Bootstrapping is the name of the game for most startups. By keeping their expenses low, particularly overhead costs, entrepreneurs are able to start businesses with limited initial funding.

A bootstrapped startup also allows the entrepreneur to determine what the market really wants without having to lock in to specific long-term expenses tied to a specific business model.

Once the business model has been tweaked enough that it begins to attract a significant growth in new business, the entrepreneur needs to shift modes and begin to create more formal form and structure to the business. This stage of development usually involves two major changes: hiring employees and moving into a legitimate space for the business.

Every week with the current American government is a new crisis, a new set of challenges for a nation whose people have grown accustomed to government solving its problems.  And we certainly are facing a slew of economic and social problems.  But compounding problems is that this recession is much different than any other.  This time, the solution is dependent more on the individual, not government.   But is the individual ready to step up?

If you’re a hiring manager in an industry experiencing skills shortages, chances are that those in your board room are experiencing high stress levels.

Think for a minute.  You’ve spent all this money on finding new employees, what comes after that?

Our research has found that during the employee’s first three months, employers make the decision to move employees out in less than 10% of cases. Even fewer employers transition employees between the end of probation and the eighteenth month of their employment.

While I know "engaging in the conversation" has applications for customer service and retention as well as public relations, it turns my stomach every time I hear someone talk about it as marketing advice.

So I've been conducting research for a few months now for our upcoming Science of Social Media webinar, and what I've found ultimately debunks myths about engaging in conversation and its effect on social media reach.

Since my last post debunking the five alleged myths of entrepreneurs triggered more than a few comments and thoughtful reactions, I wanted to respond collectively to them.

First let’s start out with venture capital performance as an asset class. Over the last ten years, it has been terrible. On an absolute basis the returns are in the low single digits. My partner at New Atlantic Ventures, Todd Hixon recently weighed in on the shape of VC today here to explain what’s going on behind the scenes.

What caused this? VC managers got greedy in the 1999-2001 period as LPs threw more money at them. Fund sizes mushroomed at the same time that the IPO market dried up. They were caught with too much money in sub-par companies, and no way out but modest M&A for an exit. The math didn’t work. And, since on a dollar-weighted basis, the big funds drive the average returns, their performance drove the industry benchmarks. Just because the average VC return was terrible does not condemn every VC in the asset class.

Despite the rocky nature of the stock market these days, it sure seems like a great time to start a company.

The stories of early stage founders graduating from Y Combinator and TechStars with $8-$10 million pre-money valuations soon after graduation are encouraging. And late stage valuations appear to be equally generous, with LinkedIn trading at a 554x P/E multiple on the day of their IPO.

These seemingly outsized returns are attracting a new group of aspiring entrepreneurs, who often leave MBA programs and business careers to try their luck at a startup. I was one of those people last year, leaving a private equity job to start a consumer-facing company. Here’s some of what I’ve learned in making that transition.

George Weiss is 84, and he just may be the eldest mobile application inventor in America. His app is called Dabble – The Fast Thinking Word Game, and it is now available for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.

The object of the $0.99 game is to spell five words as quickly as possible suing the 20 letters stacked in a pyramid shape. The five words must include a two, three, four, five and six letter word. The premise is simple and addictive. Dabble feels like the kind of old fashioned game you play with your grandparents — even grandparents reluctant to pickup an iPad.

“A lot has changed since 1958, but people still love a good game,” says Weiss in a press release today, reflecting on the year he first came up with the game. Weiss is hard to get a hold of in person because he cares for his wife who has Alzheimer’s. We will add more

One day last month, Neil Blumenthal, who is a young entrepreneur, found himself in an ornate room on Capitol Hill listening to a parade of politicians — Senator Charles E. Schumer, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and Senator John McCain, among others — talk about how important young entrepreneurs were to the economy. Mr. Blumenthal, 31, one of the founders of Warby Parker, an online eyewear company that sells designer frames for less than $100, was among 150 young chief executives invited to Washington by Our Time, a youth advocacy group, to help start Buy Young, an initiative that encourages consumers to support companies owned by members of the millennial generation.

I had lunch with one of my favorite Internet entrepreneurs today, Mark Sawyier, the CEO of Off Campus Media. The company provides college students with apartment listings near their schools, and what started out as an idea five years ago is now a multi-million dollar business. Sawyier came to this business without any formal training in computer science, business, management, or other technology training, yet he is a natural when it comes to running a modern-day Internet business. In the short time we spent today, he came up with a few bon mots and wise thoughts that I want to share with those of you that are thinking about starting your own businesses.

