Incubators are like belly buttons: Everybody’s got one.

Or so it seems from where we sit in San Francisco, where if one throws a rock in certain neighborhoods, one is sure to hit an incubator or accelerator or at least a hackathon.

As a result, we tend not to get too worked up about incubators anymore, but every so often, we come across one with sterling provenance or a particularly unique premise.

nReduce is both of those. The program comes from the gigantic brain of Ruby on Rails demigod Jacques Crocker, and he started off by throwing a hand grenade at the hornet’s nest that is Y Combinator. Crocker originally named his program “N Combinator” and claimed it would be nothing more or less than an open-source Y Combinator.

Of course, the initial announcement of “N Combinator” on the Y Combinator-affiliated aggregation site Hacker News caused a significant poo-storm. After that died down (and Crocker & Co. amiably agreed to change their program’s name), we caught up with the Rails Jedi himself to talk about why incubators needed an open-source approach and exactly how his program will work.

VentureBeat:So, clearly this is a spin on Y Combinator. Why did you think Y Combinator needed an overhaul?

Jacques Crocker: Everyone on our team [which now includes designer Joe Mellin, marketing expert Paul Eikelenboom, and developer Scott Robertson] is a huge Paul Graham and YCombinator fan. We have the utmost respect for the program.

However the demand for Y Combinator has far outstripped supply. There’s plenty of amazing teams that are either being rejected from YC or don’t fit in the narrow guidelines of a YC company. But they could use some of the energy that comes from a group of startups coming together and working together over a short period. We think there’s an opportunity for startups to band together to build something that rivals YC in scope and one that produces startups of the equal or better quality.

VB: So what does nReduce have in common with Y Combinator?

JC: We’ve taken as much inspiration as we can from the structure of YC. It runs during the same time period, and every week our companies will meet up for tuesday dinners.

We’ll use these dinners to collaborate, demo, and share our learnings with each other over the past week. We’ll also use these meetings to just talk, drink, relax, and let off some steam.

The second week is prototype day where each team is required to put together something to show the other startups what they are building, and to encourage people to ship something to customers as early as possible.

Like YC, our program will be very difficult. Only the teams that fully immerse themselves and commit to making progress every single week will survive until the end.

Near the end of the program, we’ll put together a demo day which is an opportunity to put together the best 2min pitch for each startup. We’ll do everything we can to bring in top notche investors and press to cover us, with the goal of having our startups that outshine even the best that YC can come up with.

VB: What are your criteria for individuals and teams that want to join you?

JC: nReduce does not believe in artificial barriers. We accept any team that can reasonably say they’ll be able to develop and ship every week. We expect many to apply and no one who really wants to be in the program will be declined.

Any true test of an incubator shouldn’t be about getting in. As with real startups, the test is actually executing. Our startups are required to make progress every week and report their learnings. Every Tuesday each team has to check in with their product progress, and what they’ve learned from customers (or users).

Startups who miss checking in, or are obviously not progressing will be dropped from the program. The end group of startups who survive and get to demo day will consist purely of the teams who can ship and build traction.

VB: What’s the process going to be like? Take me through a typical week, as you envision it at the outset.

JC: A typical week for our team (as a participating startup) will be 100 percent focused on our startup and product. We’ll use each Tuesday deadline to motivate us to ship product updates to customers, and learning from our users what they love, and what they hate. We’ll then share these findings with the group.

The online discussion forum will be active with people sharing their discoveries, metrics, and challenges with building and marketing their products.

On Tuesday evenings, we’ll meet up with other startups in downtown SF (other clusters will also form in other startup hubs). In SF each week, we’ll try to bring in a guest speaker who will give a quick talk for 15min, and just hang out with us and chat for a while.

VB: You talk about open-sourcing the incubator/accelerator process. Are you actually requiring everyone to open source their code? Or is it more that each team open sources its knowledge to the other teams?

JC: We’re open sourcing the process of bringing startups together and hopefully achieving a better rate of success than individually. Our goal is to test and iterate on this process all summer so that the end result is a repeatable way to bring together any group of startups (large or small), have an effective way to share information, motivate each other, and use the group to generate more interest and attention from the outside world (investors/press/customers) and any one of the startups would have been able to generate on their own.

VB: How has the community responded so far?

JC: We’ve had really amazing feedback so far. A handful of people have stepped up and offered to help organize and moderate the group. The original YC thread that was up for about an hour had 91 comments (a second thread generated 48 more comments). People gave us the usual flack for our hipster, goofy design and ninja icons (which we expected). But overall people were generally positive and encouraging of the idea.

We have over 250 teams registered and 2,000 signups already (startups, mentors, spectators) from just our limited exposure so far. We believe this shows a large demand and interest in our program.

So far received several people emailing with interest to syndicate or extend our model to other cities and locations. We’re happy to encourage this, and are working through details for what it will look like. nReduce is now up to 145 confirmed teams, and aiming for 200 by the start of the batch June 5.

VB: We just covered a “pre-incubator” earlier this month — is tech culture getting too startup-centric? Is there still value in actually working for someone else, or is everyone going to be a founder for 15 minutes?

JC: I personally think every engineer should be involved in his own startup at some point in his/her life. It gives techies much greater respect for the entire team required for a startup to succeed (including the “biz guys”).

We hope it’s win/win. The more startups out there, the more chances we have for breakout successes that will generate jobs. Founders of startups that fail will be better early employees and have greater respect for the founders of the companies they join. They’ll have gone through the process personally and realize how hard it actually is to build a team, raise money, and create something people want.

Image courtesy of olly, Shutterstock

After speaking with a number of fellow “hustlers” (fellow fundraising CEOs), I was able to amass an awesome list of classic messages people have received from investors after initial contact or initial pitch. As the title implies, below are 25 ways people get rejected from investors.

Maybe I am a bit weird, but I tend to find rejection as a fuel to my fire. When I was in college, I got the Chicago Crain’s Magazine list of top 300 companies to work for. I hacked the list and mail-merged “personalized” letters and applied to over 290 internships. I received more than 250 rejection letters but got 3 offers. I plastered the rejection letters over my door and highlighted the part where they told me why I was not a fit. My favorite letter was from McDonald’s (corporate). It had a watermark of Ronald McDonald and friends. So now I can say that I was rejected from McDonald’s. Ha!

In grad school, I kept my two rejection letters from Stanford pinned above my desk (I got in on my third try). I found it both funny and motivating.

After going through two successful venture fund raises for ShopWell, I found it fun to create this top 25 list of rejection messages from investors that I, and others in my network, have received. I hope you enjoy as much as I do.

General Lack of Interest or Uncertainty

• No response
• We don’t see this as a fit at this time (the classic non-answer)
• I was regrettably unable to get it over the finish line with my partners.
• We are hesitant to invest as the lead, but keep us informed if you get a lead term sheet.
• I’m unsure on this one. Let me set you up with one of our associates who has more expertise in this area.

Bandwidth

• I am currently overwhelmed at the moment, and can’t spend the time pursuing this any further.

Competitive

• We see this being competitive to one of our portfolio companies.
• We have concerns that there are not strong competitive barriers to prevent others from doing what you are doing.

Market Thesis

• We want to see how [insert portfolio company] plays out before we invest again in this space.
• This space is too fragmented at this point for us to see a clear cut winner.
• We don’t currently have a thesis on this space yet, and therefore are going to need to pass.

Firm Fit

• We tend to invest locally, and you are located too far away.
• You are slightly too early for our firm and we can’t see around the curve yet.
• You are slightly too late for our firm at this time as we invest earlier stage.
• We would invest if you had a local lead investor.
• We don’t have more room in the current fund to invest.

Product Market Fit

• I just don’t see people doing [insert primary action of your app] as a mainstream activity.
• We would be more interested if you included [insert random feature/technology] in your product.

Distribution and Market Traction

• We don’t see a clear path to cost effective user acquisition for your company.
• We would like to see more months of [insert metric] before we feel comfortable moving forward.

Monetization

• We are unsure of your business model and will need to see more proof points before we feel comfortable.
• Your market isn’t big enough.

Team

• We will feel more comfortable if you have added a/team of [insert hire(s)] to your team. There is too much team risk in this competitive environment.

Company Structure

• We don’t like the cap structure of the company.

Other

• I left the firm and therefore cannot make investments on behalf of [insert firm] anymore but you should check out my new venture! It is so cool.

I’ll end this post with this classic (click to play; due to WordPress.com restrictions we can’t embed it):

Brian Witlin is a serial entrepreneur who is the CEO and Founder of ShopWell, the first truly personalized nutrition resource.  He also holds EIR (Entrepreneur in Residence) positions at IDEO and StartX, a lecturer position at Stanford University’s Hasso Platner Institute of Design, and serves as a startup mentor for 500 Startups seed venture fund, Insidr, Zeel Networks, DiamondMMA, and IDEO’s Entrepreneurship Initiative. This post originally appeared on his website.

Photo of rejection phrase by from Caro Wallis/Flickr.

It’s safe to say that growing up I never thought I’d be a VC.

It’s not that there’s anything inherently wrong with venture capital. It’s just it’s not part of what I thought being a good geek was all about.

There’s a very well-defined model for becoming a successful Silicon Valley technologist. You study computer science, math, or engineering in college. Then you intern at one of the great software titans. Perhaps you routinely commit code to an open source project on Github, suffer from a crushing caffeine addiction and/or a nocturnal sleep schedule, and own a track jacket emblazoned with a tech company’s logo.

But few good geeks become VCs. It’s hard to stay a razor-sharp hacker when you spend more time in Excel than you do in Eclipse, and ditching sandals for a pair of loafers can be hard to stomach. In fact, much of what the tech community thinks VC’s are like is antithetical to the image of the model Silicon Valley geek – enough so that many of my friends from college lovingly refer to my decision to become an a VC as “joining the dark side.”

For most of my life it seemed like I fit well into the model of what a geek should be. I started playing with computers and programming early on (I could type before I could write cursive). By the end of high school, I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life making technology that solved big problems, and in 2006 I entered San Jose State as a computer science and math major. I was a flip-flop clad fixture at our school’s computer science club, and I definitely spent more time on TopCoder than I did at frat parties.

But when I started doing summer internships in engineering, I realized that I didn’t fit as neatly into the model geek image as I previously thought. I had the pleasure of spending my freshman and sophomore summers at Electronic Arts and SAP, and at both places I learned that building great software wasn’t just about writing well-documented code and hitting the compile button.

Whether you’re building a CRM suite or a video game, making rockstar software is an interdisciplinary effort. Technology is really just a tool to solve problems, and understanding how to solve those problems and fully what those problems are, requires an interdisciplinary team. I learned engineering was only one part of the process of innovating and creating great technology.

More startlingly, I learned I liked navigating and managing the product process even more than I liked writing code. I wanted to make technology that made a difference, and I wanted to explore how I could use my passion for working with people and with code.

So, to use startup terminology, I pivoted. In my remaining time in college I explored the dark arts of economics and business. Exploration led to obsession, and I ended up graduating as an economics major and computer science minor.

My professional life mirrored my life back at school, and I explored other roles in tech that would allow me the opportunity to work with lots of different people – engineers, managers, customers, etc. Product management turned out to be a perfect fit..

After two summers interning, I joined NetApp full time in 2010 as the company’s first NCG (New College Grad) product manager. NetApp was an amazing place to be a young PM. Having responsibility over a product line can be difficult for someone fresh from college, but I was surrounded by amazing co-workers that mentored me as I learned the mechanics of product management and cultivated my leadership skills.

NetApp was an amazing experience, but after two years I decided I wanted to try something different. In my last year as a PM I started getting very interested in the startup community in San Francisco. Once a month, I drove into the city to attend a tech meetup and pitch session called SF New Tech.

I found myself fascinated with the people I met there. The “make it or die trying” attitude of founders, the willingness to sacrifice everything to make a difference –the ideological drive and passion necessary to succeed in a startup spoke to how I approached technology and the tech industry.

Startups also spoke to the entire reason why I was in tech in the first place. My parents ran a small dot-com in the late 90’s, and a lot of what I learned early on about the tech industry came from them and their experiences navigating the first tech boom.
I wanted to leverage my background to help people like my parents and the people I met at SF New Tech. After careful consideration and some research, I realized venture capital could be a great way to become bilingual in both “geek” and “suit”.

One of the first lessons I learned in venture was the value of serendipity. Serendipity is core to the success of being a VC. Finding the next Facebook or Google is firmly rooted in being at the right place at the right time, and a significant portion of being at that crucial place and time is governed by serendipity.

My way into VC was fittingly serendipitous. I met my friend Adam randomly at a mutual friend’s birthday dinner, where we bonded over a shared appreciation of good drinks and cryptography. As we got to know each other a bit more, I learned Adam was an associate at a fairly unique VC firm called GGV Capital. A year after we met, Adam tracked me down – once again at a party – to offer me the opportunity to replace him at GGV.

Passion is a critical resource at GGV Capital, and they’ve allowed me incredible flexibility to explore mine as an associate. We care a lot about what we invest in, and it’s critical we work with teams who are just as excited about technology and making a difference as we are – if not more. I’m very excited about big data, cloud computing, gaming, and information security, so I plan to drill deep on all of these topics and work with entrepreneurs changing the game in these fields.

It doesn’t really matter whether your business card lists you as an engineer, a product manager, an entrepreneur, or a venture capitalist. Whether you hack code or write term sheets, the only thing that really matters is how you uniquely contribute to the process of innovating and creating great technology.

Andrew Manoske is an associate at GGV Capital, an expansion-stage venture capital firm focused on the U.S. and China with $1 billion under management.

Spent some time feelin’ inferior
standing in front of my mirror.
Combed my hair in a thousand ways
but I came out looking just the same.

For some of you, that feeling Sir Rod sang about is the same one that venture capitalists can cause you to feel. The name “venture capitalist” alone can send shivers down one’s spine, conjuring images of well-dressed men poring over company statistics and shooting holes in your vision.

Our company, EquipRent.com, has pitched to these guys many times this past year to raise capital. As we became more comfortable with pitching, what used to be an intimidating interview scenario slowly turned into a conversation, and we have learned a lot more about the scary men behind the table in the process.

The first thing we noticed was how short of an attention span these guys had. After five minutes of talking, three of them were already looking at their phones. They really didn’t care much for the story of how our company was founded, who a typical customer was, or even the pages of statistics that clearly showed why we were a great investment opportunity. Over time, we learned to keep our pitch concise, relevant, and full of engaging imagery … and pictures.

After much fine-tuning, it dawned on us that Rod was on to something: the best way to tell your story is through a picture. We creatively put together a colorful investment infographic, or “InvestFoGraphic,” on a handout. This completely complied with our goal of keeping our pitch concise, relevant, and exciting. Check out our capital-raising infographic.

Source: EquipRent

Detail of EquipRent’s capital-raising one-page infographic (click for full version)

The previous handout that we had given them (a typical 1-page executive summary) was heavy on words explaining in great detail what our company did and how successful we had been. Our new handout was riddled with bold and exciting claims about our company and our industry. The underlying theory behind using the infographic was to hook them first, and then be ready to talk business once they were paying attention.

One of the most necessary considerations when pitching a venture capitalist firm is to view the pitch from their point of view. What makes a great investment? What specific qualities do investors look for in a presentation?

We found that investors love disruptions and hate distractions. They love getting first dibs at untapped potential in huge markets. So, we focused our pitch from this angle. Instead of our old tagline “leading market service for equipment rentals,” which was an accurate description of our company, we decided to go with “disrupting the $28B market for construction equipment rental.”

The infographic we handed out contained VC-friendly buzzwords like “scalable model” and “fast, profitable growth.” Each of these claims was accompanied by a picture, since pictures are much more likely to stick in someone’s head than a paragraph of big words. Long, wordy paragraphs are distractions. There is a time and place to get down to the nitty-gritty and go over the numbers, but that is is not in your first encounter with a potential investor.

The reaction to our new infographic one-pager was very positive. “I liked it…I can quickly see what is different about this company than reading a typical one-page executive summary,” one investor said.

“I have never seen anyone use an infographic for investor purposes before,  other than to distinguish market trends,” another one said.

“It sets you apart…it’s like a cool and different resume,” said another one.

The exciting news is that we are now in final discussions with several investor groups to close our first round (series A) funding. We know the infographic wasn’t the main reason for getting to this final phase, but we do know that differentiating yourself makes you more memorable and shows investors you and your company plan on being different.

Remember the advice that the great Mr. Stewart gave years ago:

Every picture tells a story, don’t it!

Roberto Guerrieri is the chief executive of  EquipRent.com. This is his fourth startup. Previously he was the founder and chief marketing officer of Incentive Logic, a loyalty platform for online market research panels. He has also worked for early-stage companies in mobile marketing, lead generation, and in consumer marketing for Apple  and Hewlett-Packard.

Image: Album cover for Rod Stewart’s “Every Picture Tells a Story”

Many entrepreneurs dream of starting their own company so they can be their own boss, call the shots, get the corner office nicest table in the co-working space. Turns out, being in charge is a lot harder than just ordering people around and having someone fetch your lattes. To make a startup successful, you have to encourage an atmosphere of constant innovation.

We asked these upcoming entrepreneurs for their best tips on how to be a boss boss.

Allow for change and spontaneity

Working hard to keep your company from becoming rigid helps keep innovation flowing. The longer you have a business, the easier it is not to try new things — such as payment systems or even where an afternoon meeting should be held. Changing things up every now and again because of suggestions from your team shows you care about keeping your workplace full of ideas.

Caitlin McCabe, @caitlinmc, Real Bullets Branding

Be hands off

Hire great people and give them responsibility. Avoid micro-managing in favor of letting your team surprise you with their creativity!

Lisa Nicole Bell, @LisaNicoleBell, Inspired Life Media Group

Budget for innovation

No one likes to ask for money, but when they have money as an available option, they are willing to go ahead and spend it on things they think will be worthwhile. As the boss, you can enable your team to take new ideas and develop them into profitable ventures. For example, tell them they can spend a few hundred dollars a month on any cool thing they wanted to.

Danny Wong, @blanklabel, Blank Label Group, Inc.

Flat organization

Everyone, from the CEO to the intern to the secretary, should be pushed to always be thinking about how to make the business better. Reward those who speak up and demonstrate creative thinking. You never want someone in your office to be afraid to share their ideas. Foster that open environment where everyone has the confidence to speak up, and you’ll see innovation coming to the surface.

Nathan Lustig, @nathanlustig, Entrustet

Expose yourself

Innovation is driven by exposure to new ideas, people and work. One of the keys to being an innovation-driving startup leader is to encourage yourself and your employees to constantly learn.

Doreen Bloch, @DoreenBloch, Poshly Inc.

Keep time for actually working

Especially in creative ventures, it’s easy to quickly outgrow being able to work on the cool projects that lead you to start the business in the first place — turning you into a cranky boss. It’s good for your team to see you getting your hands dirty, but it will also keep you in touch with what you really want to accomplish.

Thursday Bram, @thursdayb, Hyper Modern Consulting

Empower your employees

Innovation starts with being encouraged to make choices. My employees are always responsible for their decisions, so they weigh them carefully, and when they don’t like the possibilities in front of them, they often find ways to do things differently. They feel empowered because their choices matter, and my company benefits from their perspective.

Vanessa Nornberg, @VanessaNornberg, Metal Mafia

Open workflow

Promote and encourage an open workflow. If you have an open workflow and hire the right employees, it creates an environment where you trust your employees. If employees fill like they have freedom to be innovative, they will, and that starts with their working environment.

John Hall, @JohnHallCOMO, Digital Talent Agents

Opportunities knock softly

Listen carefully to yourself, your clients, your employees, and the media. You might hear something that will create new ideas to execute. People who care about your business will constantly give advice. Listen to them, write down ideas, and execute the ones you are passionate about. Not only will people feel empowered, but you will be seen as the one with great ideas by being a great listener.

Nancy T. Nguyen, @sweettsalon, Sweet T

Allow failure

Let people explore and make mistakes. Be good with failure — as long as there is learning in the end.

Brent Beshore, @BrentBeshore, AdVentures

Rally a vision

Without any brand equity, your startup will likely field mediocre talent — unless you’re paying them too much or giving away all of your equity. But there is hope. Any team rallied around an articulated vision and stoked with sense of greater purpose can defy the impossible and achieve great things. Your job is to be a coach and a cheerleader in one, very inspiring personality.

Christopher Kelly, @ThoughtsOnBiz, Sentry Centers

Hire the right people

In my experience, it is much easier to find the people who match our company culture rather than try to learn a new company culture to match our people. As a leader, you have a set of inherent personality traits. Select people who gravitate to and respect those traits, and then build a team around them. The innovation-driving culture will come from the people, not from a preconceived plan.

Lucas Sommer, @audimated, Audimated

The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only nonprofit organization composed of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. The YEC promotes entrepreneurship as a solution to unemployment and underemployment and provides entrepreneurs with access to tools, mentorship, and resources that support each stage of their business’s development and growth.

I heart my boss art via ShutterStock

Startup investing used to be only for the rich, only if you knew the right people, and only in deals in your city. Those factors left many interested investors on the sidelines.

But today, it’s a lot easier to become an angel investor due to crowdfunding, micro lending and investment sites like MicroVentures which allows you to invest smaller sums alongside others and to invest in deals stretching from Boston to Silicon Valley.

Gone are the days where you have to risk $50,000 or more, receive a personal invitation to invest from a friend and only see a limited number of deals from the few available in your area.

MicroVenture helps investors learn about companies they may never have heard of, and to invest smaller sums, which is virtually unheard of with traditional investing.

The service matches companies seeking money with investors looking to invest anywhere from $1,000 to $30,000 or more. MicroVentures helps investors with the initial due diligence process by filtering startups and then providing documents to help investors conduct their own due diligence prior to making a final investment decision.

The key to winning at angel investing, of course, is to invest in the right startups. To get there, you need:

1) Good deal flow, allowing you to spot potential winners from many potential options.

2) The ability to invest in multiple deals so you gain experience.

3) A knack for spotting potentially successful companies, and more importantly, management teams and entrepreneurs that will succeed.

Getting good deal flow is often the stumbling block for the average person looking to get started in angel investing. And it’s one of the reasons Bill Clark launched MicroVentures. He wanted to begin investing, but didn’t have access to good deals.

Like others thinking about becoming angels, Clark wanted to invest smaller sums in more companies, allowing him to spread his risk and also increase his chances of picking a winner. And he wanted access to great companies outside of Austin, his hometown.

Today, Clark invests alongside the more than 3,500 investors from 20 states that have joined MicroVentures. To date, investors have put more than $3 million into 15 companies.

If you’d like to join the more than 3,500 angel investors getting in on new deals via the MicroVentures platform, be sure to put “VentureBeat” in the referral code when you sign up and we will send you a $100 gift card after you make your first investment.

This Sponsored post is produced by Vator.tv.

Join hundreds of high-tech influencers for Vator Splash LA on June 7, 2012 between 4 pm and 11 pm at the Fairmont Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica. Use the discount code “VB15” for 15% off of your registration here.

Splash is a single-track evening event and startup competition. Splash gathers leading entrepreneurs, innovators, venture capitalists and angel investors across technology to inspire and energize the audience about entrepreneurship and innovation.

Splash brings together high-caliber speakers who talk about how to build and scale great successful companies, how their industries are changing and the opportunities those changes are creating.

Splash also allows the audience to mingle with top venture capitalists and angels who are funding tomorrow’s next Google and Facebook. These influencers will give you insights into how they think when it comes to investments and they’ll also talk about their changing investment strategies in light of the emergence of super angels, angels, micro-VCs and incubators.

The stellar speaker lineup includes top VCs, angels, investors and incubators in LA, such as Neal Hansch (Rustic Canyon Partners), Bill Woodward (Anthem Venture Partners), Nate Redmond (Rustic Canyon Partners), Sam Tellar (Launchpad), Allen Morgan (Idealab), David Carlick (Rho Capital Partners), David Cremin (DFJ Frontier), Howard Marks (Start Engine), Terence Fung (Senior Corp Dev lead at Zynga), Rick Smith (Crosscut Ventures), David Austin (Media Camp), Paul Bricault (Amplify), Michael Jones (co-founder Science, former CEO of MySpace), Adam Huie (Hatch Labs), Erik Rannala (Mucker Labs), Tom McInerney (entrepreneur and angel investor), Gabe de la Rosa(KPMG), Alex Gurevich (Javelin Venture Partners) and Ezra Roizen (Ackrell Capital). You’ll also hear keynote presentations from top LA-based entrepreneurs Scott Painter, CEO and founder of TrueCar, which has raised some $250 million in funding and could go IPO this year, and Matt Coffin, who founded Lowermybills, which was sold to Experian for $300 million. Listen to these entrepreneurs share their successes and failures on their journey to building their successful businesses.

We hope to see you at Splash LA this June. Use the discount code “VB15” for 15% off your registration here.

Speakers at beLAUNCH include representatives from Twitter, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and more. You can get a peek at the full agenda here (click English on the top right). The event takes place June 13 and 14, 2012 at the atCenter in Seoul, South Korea.

In addition to fireside chats and speaker panels, there will be a startup competition called the “beLAUNCH Start-up Battle.” Twenty startup finalists will compete for cash, the opportunity to attend the DEMO Fall 2012 conference, and other prizes.

A sampling of the Korean companies participating in the event include:

Nexon – A Japanese-based Korean gaming company that uses a free-to-play and virtual goods business model, similar to and bigger in market cap than Zygna.

Coupang – South Korea-based daily deals site, similar to Groupon. The company ranks number one in Korean social commerce.

Ticketmonster – Acquired by LivingSocial, this is the second most popular social commerce site in Korea behind Coupang.

Kakaotalk —  This Korean company has built a free Android messaging app that boasts 46 million users

Daum — South Korea’s top internet portal

If you’ll be in Seoul and would like to attend the event, you can register here. VentureBeat readers can use the code VB2012 to get a 30% discount on beLAUNCH tickets.

Seoul skyline image via Shutterstock

If you think that sounds crazy, that’s because it is. But that’s precisely the message noted investor and Libertarian Peter Thiel intoned on CBS 60 Minutes Sunday. It was only the latest blast against college degrees from Thiel, who sees education as a liability rather than an asset.

Thiel made this statement based on a 2011 calculation by Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff, which found that plumbers make more money than doctors, under very specific circumstances. Thiel, in particular, seems hell bent on pressing the issue in the face of all evidence that college is essential to economic success. By many key economic and health measures of well being — average lifetime earnings, average salary, average unemployment rates, average life expectancy— a college degree makes a significant difference.

Thiel’s basic message is simple. We’re in a massive college bubble. Getting a four-year degree is wildly overrated. There are many lucrative jobs for people who don’t get four-year degrees. Graduate degrees, he implies, may be an even worse idea. Rather than rely on a credential, we should pursue degrees in the school of hard knocks, start a business and make a million dollars. Or fail, then try to start another one and another one. And even if you don’t want to be an entrepreneur, there are many high paying vocations that don’t require a college degree.

For his part, Thiel argues that the people who succeed would have done so regardless of whether they went to college or not. I find that argument ludicrous, all the more so looking at the paths taken by some of the people in his own Thiel 20 Fellowship program, a widely publicized offer to pay young people $100,000 not to go to college and to instead pursue an entrepreneurial idea.

First, I tracked down Kotlikoff and asked him if he broadly agreed with what Thiel was saying. The answer is: It depends. His calculation used a complicated and powerful piece of software that he has helped develop and which predicts both earnings power and available income to spend over the course of a lifetime. He presupposed that the doctors went to elite institutions for undergraduate and graduate degrees and then worked in a lower-paying medical specialty such as pediatrics or general practice. And he assumed the doctors financed their entire education without scholarships or other assistance. The calculations also did not take into account the far greater likelihood that a plumber could be unemployed or injured on the job, either of which could prove catastrophic to his or her earning power.

Likewise, if the medical school grad had worked in a higher paying specialty, they would have obliterated the earning power of even the highest paid plumber (it doesn’t take many years with earnings of over $200,000 per year to catch up). Kotlikoff makes the valid point that progressive taxes, opportunity costs and Social Security all favor the plumber over the doctor. But even according to his findings, those doctors out-earned by plumbers represent a very small fraction of the medical profession.

Let’s take apart some other aspects of his argument. Thiel also argues the college students are incurring so much debt to gain their degrees that paying off the debt is a crippling burden that takes a huge chunk out of lifetime earnings. He states that college can cost as much as $250,0000, implying that the amount is the debt load all students must bear. But, according to the Project on Student Debt, the average college debt for the class of 2010 was $25,000. That’s nothing to sneeze at, but it’s hardly a crippling burden. To put that into perspective, the average amount financed for a new car purchased is $26,000 according to Experian Automotive statistics as reported by Bankrate.com. Even more important — and something conveniently not discussed by Thiel — the average earning power of college graduates has climbed steadily while the average earning power of those without college degrees has dropped precipitously. There is a lifetime of earnings to account for. University of Toronto‘s Martin Prosperity Institute calculatedthat, on average, bachelor’s degree holders earn $17,037 more per year than high school diploma holders.

So, while you might get lucky with that startup, the law of averages says that if you don’t go to college, you’ll probably end up significantly poorer. What was fascinating to me is that some of the young entrepreneurs Thiel bankrolled clearly benefited from partial college educations. It’s hard to imagine that the founder of the biofuels startup who was a Harvard pre-med before taking a Thiel Fellowship would have gained access to the resources he needed or been exposed to the mentorship of professors and the institutional creativity had he chosen not to go to college at all.

This is the reality: college is a formative place where creativity and ideas that turn into great companies thrive. It’s a giant R&D lab, a spectacular Petrie dish not just for scientists but for anyone who wants to learn more about the world and how to better navigate life after college. If you don’t believe that, then pick a profession that doesn’t require a degree and take your chances. You might have a nice solid life as a plumber. But the averages say, you’ll always be keeping up with the college grads.

Wadhwa is a fellow at the Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University and is affiliated with several other universities. Read more about Vivek Wadhwa’s affiliations.

This story originally appeared on WashingtonPost.com.

Top photo: A bunch of college dropouts (the 2011 class of Thiel Fellows).

The Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students (BASES), the student-run organization behind the event, has birthed a number of successful companies in its fifteen-year history, notably Kiva, CourseRank and Togetherville. BASES is a hotbed of social entrepreneurship, which is the practice of using business and business process to drive social or environmental change.

BASES events are typically well-attended by entrepreneurs and investors in search of the next big idea. This year saw an upswing in international interest with 1,000 applications pouring in from around the world. The event is supported by the who’s who of Silicon Valley’s venture capital firms, including Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

“We see the BASES Finale as a mecca for entrepreneurship, bringing together the best of Stanford with the best of the valley celebrating the next generation of entrepreneurs,” said Kevin Xu, Chief Branding Officer of the BASES Finale.

Described by organizers as a “student fair on steroids”, the BASES finale is split into four funding competitions: the E-Challenge, Social E-Challenge, Product Showcase and Forge Program. The winners will be announced starting at 5pm, following a keynote speech from Sequoia’s Alfred Lin.

“Stanford is one of the most entrepreneurial universities in the world and BASES is at its epicenter. Many of the most important technology companies were born out of Stanford — including Cisco, Google, Network Appliance, NVIDIA, PayPal, and Yahoo,” said Lin, the former COO/ CFO of Zappos. “We look forward to partnering with many more of them in the years ahead.”

The event takes place from 10:00AM to 7:00PM at the Arrilaga Alumni Center. To view the agenda, click here. To register and secure a free ticket, go to 150kfinale.eventbrite.com.

Stanford campus image via ShutterStock

Quit your technology job. Get a Ph.D in the humanities. That’s the way to get ahead in the technology sector. That, at least, is what philosopher Damon Horowitz told a crowd of attendees at the BiblioTech Conference at Stanford University in 2011.

Horowitz is also a serial entrepreneur who co-founded a company, Aardvark, which sold to Google for $50 million. He is presently the In-House Philosopher / Director of Engineering at Google. Wait, you say, that’s insane. At a time when record numbers of people, among them those with high-level degrees, are receiving public assistance, what kind of fool would get a degree in a subject with no clear job prospects beyond higher education or teaching?

In Silicon Valley, engineers are honor students and everyone else is taking remedial math. Venture capitalists often express disdain for startup CEOs who are not engineers. Silicon Valley parents send their kids to college expecting them to major in a science, technology, engineering or math (STEM) discipline. The theory goes as follows: STEM degree holders will get higher pay upon graduation and get a leg up in the career sprint.

The trouble is that theory is wrong. In 2008, my research team at Duke and Harvard surveyed652 U.S.-born chief executive officers and heads of product engineering at 502 technology companies. We found that they tended to be highly educated: 92 percent held bachelor’s degrees, and 47 percent held higher degrees. But only 37 percent held degrees in engineering or computer technology, and just two percent held them in mathematics. The rest have degrees in fields as diverse as business, accounting, finance, healthcare, arts, and the humanities.

Yes, gaining a degree made a big difference in the sales and employment of the company that a founder started. But the field that the degree was in was not a significant factor. Over the past two years, I have interviewed the founders of more than 300 Silicon Valley startups. The most common traits I have observed are a passion to change the world and the confidence to defy the odds and succeed.

Any discussion of this nature must return to a comparison of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. True, Jobs was technically competent. But he had, if anything, an eclectic educational background where he spent as much time in seeming arcana such as philosophy and calligraphy as he did on math and engineering.

I’d take that a step further. I believe humanity majors make the best project managers, the best product managers, and, ultimately, the most visionary technology leaders. The reason is simple. Technologists and engineers focus on features and too often get wrapped up in elements that may be cool for geeks but are useless for most people. In contrast, humanities majors can more easily focus on people and how they interact with technology. A history major who has studied the Enlightenment or the rise and fall of the Roman Empire may be more likely to understand the human elements of technology. She may more readily understand how ease of use and design can make the difference between an interesting historical footnote and a world-changing technology. A psychologist is more likely to know how to motivate people or to understand what users want.

This brings me back to Damon Horowitz. He was a highly accomplished artificial intelligence (AI) researcher with a master’s degree from MIT. Damon was in hot demand, making big bucks and founding companies, several of which were acquired for nice, tidy sums. The trouble was, he realized his work was not actually solving the underlying problems of AI in any meaningful way. Damon felt he didn’t understand the philosophy of intelligence and human thought well enough to get beyond the beautiful, “intoxicating” prison of computer code he lived in.

So Horowitz quit his tech job and went to Stanford to get his doctorate in philosophy. He was amazed at how much he had to learn. For Horowitz, going back was a transformational shift that opened his eyes not only to key foundational arguments and theories about the nature of intelligence, but it also gave him improved capabilities in strategic vision, creative problem solving and other critical traits. Horowitz believes his degree helped him envision Aardvark, which was an interesting hybrid search system that involved people sending out queries to fellow users who were connected through an automated interface that helped askers properly shape and target their questions.

Don’t get me wrong. The world needs engineers. And no, I am not actually advising people to quit their jobs and get Ph.Ds in philosophy. For some people, it might make sense, but for others it wouldn’t. The point I’m trying to get across is more nuanced: We need musicians, artists, and psychologists, as much as we need biomedical engineers and computer programmers.

For tech entrepreneurs and managers, there is no “right” major or field of study. While having a degree in slinging code may present a short-term advantage at startup time, it may comprise an equally important disadvantage if the degree came at the cost of other critical “soft leadership” skills required to focus, lead and grow companies. So, it’s time for Silicon Valley to get over its obsession with engineers. And, if you run a startup, hire that psychology Ph.D. You may get a lot more than you bargained for.

Wadhwa is a fellow at the Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University and is affiliated with several other universities. Read more about Vivek Wadhwa’s affiliations.

Originally published on WashingtonPost.com.

Photo credit: mararie/Flickr

Venture capital has always been geographically concentrated, resulting in the emergence of a few hubs of VC and entrepreneurial activity and support services — Silicon Valley being the best example.

But the majority of US entrepreneurs have not been able to benefit from the venture capital industry because they live in the wrong parts of the US. This wasn’t an issue in the early days, when VC was novel. But over time, this geographic concentration has become a limitation.

Let’s put some numbers to this: In 2010 (the most recent full year the National Venture Capital Association provides numbers for), the VC industry invested $3,945 per person living in the Silicon Valley area compared to $43 per person in the rest of the US, including the other VC hubs like Boston and New York.  That’s a 91:1 ratio.

Go to Michigan and the amount is $15 per person per year. Now we’re talking 263:1. If I was a gambling man, I wouldn’t bet on a startup in Detroit getting venture funding. Better to relocate the family to a VC hub.  Or find another option.

Millions of talented entrepreneurs live in the “wrong parts” of the US, where they have very little chance of getting venture capital.  A few hundred (or thousand) of them just might have the spark to cause inspired innovation and bring employment to thousands, perhaps millions.

The argument has been that entrepreneurs also need expert advice and resources to excel and that it must all be local.  I agree that mentoring, support, and resources in addition to capital are vital. I just don’t buy the local part. What portion of the communication between a VC and his or her portfolio companies was done in person 50 years ago? And what portion of the same communication is now delivered through the Internet?  Email, video conference calls, remote screen sharing, group document editing, and other technologies have all changed the way we collaborate.

The truth is that a mentor can add a lot of value in assisting an entrepreneur anywhere in the US, or worldwide for that matter.

The Internet has shown itself to be very good at providing the platform on which formerly local services can be provided virtually anywhere.  eBay did this with auctions, Amazon with books, and Facebook with friendship.

Crowdfunding for entrepreneurs has the potential to deliver capital, mentoring, and resources virtually anywhere. The opportunity is large:

The US VC industry ranges from $20 to $30 billion of invested capital per annum, according to the NVCA, and it’s concentrated where most entrepreneurs are not. Imagine if we take the $43 per person of VC invested per year outside Silicon Valley and double it to $86 by bringing the capital and mentoring and resources to entrepreneurs across the US. If that were done, the amount of new capital deployed would be $13 billion per year.

That amount of money can fund an additional 6,500 startups per year at the $2 million level.

Crowdfunding can be an $8 billion to $100 billion industry in six years. This will not come at the expense of the current VC industry; it will complement and extend its reach.

This is market expansion, and it will redefine venture capital to break out of its historic limitations. At least for entrepreneurs who  live in the wrong place, which is most of us.

Rod Turner is a serial entrepreneur who has played a key role in building Ashton Tate (dBASE), Symantec Norton, Knowledge Adventure, Mobile Automation, and ArtSlant. He has two IPOs under his belt and has sold three startups to public companies. He is now focused on the launch of his newest initiative, crowdfunding site START.ac.

Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of VentureBeat columns by award-winning author and serial entrepreneur Penelope Trunk. She’s going to be our startup critic: She’ll review new companies, point out what they’re doing right, and give them advice (which she’s never shy about anyway) for how they can improve. Her first company is Browsemob.

Browsemob is a site that lets you tell a retailer what you’d be willing to pay for an item they sell.

If you go to Browsemob’s site, the first thing you see is a photo of a woman who looks excited in a touching-herself way.

So look, this is the first sign that there is no one on the management team who knows about marketing. Because in any book about body language, a woman touching herself means, “I want you.”

The “I want you” picture, together with the name Browsemob, makes the site look like it’s a matching site for hot women and the unruly mobs of boys who want to hire those women for something that will turn out badly, like a Duke lacrosse party.

It’s just not good.

But I give the site the benefit of doubt, because it’s about the customer setting the price. I like this because I do tons of coaching and I’m always trying to figure out the right price. I charge $250 for an hour and I get annoyed when I am coaching a millionaire, because I think I should have added a few more zeros. But I also feel bad when I price myself too high for struggling college students. Those are fun people to coach. I am excited for Browsemob to show me how to price my own services.

The problem is that Browsemob is about economics. The founders have identified an inefficiency in the marketplace: There are, I don’t know, ten days when a retailer knows they will discount a product but they have not yet done so. During that window, there is a possibility to sell the product at a smaller discount.

There is a lot of math involved in figuring out this inefficiency and optimizing it. But the bottom line is that there is a ton of inefficiency in the world that is not worth confronting, and this is unfortunately an example.

Matt Hurewitz, a founder of Browsemob, is really nice. He lets me cut him off four hundred times. Every time he tells me about the economics I tell him that I’m sure the economics are right. I’m sold. No one is solving the problem he’s talking about and he can solve it. I got it.

I want to know: Can he get any large retailer to care enough about this market inefficiency enough to sign up for his site?

No. The answer is no. He only has this beauty product company that is masquerading as a sex shop on his home page.  This will not propel his company to success.

You need a big retailer to succeed, I tell him.

He says he knows.

I say, no retailer will care enough about the problem you are proposing to solve. What did the Gap say?

He says that the Gap said that integration with Browsemob would need to be very sophisticated and…

Wait. What?

He repeats the word “sophisticated,” and I repeat to him that there is no way anyone is going to take the time to make changes in their discounting system in order to save a minuscule amount of money for their company.

This is how our conversation goes: I am obnoxious and impatient. He is nice and sweet. This reminds me that math guys are not good at pitching companies, but they are very good for dating. They are patient and honest. Good qualities. But I digress, and anyway, if you are wondering, he’s married. So we are back to the company.

The code is already written. A lot of it. I want to tell you something: Don’t do this. Don’t write code before you know what you’re going to use it for. This company is a perfect example.

Obviously there is a market inefficiency in discounting systems. There is money left on the table. It’s up to Matt to show that companies actually care that he can solve this problem.

So, before he writes all the code to solve the problem, he should go to a company and get them to sign up. He can give them a demo that sort of works but only takes about ten minutes to code, in HTML. The prospective customer won’t care, because they are making a business decision, not a coding decision. Once he has got a company signed up, then he can start coding to solve the real customer’s real problem.

You need to look at your startup idea. If the hardest part of the business is showing that the code can work, then you need to write the code first. For instance, if you are trying to allow ten billion people to tweet simultaneously, you’re not going to get very far unless you have already written code that makes that possible. But in most cases, people believe you can write the code and the hardest part of the business is something else. Do that hardest thing first, before you spend time writing the code.

In this case, Matt should cut a deal. Get a company to sign a letter of intent to use the software to unload almost-on-sale items. Then he has reason to believe it’s worth building the software.

Another thing: Don’t pitch for news coverage if you can’t use it. Save PR for when you need more customers or when you need investors. Right now, all Browsemob needs is someone from a large retailer who cares about the problem they are solving. What it needs is to close a sale.

Matt did say something interesting, though. He said he got the idea for this company from his friend who asks for a discount everywhere. He said his friend gets discounts almost every time, at least a few dollars, from stores of all sizes

I say the friend is totally annoying.

Matt says he knows. But maybe this site can give everyone the ability to ask for those discounts without being annoying. 

That’s a good vision: It’s fun, and it promises something good in the end. I don’t think he’s really on the right path yet, but really, all startups are about pivots, so in case he pivots to the point where you can haggle with impunity, you can sign up here:  www.browsemob.com/signup.

Penelope Trunk founded Brazen Careerist and two other startups. Her career advice runs in 200 newspapers, and she is the author of a bestselling career advice book. She lives on a farm in Wisconsin and homeschools her sons.

Nurse thumbnail image via ShutterStock

The brains behind Lenddo, co-founders Jeff Stewart and Richard Eldridge and chief scientist Dr. Naveen Agnihotri, think a person’s social graph can be a better indicator of trustworthiness than a credit score. Anyone who’s ever tried to get a loan or credit card without prior credit knows it’s a circular problem, one that is infinitely more difficult in emerging economies. Lenddo helps individuals in these countries break out of the cycle with small loans up to one month’s pay.

The company takes the wealth of data from your many social networks (including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter), looks at the people in your Lenddo Trusted Network (family, friends, co-workers), verifies you have a full-time job, and uses predictive algorithms to confirm your identity and calculate if you are a risk. There are three types of algorithms it uses: Bayesian (pattern matching), validators (verifying your identity and the information you’ve given), homophily (you’re likely to associate with people similar to you).

“It turns out, who is willing to endorse you is a powerful indicator of your trustworthiness,” a Lendoo spokesperson told us in an email. “As more people pay back, the network grows, and the borrowing capacity of the community grows.”

Currently, Lenddo only offers loans in the Philippines and Colombia, though it has tens of thousands of members in over 35 countries. The company won’t say how many loans or how much cash it has given out to date, but the average loan is $400 the Philippines and near $800 in Columbia, and the total amount is growing at close to one percent a day. The loans are most frequently used for education, but can also be put towards health care or repairs after a natural disaster, such as the recent devastating floods in the Philippines.

The company plans to use this $8 million round of funding to hire more engineers, ramp up growth, and eventually expand into other emerging markets, a process it says will be driven by its members.

Started in early 2011, Lenddo has employees in Manila, Bogotá, and New York City. Accel Partners, Blumberg Capital, Omidyar Network, iNovia Capital and Metamorphic Ventures participated in this round of funding, as did angel investors Geoff Judge, David Kidder, Scott Heiferman, and Barry Silbert.

The Russian market is growing at a supersonic rate and provides excellent exit opportunites for investors in Russian online ventures to create a brand-new breed of Russian internet entrepreneur.

So who are the trailblazers to watch in this new web frontier? Yankov Sadchikov, Russian startup blogger at Quintura.com, talks us through the hottest Russian entrepreneurs to watch right now…

Oskar Hartmann, founder and CEO, KupiVIP.ru

After launching online shopping club KupiVIP.ru in fall 2008, the Russian-German Oskar Hartmann added an e-commerce platform for Russian retailers and launched online fashion store ShopTime.

In Russian online shopping, KupiVIP is growing bigger than almost as big as established brand OZON.ru by racking $200 million revenues last year. Correction 5/16/2012: Ozon notes that it generated over $300 million in revenue for 2011. In 2010, Hartmann partnered with the French businessman Pascal Clément to set up a Moscow-based internet business incubator, Fast Lane Ventures, which has already started eighteen internet businesses to date, of which two were already exited.

Marina Kolesnik, founder and CEO, Oktogo.ru

Following a consulting career at McKinsey and management role at DataArt, where she headed complex software development projects, Marina Kolesnik has leveraged her Harvard MBA to launch her own online venture Oktogo.ru two years ago. Since then, Marina raised $15 million in venture capital from European and Russian investors to make Oktogo.ru into Russia’s leading online hotel booking and travel site or “Booking.com of Russia”.

Pavel Cherkashin, co-founder, Krible and Kuznech

Having been Russian manager for Adobe and Siebel as well as Microsoft Russia’s general manager of consumer and online businesses, Pavel Cherkashin made a number of angel investments in online businesses in Russia. He now works for his investee companies: online customer support service Krible and image search Kuznech as well as helping other investees: online video site Tvigle.ru and mobile advertising network AdWired.

Alisa Chumachenko, founder and CEO, Game Insight

In online gaming, marketing is key. The former head of marketing at Astrum Online, which was merged into Mail.ru Group in 2008, Chumachenko started her own  social game publisher and developer Game Insight in late 2009. In 2011, she moved into mobile gaming to make Game Insight one of the leading gaming companies on Android.

Albert Popkov, founder, Sravni.ru

Popkov capitalised on the social networking boom in Russia. Back in 2006, he launched the social network company Odnoklassniki.ru. He then raised funding from DST and sold his startup to it later. Odnoklassniki, which is part of Mail.ru Group, has some 25 million monthly users. In 2009, Albert launched consumer banking comparison site Sravni.ru, which is now the leader in its category.

Yulia Mitrovich, Entrepreneur in Residence, Svyaznoy Group

A graduate of the University of British Columbia, Mitrovich was a McKinsey consultant before going to Web Media Group in Moscow to head its online video site Zoomby.ru.

