Convertible notes -- debt instruments that can be converted into stock at the option of the holder or the issuer -- are  a popular choice among VCs when they participate in early funding.

On this point, Y-combinator cofounder Paul Grahm tweeted:

“Convertible notes have won. Every investment so far in this YC batch (and there have been a lot) has been done on a convertible note.”

But have they really won?

This question was asked on Q&A site Quora yesterday:

Why would an early-stage investor specifically NOT prefer a convertible note structure to straight equity (e.g. a priced/valued preferred stock financing)?

Last year Karl Williams, the owner of Society Coffee and 67 Orange Street in Harlem, like many other small business owners, was struggling with high financing costs and flat growth. As a first time restaurateur faced with a difficult economy, Karl turned to the Clinton Foundation's Clinton Economic Opportunity Initiative (CEO). He enrolled in CEO's Entrepreneur Mentoring Program (EMP), a partnership with Inc. magazine which pairs small business owners with successful entrepreneurs and business leaders who serve as mentors. Karl was partnered with Richard Coraine, President of New Business for the Union Square Hospitality Group, the restaurant group that owns establishments like Gramercy Tavern and the Shake Shack.

Working with his mentor and CEO, Karl has restructured his financing, developed a new marketing strategy with the help of Union Square Hospitality Group's marketing team, and even launched a new artisanal coffee business. As a result, he has seen his revenue grow each month since the beginning of the year. Over 50 EMP entrepreneurs in five cities nationwide have been matched with successful business leaders like Richard Coraine, who volunteer to help small business owners in underserved communities succeed and compete in the marketplace.

From the wheel to the 18-wheeler, innovation is the heart of human progress. But some innovators have taken a step... too far.

Make that a leap. While their gadgets might be shockingly creative, and really, really cool, some are also totally unnecessary for day-to-day life.

TIME NewsFeed presents to you: five gadgets that are almost as gratuitous as posting a colorful and vaguely relevant click-through gallery.

1. Creativity scares the s#!t out of lots of authority figures! Hand them some toilet paper and keep going!!!
2. Creative variation is more than okay. Creative variation is wondrous!!!
3. Explain something you’re familiar with to someone who has no idea about it. Use pictures. Or act it out. Or make it a song.
4. Find a few moments for creative silence today – think, pray, nap to give yourself a break.
5. Don’t email the same old memo. Do a diagram, mind map, or sketch of your points and use it instead.
6. When known for complete unconventionality, sometimes you have to be blatantly conventional to stay truly unconventional. Surprise somebody today.
7. Give your brain a break by thinking about something completely frivolous right this very instant.

Here’s the latest from VentureBeat’s Entrepreneur Corner:

Using contractors? Lock down their work as your IP – Owning intellectual property is the most important thing to a startup. But if you’re using a mix of salaried employees and contracted labor, you might be in murky waters. Attorney Curtis Smolar runs down how to protect yourself.

When should you turn on the marketing faucet? — “Turning on the faucet” is a metaphor for flooding your market with marketing, but timing is everything. Chris Drake, founder of FireHost, discusses how to know when your company is ready.

It’s been a tough slog for early stage capital, lately.

Affinity Capital Management and Triathlon Medical Ventures have suspended efforts to raise a $10 million seed fund in Minnesota. And the $1 billion fund biotech investor Steve Burill promised to raise for the Elk Run BioBusiness Park two years ago has yet to materialize. (Burrill has reportedly lowered his goal to $250 million, which is still a lot of money.)

But alas, there is some good news (for a change)! The state Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED) has awarded $573,000 in tax credits during the first full month of Minnesota’s shiny new angel investment tax program.

An interesting paradox in the technology world is that there is both a shortage and a surplus of engineers in the United States. Talk to those working at any Silicon Valley company, and they will tell you how hard it is to find qualified talent. But listen to the heart-wrenching stories of unemployed engineers, and you will realize that there are tens of thousands who can’t get jobs. What gives?

The harsh reality is that in the tech world, companies prefer to hire young, inexperienced, engineers.

And engineering is an “up or out” profession: you either move up the ladder or face unemployment. This is not something that tech executives publicly admit, because they fear being sued for age discrimination, but everyone knows that this is the way things are. Why would any company hire a computer programmer with the wrong skills for a salary of $150,000, when it can hire a fresh graduate—with no skills—for around $60,000? Even if it spends a month training the younger worker, the company is still far ahead. The young understand new technologies better than the old do, and are like a clean slate: they will rapidly learn the latest coding methods and techniques, and they don’t carry any “technology baggage”. As well, the older worker likely has a family and needs to leave by 6 pm, whereas the young can pull all-nighters.

The busy green tech industry is teeming with companies focused on alternative energy. Some of the biggest new sources of energy they are trying to tap into include solar, wind, hydroelectric, geothermal, biomass and fuel cells. Most companies harnessing each power source are pursuing somewhat similar technologies – such as photovoltaic cells in solar, turbines in wind and hydroelectric – and then innovate from there.

There are also many companies, however, that also focus on green technology and alternative energy but in different ways. Here are five you may not have heard of that are worth keeping an eye on. They are developing new ways to capture and store energy, light up our world, and power our vehicles.

Many entrepreneurs start their business with 1 of 2 possible mindsets. Either they will set the world on fire and utilize venture capital funding and eventually sell stock to the public or be acquired by a publicly traded company, or they will utilize their friends and family to invest in the business and grow slowly and organically. Both of these groups should now consider angel investors. Here are 5 facts that every entrepreneur should know:

$20 Billion in Annual Angel Investment - According to the Angel Capital Education Foundation angel investors pledge $20 billion to startup businesses; whereas, total venture capital funding is only $300 million and state funding comes in at about $500 million. Friends and family are responsible for approximately $60 billion in small business investment each year.

There are simply too many firms and too much capital. Too many little fish, or 'tourists', are trying the waters of venture capitalism and getting hurt, plus too many top predators keep competing against each other.

Well, I’ve learned a lot about how a bill becomes a law on my journey to try to turn the Startup Visa idea into a law. And yes – it’s a lot like how I learned about it on Schoolhouse Rock about 35 years ago.

With many new college graduates struggling to land a job, incoming seniors should act now to avoid falling into the same trap, says Ladd Flock, director of career services at Wake Forest University. Here are 10 steps students can take as they head back to school this fall to improve their chances of finding a job by graduation.

1. Register with the university’s career office – One of the first items on your back-to-school list should be registering with the university’s career office. All kinds of things may have changed over the summer, so be sure to update your career center profile with current career interests, job experience, and GPA.

2. Update your resume – Did you work over the summer, study abroad or take part in an undergraduate research project? Don’t wait to update your resume. Employers may come recruiting as early as one or two weeks into the semester.

Many universities these days are translating their academic breakthroughs to products and innovations that can be marketed. For example, years of research into understanding a certain phenomena in natural science could lead to a discovery that ought to be patented, and there-after licenced for application in industry. If this discovery is not licenced for use by other companies, researchers often seek to establish their own start-up company with the aim of developing that innovated product.

In Europe, Asia and North America it is the norm to hear a handful or more companies established per University annualy with the aim of commercializing their research outputs. I wonder, to what extent is the performance of East African universities in establishing such start-up companies that are offshoots of university research? We have our DIT, UDSM, and KIST, how are their research-efforts performing in this respect?

Nearly fifteen years after state taxpayers began investing billions of dollars to reinvigorate the University of Connecticut, school and state officials say they have the infrastructure and intellectual capacity in place to become a major player in the Rita Zangari, interim director of UConn’s Office of Technology Commercialization, stands in front of a directory of incubator companies housed at various UConn campuses across the state. technology transfer scene.

And the school and state are moving aggressively to convince outside investors to get on board.

The end goal is for the school to commercialize more of its research — that is take ideas out of the lab and turn them into marketable products, services or therapeutic treatments.

The burn: Falling into a rut of uninspired thought

The diagnosis: Society is looking at creative ideas with increased appreciation. Ideas, in this new emerging marketplace (appropriately labeled the “creative economy”), are rapidly becoming viewed as extremely valuable commodities. More than ever before, the world relies on human creativity to solve the many problems we have created, combat the threats of nature, refine elements of function and style, and simply make life more enjoyable. For this reason, I thought it fitting to discuss the source of ideas… imagination.

Everybody agrees that, without meaningful job growth, America will not emerge from its current deep economic funk. There is plenty of debate, however, over what drives that job creation engine in our country. I’ve recently read several interesting reports that touch on parts of the American job growth conundrum but do not tie them together. Pooling some compelling statistics from these various sources, I believe that the following conclusions are correct and interrelated :

(1) Job growth drives GDP growth;

(2) New company formation drives job growth;

(3) New companies create the vast majority of new jobs after their Initial Public Offerings;

(4) Increased Initial Public Offerings are required to increase job growth;

(5) If the total annual number of Initial Public Offerings (IPO’s) in the U.S. does not exceed 500, which studies show is the level required to support 3% annual U.S. GDP growth, the U.S. will not generate the job growth necessary to rekindle meaningful sustainable GDP growth in the U.S.;

Unless you are living on Gilligan’s Island, you have probably read about the pledge that Warren Buffet and Bill Gates are asking billionaires to make, which is to donate half of their money to charity. No question that charitable organizations have been suffering over the last three years with the stock market meltdown, but is spending the vast parts of their fortunes on eradicating different health-care issues and solving educational problems the best way to utilize their wealth? What about investing in the economy that has made their billions?

No one can debate that improving the physical and mental well being of the planet is a worthy cause. Yet, the stress and strain the U.S., and, for that matter, most of the world is crumbling under is lack of investment capital and jobs. Right now, banks are still leery about loaning money to small business. Professional venture capital funds prefer to invest in companies with existing revenues and there isn’t enough angel capital to go around.

The Gregson Street train trestle in Durham, NC, is 11-foot-8-inches high. Occasionally, a driver of a 12-foot-tall truck approaching the trestle doesn't pay heed to the flashing warning lights and gets the top ripped off his trailer. It happens often enough that Jürgen Henn has a Web site called 11foot8.com with videos of the unfortunate incidents.

I have a friend that is looking at starting up a company and she asked me to go over her idea to see if it was innovative enough? Add that to all the hype that I am hearing recently about innovation this and innovation that, I have decided to write a few posts on the subject by way of clarifying some points that are bugging me and where better to start than with: What is innovation?

Above all else innovation is a process which has, in addition to several phases, a start and a finish and should be managed using some type of process management methodology; whatever works best for you. Innovation for me, from a business stand point, must start with a necessity, albeit a problem and finish in a commercial success anything else for me is something like “it” but just not “it”. Innovation is not however a great idea, something new, something original, something ground breaking, something that makes us different… That could be part of it but only part.

IN HIS new book, “Still Surprised: A Memoir of a Life in Leadership”, Warren Bennis, a management theorist, tells a story about Sigmund Freud’s flight from Vienna to London in 1938. On arriving in his new home Freud asked Stefan Zweig, a fellow Viennese intellectual, what it was like. “London? How can you even mention London and Vienna in the same breath?” Zweig thundered. “In Vienna there was sperm in the air!”

Today there is no hotter topic in management theory than “sperm in the air”. How do companies generate new ideas? And how do they turn those ideas into products? Hardly a week passes without someone publishing a book on the subject. Most are rubbish. But “The Other Side of Innovation: Solving the Execution Challenge” is rather good. Its authors are Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble, two professors at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. Last year Mr Govindarajan and Mr Trimble (hereafter: G&T) published a seminal article, with Jeff Immelt, the head of General Electric, on frugal innovation. In their new book they address two subjects that are usually given short shrift: established companies rather than start-ups and the implementation of new ideas rather than their generation.