resonates with free-market libertarians and champions of the working class. By marrying online social networks with finance, this model offers a more democratic model of finance, in which individuals can directly fund other individuals or businesses that they deem worthy, without going through a bank or Wall Street middleman.

GAINESVILLE — For the University of Florida, the expanse of land across from the 106-year-old campus holds a grand, new vision.

UF leaders hope this 40-acre development called Innovation Square will spawn start-up companies, encourage "creative collisions" among inventors and foster a "collaborative spirit" for research, academics and business.

Read between the buzz words. If successful, the project could mean two important things: jobs and money.

And that's crucial, say leaders of the state's public universities, given the downturn of Florida's other industries, like construction or tourism.

Living through a collapse is a curious experience. Perhaps the most curious part is that nobody wants to admit it's a collapse. The results of half a century of debt-fuelled "growth" are becoming impossible to convincingly deny, but even as economies and certainties crumble, our appointed leaders bravely hold the line. No one wants to be the first to say the dam is cracked beyond repair.

To listen to a political leader at this moment in history is like sitting through a sermon by a priest who has lost his faith but is desperately trying not to admit it, even to himself. Watch Nick Clegg, David Cameron or Ed Miliband mouthing tough-guy platitudes to the party faithful. Listen to Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy or George Papandreou pretending that all will be well in the eurozone. Study the expressions on the faces of Barack Obama or Ben Bernanke talking about "growth" as if it were a heathen god to be appeased by tipping another cauldron's worth of fictional money into the mouth of a volcano.

European Central Bank chief Jean-Claude Trichet last week warned that eurozone banks need to strengthen their balance sheets, as worries mount over the sector's exposure to Greek debt.

The Bank of China's decision to halt on foreign exchange swaps with several European banks, as well as the ECB's money market operations, were the latest signs that debt and economic woes are spreading to the financial sector.

"The European banking sector has to reinforce its balance sheet and improve its resilience," Trichet said, reinforcing fears of an impending credit crunch.

This week it was announced that some of Europe's largest multinationals – including Shell, Siemens Astra Zeneca and Total – are returning to school to teach children in an effort to boost entrepreneurial skills as part of a Commission-endorsed initiative.

During the three-year initiative, 40,000 European schoolchildren between the ages of 15 and 18 across the nine countries will have the opportunity to create and manage a real enterprise, discuss globalisation and develop ventures with peers in other countries.

Looking at what has worked best across Europe, notably Austria where unemployment is as low as 3.4%, the European business federation is trying to make the case that sound labour market reform can reduce unemployment, boost growth and restore debt-laden countries' public finances.

"Reforming the labour maket is not an austerity issue, but it is key to boost the tax basis," said BusinessEurope director-general, Philippe de Buck, presenting the 12 key actions to a small group of journalists.

At a 19 September event, a 'global enterprise project' was launched by the European Roundtable of Industrialists (ERT), Junior Achievement Young Enterprise (JA-YE), and the EU education ministries network Schoolnet.

The project will give school students practical exposure to company situations, and allow teachers from different countries to benefit from different experiences and best practices. It is managed by JA-YE in association with Schoolnet, and supported by 18 ERT members, plus the EU Comenius programme.

"Entrepreneurship is not only about creating your own business, but also innovating and creating new businesses inside of existing companies. It is about attitudes and taking responsibility for one's life and career," said Brian Ager, ERT secretary-general in an interview with EurActiv.

I loved reading today's New York Times story about the renegade Applebee's franchisee in New York, who now owns 34 of the chain's restaurants. His locations average $4.25 million in annual revenue -- twice the average Applebee's, the Times reports. The owner, Zane Tankel, perfectly articulates the way someone can be a franchisee and an entrepreneur. Most franchisees are sheep, not business people. They're hoping someone else's vision will save them, as long as they can follow the manual. Tankel said fuggedaboutit to the manual. He changed menus, uniforms, hiring practices and many other operating assumptions that Applebee's considers sacrosanct.

Well, if this is true for Microsoft, with all of its deep pockets, think about your own business for a moment. Ouch! What can you do this week to ensure that your venture doesn't crap out in two years?

Today Babson College and the Business Innovation Factory released research findings from the first year of their collaboration, the Entrepreneurship Experience Lab. The Entrepreneurship Experience Lab is an ambitious research and development platform that puts the voice of real world entrepreneurs at the center of an ongoing effort to design, develop, and experiment with new solutions that will make entrepreneurship central to our economic future and enable future generations of entrepreneurs.

“We face an unprecedented time of opportunity for entrepreneurship – how will we create jobs, build an economy with entrepreneurship of all kinds at its core, and solve complex social issues,” said Len Scheslinger. “Understanding the entrepreneur experience through the lens of entrepreneurs and transforming how we teach and support entrepreneurship is how we will transform our global economy.”

John Sculley has had a diverse career by any measure--he has served as president of PepsiCo, CEO of Apple (where he famously championed the tablet computer in the 1980s), and more recently, chairman of Watermark Medical, a medical products company that has developed an in-home sleep apnea diagnostic device). Sculley is also working with Audax Health Solutions, a startup that has developed a personal health management platform with a gamification layer that allows users to compete with friends and collect points and badges.

We caught up with Sculley at this year's Body Computing Conference--an event that brings together doctors, designers, programmers, entrepreneurs, journalists, and members of the entertainment industry to preview the future of high-tech health care--to learn more about his thoughts on the future of health care technology.

The Hype Cycle was a concept put forward by Gartner, Inc. back in 1995 meant to apply to technology product evolution and acceptance. As I was reading about it recently, it occurred to me that the concept relates directly to how investors see startup opportunities and potential success as well, at least those with technology in their offerings.

For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, the Gartner Hype Cycle characterizes the over-enthusiasm or "hype" and subsequent disappointment that typically occurs with the introduction of new technologies. Hype curves then show how and when technologies move beyond the hype, offer practical benefits and become widely accepted. A hype cycle in Gartner's interpretation always comprises five phases: