Entrepreneurship & Innovation

Reed Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, describes the 3 secrets of highly successful graduates in this very good (excellent even) presentation. The presentation covers the following topics:

• Competition
• Networks
• Risk

Making society has posted the Best Entrepreneur Books to Build a Hardware Company. The list looks pretty interesting. The book Hardware Startup by Renee DiResta and led me to her blog and presentation on Hardware by the Numbers: A Narrative. Her presentation describes the trends in funding hardware projects between 2011 and 2013. More VCs are funding hardware companies but it's still hard to get funding and even harder to get follow on funding. Fortunately, crowdfunding has really helped get hardware companies started and increased VC participation.

CBinsights has posted a number of blogs on VC and Angel investors for the first half of 2014. The three blogs include:

• The Most Active Venture Capital Firms in H1 2014 – Silicon Valley, New York & Massachusetts
• We Analyzed 2000 Angel Investors. Here are the Top 1%.
• Onboarding Reading List – Staying Current on Tech, VC and Startups

The top five most active VC are as follows:

1. New Enterprise Associates
2. KPC&B
3. Andressen Horowitz
4. Google Ventures
5. 5000 Startups

The top five angel investors are as follows

1. Alexis Ohnian
2. Max Levchin
3. Garry Tan
4. Marc Benioff
5. Daveid Tisch

The HBR has posted the interesting article The Evidence Is In: Patent Trolls Do Hurt Innovation. Patent litigation is way up and costs the industry $29B a year plus it destroys $60B in corporate wealth at the same time. Mean damages is $21M. Patent lawsuits result in reduces R&D from large firms, small firms, and investments by VC.

MIT professor Joi Ito describes how he collaborated with strangers to build a radiation sensor network after the massive 9.0 earthquake in Japan in his TED talk. The project occur out of a need for the safety of the families of the people involve. He says that it would have been very difficult to plan and build such a network before hand as he did not know of the people that eventually contributed to the project. He advocates spontaneous project and become now-ists.

EE Times has posted it list of the 60 top startups to watch.

First Round Review has posted the The 30 Best Pieces of Advice for Entrepreneurs in 2013. The top five include:

• Really check references
• You don’t have to be first to market to win.
• Use equity to create real loyalty
• Fight like you’re right. Listen like you’re wrong
• To inspire a team, tell a good story

Inc has posted its list of the Best Videos of 2013. The videos include:

• Richard Branson: In the end, you have to say, Screw it. Just do it.
• Alexa von Tobel: Trusting Your Gut Makes All the Difference
• Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman: Make Smarter Decisions
• Vanessa Nornberg: Building a Killer Salesforce
• Gary Vaynerchuk: The Hardest Working Man in Social Media
• Brene Brown: 4 Powerful Things Leaders Should Know About Vulnerability
• Max Haot: Your Start-Up Name Matters (A Lot)
• JJ Ramberg: When Negotiating, Keep Something in Your Back Pocket
• Barbara Corcoran: An Insult Made Me an Entrepreneur
• Marc Eko: There's No Straight Line to Success

PitchTo is a platform for entrepreneurs to pitch to investors and to get feedback on their pitch from the community of investors and peers. Entrepreneurs create a pitch profile and can upload their pitch video, slide deck, and executive summary.

The SBIRSources website has posted a list of the top 50 investors that have invested in companies that have won Federal R&D Grants and SBIR funding. The top three investors include:

• Harris & Harris Group
• Lux Capital
• In-Q-Tel

J.J. Colao at Forbes thinks these investors are actually funding innovative companies.