In 2012 Mitrovich joined Svyaznoy Group, the leading mobile phone retailer in Russia, as Entrepreneur in Residence. No surprise, Svyaznoy founder Maxim Nogotkov was named Russia’s Entrepreneur of The Year 2010 by Ernst & Young.

Igor Matsanyuk, founder, IMI.VC

If the internet incubators are the new black, then mobile-focused business accelerators are the new, new black. Entrepreneur-turned-VC Matsanyuk has made a fortune by cashing out shares in Mail.ru Group during its IPO in late 2010.

One year before, he merged his online gaming company Astrum Online Entertainment into Mail.ru. Igor currently seeds mobile startups viaFarminers business incubator and own investment company IMI.VC.

Elena Masolova, co-founder and CEO, Pixonic

The Higher School of Economics graduate, Masolova co-founded the AddVenture seed-stage fund in Moscow in 2008 and was a founding member of coupon site Darberry, which became Groupon Russia. She currently heads social gaming company Pixonic, a portfolio company of AddVenture. She also eager to make angel investments in online startups and lead them later.

Anna Znamenskaya, founder, Workingmama

Following a ten-year executive career including CEO of Digital Access (online video portal ivi.ru), Rambler‘s commercial director and B2B Media CEO, Znamenskaya has ventured into entrepreneurship with her own online project for mothers, Workingmama.ru in late 2011. She is also receiving Master in Digital Marketing from Instituto de Empresa in Madrid this year.

Olga Steidl, partner, dots’n‘spaces

The St. Petersburg State University graduate Steidl has headed marketing at mobile software maker SPB Software before it was acquired by Yandex last November. After a short stint withYandex, she has settled in Zurich to help mobile startups via dots’n’spaces and organize mobile industry events. Steidl is also startup CEO herself and mentor at Seedcamp where Yandex recently invested.

FURTHER READING

• The Top 10 Russian Internet Startups
• Exclusive interview with Marina Kolesnik

This article originally appeared on Venture Village, one of VentureBeat’s editorial partners.

Outsource, outsource, outsource

Everything may be a priority, but you are not equally brilliant at everything. Eliminate the unnecessary tasks and outsource your weaknesses so your time and focus is directed to where you’ll make the biggest impact for the business.

Kelly Azevedo, @krazevedo, She’s Got Systems

Focus on one thing at a time

It may seem like a no-brainer, but multitasking can actually cut back on your productivity. Instead of juggling multiple projects at once, schedule out blocks of time — or even entire days — during which you only focus on one task or one project.

Steph Auteri, @stephauteri, Word Nerd Pro

Take on what’s time-sensitive

Do time-sensitive tasks, then divide into projects. Look at all of your to-dos and first identify which ones are time-sensitive — the ones that need to be done that day or that week. Do those tasks at the start of each day, then pick one big project per day to tackle once the time-sensitive items are done.

Stephanie Kaplan, @stephaniekaplan, Her Campus Media

Figure out your prime time

Identify when you are the most productive and focus on the tasks that are the highest priority to complete during that time. To do so, eliminate distractions — such as calls and email — and instead use the time you are at your mental best to accomplish your most important tasks.

Doug Bend, @DougBend, The Law Office of Doug Bend

Get an outside perspective

It’s easy to get overwhelmed and too emotionally involved in everything that is happening to make clear decisions. Engage someone else — such as a business partner, mentor, coach or friend — to help ask you the right questions and sort out what’s really most important now. An outside perspective can open you up to new possibilities.

Elizabeth Saunders, @RealLifeE, Real Life E

Go into bunker mode

In the event that you find your plate filled with all high-priority tasks, you must remove all external distractions. This includes other people, emails, phone calls, and all social media sites. Now that it’s just you and your work, focus all of your energy on one task at a time until it’s complete, and then move on to the next one. Once all priorities are cleared, you may rejoin society!

Anthony Saladino, @cabinetkings, Kitchen Cabinet Kings

Don’t dwell

You’ll never get everything done, so don’t dwell on it. Split your time between what’s urgent and what’s important. If you handle all the things that pop up as soon as they come to you, you’ll never move forward as a business. Make an even split between handling urgent issues and working on long-term solutions. As you grow, you can hire people to handle more urgent matters.

Nick Friedman, @NickFriedman1, College Hunks Hauling Junk

Not everything is a priority

It’s important to stay focused on what really matters. Spend some time on upfront planning to determine the most critical tasks that you need to take on. It’s usually much better to concentrate on one or two priorities and do them really well, instead of being spread so thin that you have mediocre output.

Ben Rubenstein, @yodle, Yodle

Break out the rankings

Written lists are still my best tool for productivity. When I feel like I have too much on my plate, I do a brain dump, then I give each item a numbered ranking based on priority. If I owe deliverables to others, I make sure to ask them when they need them by so that I can rank them appropriately.

Allie Siarto, @allieo, Loudpixel

Define roles and divide work

Make sure everyone on the team has distinct roles defined, and divide work accordingly. Everyone on a proactive team will want to do everything, and clearly defined roles make it clear who should do what.

David Gardner, @david_gardner, ColorJar

There’s a tool for that

Pivotal Tracker is a free tool that allows you to track task lists. It forces you to prioritize your to-do list. If you keep the list current, you will always know what the next most important task is.

Aaron Schwartz, @ModifyWatches, Modify Watches

The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only nonprofit organization composed of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. The YEC promotes entrepreneurship as a solution to unemployment and underemployment and provides entrepreneurs with access to tools, mentorship, and resources that support each stage of their business’s development and growth.

Overworked man image via ShutterStock

Starting a new technology company is exciting. Since the founders have their energies fully focused on new technologies and innovations that promise to change the world, there is little time left for them to think about creating the right culture for the company. Hence, more often than not, the company’s culture takes after the styles and personalities of the founders. (Above, CollegeHumor’s startup guys.)

While there is nothing wrong with that, it can be a limiting factor in the growth of the company, especially if the company succeeds and starts to grow out of the initial startup phase, and begins its journey toward an established company. Because the culture influences the type of talent the company attracts, if the culture is set in a limiting way, the company struggles to get the diverse talent outside of its core group that it needs to function as an established business.

For example, many times companies started by young males in their 20’s take on their personality, and the culture is defined by a highly informal shorts and sandals dress code. Typically, work hours are anything but nine-to-five and include frequent visits to local watering holes.

While it is a very comfortable setting for twenty-something males who see it as a continuation of their fun and free college lifestyle; the result is predictable. The company attracts more talent of the same profile and not a more diversified workforce. This works well in the early days when the core technology is being developed and you may not need much more than a bunch of guys willing to churn out the initial software. But it becomes a hindrance to attracting more diverse talent, which is necessary when you start to grow the business.

The reverse is also quite common, where older founders create a more staid and formal culture of button-down shirts and strict policies. As a result, they struggle to attract top-tier software developers who prefer a more relaxed setting. While this challenge of setting the right culture exists in any technology company, it is more pronounced in enterprise software startups where the company must strike the right balance between relaxed and cool and the more mature grown up culture.

One of the mistakes many founders make is that they overlook the good aspects of what larger companies do. It’s perhaps more prudent to carefully look at the good aspects of large company environment and incorporate those into their startup company’s culture.
Here are a few ideas on how to set the right culture.

1. Be proactive in determining the work culture and the image you want to project. You want to set the culture primarily to be attractive to the employees and customers. So think about what type of work environment will attract the right employees and how will those employees and the company culture appear to your potential customers.

2. Instead of dictating a specific dress code or work hours, make suggestions but provide flexibility in how people dress depending on their roles and work situations. Make the hours they work dependent on their job requirements. Include these in the employee handbook if you have one because if you don’t, the default culture will be set by how founders and key employees dress and work. It is probably best to give specific departments control over their dress code, work hours, and work settings.

3. Don’t overlook traditional employee benefits. Many founders are wary of providing healthcare and insurance benefits simply because either those aren’t important to them (which is true for most twenty-something males) or they’re afraid of signing up for the costs. Interestingly, the healthcare costs for a company full of young males are much lower than for a company with a more diverse and older workforce. So by providing those benefits at a relatively low cost, you can make the company attractive to the broader workforce that the company will surely need sooner or later.

4. Take time to figure out the values and principles that should drive the company. If it is innovation, creativity, excellence, then write that down. It is also a good idea to come up with moral or ethical guidelines that tell employees how to conduct themselves when working with each other and their customers. For example, if honesty, respect, and teamwork are important to you, then include those. A good set of values not only tells your employees how to conduct themselves but can become a strong branding tool for the company. Google’s “don’t be evil” tagline is a great example of that.

5. Involve employees in defining the culture of the company. Company culture should and does evolve with the growth of the company and over time. If employees of the company actively participate in building the culture, then it thrives and gets better over time.

A company culture isn’t something that a startup will figure out overnight. But apart from the world-changing technology they plan to develop, their company’s culture will be the most important key to their lasting success.

Zikria Syed is the CEO and co-founder of NextDocs, which provides SharePoint-based compliance solutions including quality management software, regulatory document management, and clinical portals.

WeWork Labs, a spin-off of the successful WeWork co-working spaces, has already picked many of its first crop of workers, including ShopperSeeks.com‘s founder Andrea Gouw and Twitter hacker Abraham Williams. The space is the second of its kind — the WeWork Labs in New York, which calls itself an entrepreneur residency, has proven extremely successful and recently added the mother of all amenities: health insurance. (VentureBeat has a space in WeWork’s New York co-working office.)

For $300 a month, aspiring “startup-adjacent” professionals and freelancers get 24/7 access to the SOMA space’s long shared tables, meeting rooms, telephone rooms, showers (for the bikers), and game lounge with a pool table and an Xbox.