As you load up your smartphone with apps and buy peripherals for your tablet, consider that the future might be devices that do less -- or rather, they do one thing, do it well, and possibly while intimately attached to your body or your clothes. That's the idea behind a new technology by WIMM Labs, which they say can be embedded into everything from a wristwatch-sized screen that sends visual medication reminders, to a clip-on pedometer that can act as a total fitness companion.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Back in 2008, Sequoia Capital -- one of Silicon Valley's venture-capital kingmakers -- held an emergency, all-hands meeting for the 100-plus startups in its portfolio. Its purpose: To outline the grim times Sequoia saw coming. "It's always darkest before it's pitch black," Sequoia partner Eric Upin told the gathered troops. He underlined the point with a now-famous PowerPoint deck that tech wags dubbed the "ultimate panic memo." The 56-slide presentation opens with a gravestone labeled "RIP Good Times" -- and gets worse from there.

Clean water, in short supply for almost 1 billion people around the world, will be the focus of investment for Frog Capital Ltd. as the U.K. venture capital firm sees rising demand from a burgeoning global population.

“There’s a lot of innovation and effort going into how the water supply is treated and managed,” Iyad Omari, a partner at the London-based Frog Capital Cleantech Fund, said in an interview. “I’ve seen hundreds of small companies that are doing innovative things in this area.”

Almost half the world’s population will be living in areas affected by “high water stress” by 2030, according to the United Nations. As growing numbers of people put pressure on limited supplies of drinking water, there’s increasing demand for technology that can make water treatment cheaper, cleaner, more widespread and more efficient.

After losing their London-based publisher, co-editors Ruby Russell and Katherine Hunt of the grassroots art magazine Teller were forced to look in a new direction for their second issue. Self-funding was out of the question, so the editors launched a campaign on the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter to ask the public for help.

“It allowed us to pre-sell copies of our magazine and put the full cover price toward production costs, with some people donating larger sums,” says Russell. “It’s very easy to set up and use, and people responded very generously.” With an original funding goal of $4,000, they actually received a few hundred dollars more by the time they reached their deadline.

Recently I wrote a blog post on things to think about when starting a startup accelerator. I pointed out that most accelerator programs take between 5-12% or thereabouts for a fairly standard amount of money and time. Year One Labs is a bit different (more money and more time = more equity taken); our belief being that early stage startups need more time to bake. But even Year One Labs only takes 20%, and we only invested in 5 companies, and we don’t follow-on, so we get diluted just like founders do as they take on more financing.

In thinking about alternative models for startup acceleration or incubation, I can’t help but ask the question, “What if the incubator owned 80% instead of 20% and the people working on the startup owned 20% instead of 80%? How could that work? And does it make sense?”

The second batch of new companies seeking financial backing at 500 Startups, Dave McClure's well-regarded incubator, had a certain commonality. They were nearly all about the consumer.

In all, about 30 companies made their first pitch to the media and potential investors Tuesday at 500 Startups headquarters in Mountain View, California. They'll repeat themselves in a second session later today.

Eric Ries, creator of the Lean Startup methodology and the author of the entrepreneurship blog Startup Lessons Learned, says that Silicon Valley’s celebrated entrepreneurial culture isn’t necessarily a result of the research universities and venture capital dollars in the area, since similar resources are available elsewhere.

Instead, he gave a lot of credit to California’s legal system in a recent interview. While the state may have more than its share of budget issues and crushing tax burdens, the entrepreneurial spirit is allowed to flourish without teams of lawyers putting a damper on things:

Building on the trend toward remote work, two companies started shipping wheeled telepresence robots to customers this year, and other versions are launching soon. While prices are steep and sales tepid, some early adopters find that the robots offer advantages over technologies such as videoconferencing.

Telepresence robots are wheeled machines steered by a person sitting at a remote computer; the bots take the person's place around the conference table or, say, on a facility inspection. They are equipped with cameras, microphones, screens, and speakers so the human controller can interact with real people.

And the winner is: Second Sight Medical Products, Inc., which has just received patent number 8,000,000 for a device to help people with a certain type of vision impairment see better.

Patent No. 8,000,000 is not actually the 8,000,000th patent granted in the United States. Patent No. 1 wasn't issued until 1836; the approximately 10,000 earlier patents used a different indexing system. About 8,000 of those early patents were destroyed in a fire.

Venture capitalist and entrepreneur Mark Suster shares insights on how startups can connect with investors. He explains the best method is to access investors through other entrepreneurs. Suster speaks to the need for a startup to find their first anchor investor, whose presence can often cause additional funding sources to come forward.

It seems like Facebook is everywhere these days. With more than 750 million active users the site is a juggernaut. Facebook is an unstoppable social force that when used for good has been the catalyst for a 7 year social media revolution. Higher education has adopted and adapted Facebook for a variety of reasons including: marketing/communications, course participation, academic advising information, roommate matching, and retention/community building, alumni development, and commencement live-streaming.