Directors Kaitlin Pike and Seth Blank hope to bring together entrepreneurs, developers, designers, marketers, advisors, and investors, and then sit back and watch the magic happen as they bounce ideas off each other, meet-cute with co-founders, and ultimately “get the hell out of the space.” They hope to make the final mix 50 percent female.

Pike and Blank gave us a tour of the sunny new digs, which feels like a combination of a dorm, public library, and CB2 catalog.

You’ve got exactly what a prospective client needs to grow their business: the right service, the right software, or the right product. But how are you going to convince her of that fact when she’s in New York and you’re in Chicago? With a killer online sales demonstration, of course.

But online sales demos need to be done right or you’ll lose the client’s attention, and then you’ll lose the sale. Here are 10 tips for delivering killer online sales demos.

1. Do your homework
   Before you open up your laptop and start broadcasting, spend time talking to and researching your customer. Ask questions: Who is she? What does she need? Why? How will your solution be used? Who will use it? Once you know the answers, customize your presentation accordingly. Make it relevant to your customer’s specific situation, and you’ll close more sales.
2. Don’t waste time
   No one has time to waste on long, drawn-out introductions, explanations, or product demos. Imagine Steve Jobs is at the other end of your demo, and he’s itching to get the big picture and see the relevant details, right away, without any dressing or flowery language. Respect your client’s time, and they’ll respect yours.
3. Make it a story
   We forget facts; we remember stories. Loading a prospective buyer up with a million facts about your software or solution is counterproductive. They won’t remember them, but they will remember being bored by you. Not good. Instead, make the demo a story — the story of your client solving the problem they have. That’s going to be more memorable: There’s a hero, a problem, and a solution. Much more interesting!
4. Walk through typical uses — avoid the feature dump
   We’ve all been in the demo or presentation where a “sales engineer” is engineering his way through every single menu, every single item, and every single option in his unnecessarily complex software. Did you find that fun? Enlightening? Enjoyable? Or were you just about ready to connect your head with a hard object, quickly? Remember that feeling … and do whatever it takes to avoid replicating it in your clients. Because, with apologies, your tedious list of features is just as boring as his. Instead, walk through some common processes or typical uses. Ignore edge cases, unless there’s one the client has specifically mentioned they need. Do not walk through the configuration or installation steps. Instead, show your client what she’ll be able to do with your solution.
5. Customize your pitch for every client
   If your client is in the automotive industry, customize your examples to that segment.Don’t use examples from the packaged consumer goods industry … unless you can find an angle that credibly connects the two.
6. Sweat the small stuff
   This one may be obvious, but if so, it’s evidence that common sense isn’t nearly common enough. Make sure you get all the tech details sorted out before you start. Test, try, demo to a colleague before you demo to a prospect, and work out all the bugs.In addition, make sure you know your clients’ computing set-up, and check with the vendor who provides your screen-sharing or webinar software. Are they compatible? Are there plugins that need to be downloaded and installed? Do whatever you can to ensure that all those details are taken care of before your presentation is due to begin.
7. Provide social proof
   Whether you’re a startup or a huge company, don’t assume your prospect has heard of you, knows your story, or has faith in your ability to provide the correct solution.Ease her mind and reduce the perceived risk by mentioning clients who have used your solution successfully. Apologies, but no one wants to be your guinea pig. Everyone wants to know that this is not your first rodeo.
8. Talk less, listen more
   There is a famous adage in sales lore: “In a single day, Samson slew a thousand Philistines with the jawbone of an ass. Every day, thousands of sales are killed with the same weapon.”Don’t let your mouth be your worst enemy. Pause, ask questions, and listen. When your potential client is speaking more than you, you’re doing your job well. And you’re positioning yourself for a sale by engaging your prospect.
9. Be flexible
   Sometimes your client wants to go in a different direction than your pre-planned 15-slide presentation. Remember who is making the buying decision, and let them go. Redirect if absolutely necessary, but do it with caution.Remember, your customer knows what they need to understand and what questions they need answered before they can sign a check. Insisting on sticking to your presentation is not going to make you popular … and an unlikeable sales rep is a poor sales rep.
10. Don’t forget sales 101
    You’re showing your product, you’re customizing the presentation to your client, you’re listening, you’re doing it all right. Just don’t forget why you’re there: to make a sale. When the opportunity comes (and you may have to invent the opportunity), ask for the sale.You may have to use trial closes if you’re early in the sales process, but you need to make this more than simply an informational session. It is, but it’s also a sales call, and your job is to provide the information and context within which your client can make a good decision.

Now you’re a pro: ready to go. Load up with lots of energy and make it fun for both you and your client!

Photo credit: Sean MacEntee

Unreasonable at Sea mixes startups, Semester at Sea students, venture capitalists, and seasoned entrepreneur mentors to create a floating incubator. But instead of floating in one location off the coast of California like Blueseed, this voyage will sail startup entrepreneurs to 14 international ports to help them expand businesses that have previously operated in only one market.

I recently spoke with the mastermind behind this endeavor, Daniel Epstein. During his junior year in college, he enrolled in Semester at Sea (SAS), a study abroad program that sails around the world on a ship. It was during his journey that he began working on the the incubator and investment firm he operates today. The ah-ha moment for Unreasonable at Sea came when he thought of combining his experience as a Semester at Sea alumni with his Unreasonable Institute, an incubator for entrepreneurs focused on social and environmental topics.

“Six months ago, the president at Semester at Sea called me. He thought that Semester at Sea was missing an entrepreneurial energy and presence and told me he would send me on the ship. I was excited, but [I thought] it had to be more interesting than just me on the boat,” said Epstein, in an interview with VentureBeat.

Epstein decided to operate his incubator on board the ship instead of just tagging along for the ride. The goal of the program is for startups to expand into new markets and pitch to new investors. At each of the 14 ports, startups will attend pitch events where they’ll meet investors, politicians, and business people and show off their awesome ideas. All feedback will be used to improve the startup for the next pitch event in another country.

“From the entrepreneur’s perspective, it’s an opportunity to experiment with products and technology internationally. Startups can take their technology to another market to see what works and walk out with a globally relevant product,” Epstein said.

Unreasonable at Sea is accepting applications through June of this year and has already received responses from startups in more than 100 countries. Once all the applications come in, Epstein and his team will select 10 entrepreneurs and one to two of their team members to set sail on the maiden voyage.

From January 6, 2013 to April 25, 2013, Unreasonable at Sea will sail to across the Pacific and India Oceans, starting in San Diego and ending in Barcelona, Spain. In between, the ship will stop in Hawaii, Japan, China, Hong Kong, Vietnam, and India, to name a few.

While on the ship, each startup will get the chance to interact with venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and advisors who will coach them throughout the process. Half of the mentors have been selected and include vice president of business development for Google Megan Smith and retired vice president of HP Phil McKinney. Once the startups are selected for the program, more mentors will be added to fit each company’s unique needs.

In addition to working on their businesses, the startups will be interacting with SAS students to learn about entrepreneurship and business. Epstein and his team also plan to spend time teaching SAS students about business.

If you think your startup has what it takes, check out the requirements of the program and submit your application quickly. You have until June 5 to prove that your company is worthy of sailing around the world.

This sponsored post is produced by TiE.

Successes such as Instagram, has got the whole tech community up in restless excitement. At least 2 developers approached me the day the Instagram acquisition was announced. They needed to do something. If not here, surrounded by the startup frenzy in the Silicon Valley, then where else, they said.

This is the right time, the right economy, the right place and everyone wants a ride on the startup train. And TiEcon is the biggest Entrepreneurship Conference, which has something for everyone – from Entrepreneurs, Investors, to Engineers, Recruiters.

Entrepreneurship – What it takes

The rosy successes and all – there is a lot that goes into entrepreneurship. What people to hire, who to pick for your founding team, who to partner with, when & how much to take to market, when to raise funds and if you are lucky like Instagram & many others before, when & whether to sell. Do you have what it takes? The Entrepreneurship panel at this year’s TiEcon , gives you food for thought.

Entrepreneurship for Women

Entrepreneurship, is perfect for women! And here is why. For one, it destroys the myth of the Glass ceiling (A woman Entrepreneur – To be or not to be) exposes Gender socialization (Deborah Gruelfeld at TiEcon on Mastering the Body Language for Power and Influence) and only your technical, social and business skills are the ones on the line. There is no limit to your creativity.

What goes into making your startup a success

If you are on the entrepreneurial track, there are many things that go into making your startup, a success. Whether to bootstrap, or take money from Angels or VCs or How to take your product to market? A startup is about a team with the perfect complementary skill-sets. So how do you build your winning team or judge whether you are part of that winning startup team. Once your startup is off the ground, does it have the belts and buckles in place for the journey up the hockey stick curve? And well – if you are young, right out of or in school/college and wondering how you could start a company– there is the Young entrepreneur’s guide to getting started doling out advice on it, at the TiE Youth Forum.

For the Geeks in us

‘What if Im not an entrepreneur’, ‘What if I love coding and and, building things?’ Well, this year’s TiEcon fuels the developer’s passion and knowledge as well.

The Social Panels talk about the next frontiers in Social Gaming, how internet commerce has been impacted by Social media, and what the emerging trends and opportunities are in the Social space.

The Mobile panels talk about the latest mobile trends and opportunities. You could learn best practices from mobile companies for deployments in the enterprise space.

The Energy panels talk about the upcoming applications and emerging trends in energy fields, the hottest opportunities in the cleantech area, and the evolution of energy efficiency in the automobile sector.

The Life Sciences Panels talk about Medical device innovation in emerging markets, and opportunities in Mobile health.

The Cloud Panels talk about how Cloud & SAAS are being used in the real-world, emerging trends and opportunities in Cloud and how Consumerization in the Enterprise is driving opportunities in the Cloud.

What the Stars foretell

And that’s not all. This year’s TiEcon 2012 (May 18 – 19, 2012) also has some amazing Keynotes from Dr. Vishal Sikka, Head of Technology at SAP and Carlos Dominguez, Cisco SVP. In the Breakthrough Thinkers keynote, Dr. Deepak Chopra, talks about Prosperity and Leadership. And finally, Sam Pitroda tells the story of how innovation was ignited in India, which has led to the Internet revolution there and the new booming economy that we see there today.

And this isn’t all. At the TiEcon Expo you will find 100 or so startups displaying their latest products and innovations. And in the corridors of the convention, you will find endless opportunities to Network and talk to the smartest of entrepreneurs, investors, passionate developers who are on the cutting edge of technology. A boundless, priceless opportunity to connect, network, learn, grow and prosper…

Whether or not you were aware of it at the time, the world changed in 2011 when Ken Jennings lost to IBM’s Watson on Jeopardy. As a part humorous, part chilling conclusion to the historic show, Jennings wrote the following beneath his final answer:

I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords.

Jennings recognized something investigated in the book, Race Against the Machine, published by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew P. McAfee at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. According to the book, Race Against the Machine explores the ways “we’re living in an era where computers dominate every aspect of our life, and unless we catch up and start working with the machine rather than against it, the new economic machine is going to spit us out.”

We can draw correlations to the patterns we’re seeing in income disparity and job displacement from technology and automation. The theory in Race Against the Machine also helps to explain humans’ role in the new economy. At only 80 pages, it is a must read for anyone still on the fence about whether to pursue a liberal arts degree or one in engineering.

Most people with a liberal arts degree are struggling to find jobs, but tech companies are scrambling to find talent. It’s still one of the most difficult problems in a startup: hiring smart people. The money and power has already shifted and will continue to disproportionately shift to people who either (a) know how to program or (b) figure out how to work well with those who already do. There’s an enormous ecosystem of value creation potential out there if you could only contribute to it.

Is there anyone who is immune to technological unemployment?

In 2004, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane wrote that truck drivers are nearly immune from technological unemployment in The New Division of Labor:

The truck driver is processing a constant stream of [visual, aural, and tactile] information from his environment… To program this behavior we could begin with a video camera and other sensors to capture the sensory input. But executing a left turn against oncoming traffic involves so many factors that it is hard to imagine discovering the set of rules that can replicate a driver’s behavior… Articulating [human] knowledge and embedding it in software for all but highly structured situations are at present enormously difficult tasks… Computers cannot easily substitute for humans in [jobs like truck driving].

At one point, it was easy to write off computers as being our drivers. The 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge supported this hypothesis. The “winning” vehicle took hours to get just 8 miles into the 150 mile course, and then stopped working.

Surprisingly, something happened less than six years later, not centuries or decades later: Google modified the Toyota Prius to be fully autonomous. Today, Priuses have driven hundreds of thousands miles with no human guidance on American roads. There was only one accident ever reported, when a human driver read-ended the Google-modified vehicle.

Why did this happen so quickly? Six years is all it took for this seemingly quantum leap into fully autonomous driving that Levy and Murnane pointed out as so computationally difficult to solve. It’s not just that computers are getting cheaper and faster. Martin Grötschel showed that processors were increasing efficiency in computing a la Moore’s Law by a factor of 1,000, butalgorithms were 43,000 times faster in the same time span.

This sweeping change isn’t coming in futuristic gas-sippers from Mountain View. On the legal side, Blackstone Discovery analyzed 1.5 million documents for less than $100,000. The one human assisting the machine did the work of 500 lawyers. And the machine-human pair did a much better job: lawyers have been shown to achieve only 60% accuracy in this mundane, headache-inducing work.

In China, Foxconn already has 10,000 robots and expects to buy 300,000 next year. Over the next 3 years the company is planning to purchase 1,000,000 robots to replace a portion of their existing Chinese workforce.

Even in sales, companies are turning to software instead of people to close. Since June 2009, when the recession ended, corporate spending on software is up 26%, but payrolls remain flat. When I ordered tickets to Florida, I bought them on Hipmunk without any interaction with a human. I got on a train and ordered my ticket through a computer and when I got to the airport I printed my tickets from a kiosk. I was even lucky enough to proceed through security with minimal interaction with the TSA.

There are very few professions resistant to automation and those tend to involve physical coordination and sensory perception, a phenomenon called Moravec’s Paradox.

How much theory is relevant?

Is Race Against a Machine arguing that computer science is what everyone should be studying now? Not necessarily. The book is optimistic but points out that the educational system is doing a terrible job of teaching people how to be creative and how to work with machines. It’s important to be able to work creatively with technology, as Steve Jobs once said:

When I went to Pixar, I became aware of a great divide. Tech companies don’t understand creativity. They don’t appreciate intuitive thinking, like the ability for an A&R guy at a music label to listen to a hundred artists and have a feeling for which five might be successful.

Granted, you’re not a computer scientist just because you can build web applications. Maybe you’re just a web app developer, but I think that’s good enough. A web developer today can go and get an entry level job in California with $70,000 or more in salary plus benefits, equity, significant learning experience, and plenty of room for career mobility. I was 20 years old in 2007 when I was offered $70,000/year to join a company as the first employee.

Can you get away with being a web application developer and skip accreditation altogether? Computer science curricula is still heavy on theory, but much of the theory and lower level material taught in CS is not necessary for a startup — when was the last time you needed to know how multiplexers work at the gate level? Everything you learn sits somewhere on a totem pole of tech abstraction, so the current debate seems to be over how low on that pole you should go to learn what’s applicable to what you’ll use in a tech role.

Creativity and intuition

What can’t computers do? Intuition and creativity. That’s where humans can help. We will never win the race by running faster than the machine, but we can still help it with the skills it can’t yet replicate. When you think about it, it’s a match made in heaven: the power of the machine harnessed with the creativity of the individual. Undoubtedly there is no limit to the markets that remain to be captured.

I realize there’s some irony that our willingness to work with the machines is also what causes an increase in automation, and a potential increase in unemployment for those who don’t adapt. There was a Redditor who asked if he was a scumbag because he automated his work and ended up with 95% of the entire bonus pool because other people performed poorly in comparison. There’s nothing to stop other employees from learning Ruby or Python and balancing out the bonus pool again — no CS degree required there; just creativity and cooperation from a machine.

Fortunately, Race Against the Machine isn’t a grim outlook on our jobs or standard of living if we can race alongside the machine. In 1800, 90% of all Americans worked in agriculture or farming in 1800; by 1900 41% did, and only 2% by 2000. We found more jobs and higher standards of living in the manufacturing and services industry that emerged. When we left the Industrial Revolution, we saw many more jobs as a result–not fewer.

I don’t think we’re heading towards the “end of work” as some economists would suggest. We’re experiencing the natural and healthy fluctuations of a market that is deeply starved for technical skills, or at least people who can use their creativity and intuition in unison with technology.

Jared Tame is a co-founder and mentor at Bloc, where he’s teaching people how to become web developers in 8 weeks.

The NextGen Conference takes place on May 19th at the Parc 55 Hotel in Downtown San Francisco. This conference brings together young aspiring entrepreneurs and young rock star entrepreneurs with more experienced entrepreneurs and venture capitalists.

Cory Levy, co-founder of One (http://bit.ly/pLyhvm) and the NextGen Conference, has previously planned three sold out events in Palo Alto, Stanford University and UCLA. This past conference in Palo Alto was sold out with 250 attendees and a 60+ person waiting list. Previous speakers and attendees at the NextGen Conference include: Peter Thiel (founder of PayPal and member of Facebook’s board of directors), Keith Rabois (COO of Square), Mark Suster (GRP Partners), Travis Kalanick (CEO of Uber), Scooter Braun (Justin Bieber’s manager), and more. Ashton Kutcher showed up as an attendee at the last NextGen Conference in July.

Speakers at this year’s event include: Tony Conrad (founder of About.me and True Ventures), Keith Rabois (COO of Square), Josh Elman (Greylock), Sahil Lavingia (founding team of Pinterest and founder of Gumroad), and more!

For 20% off, register now using promo code “VentureBeat”.

Startup accelerator 500 Startups announced its fourth batch of companies on Wednesday, a fun group that includes a necktie subscription service, a Dropbox-based collaboration tool for creatives, a consumer-action site currently trying to take down Big Cable, and a property-inspection iPad app.

For those who aren’t familiar with it, 500 Startups is an early-stage seed fund and incubator program that’s become a brand name over the last few years, mostly through the sheer volume of companies it’s invested in. The Mountain View, Calif.-based group invests between $25,000 to $250,000 in startups, primarily those aimed at consumers and small-to-medium-size businesses, as well as related web infrastructure services.

Its latest selection of companies is eclectic, but there are a few trends: Fashion, and help for people who are fashion-deficient, is hot — inspired no doubt by a little company called Pinterest. Education disguised as fun, specifically on iPads, is huge as well. Only seven of the 26 companies have a female co-founder. There are twelve international entries from variety of countries including Mexico, Brazil, Slovenia, India, and the Philippines, and over half are from outside the San Francisco area.

“The previous batches have always had some international presence, but that’s something that really stands out in this group,” said 500 Startups partner Christine Tsai, who told VentureBeat that they didn’t necessarily seek out companies in foreign markets. Founding partner Dave McClure also previously noted that the startup accelerator doesn’t mind looking outside its comfort zone, and has added a number of international partners to help boost its awareness.

Companies accepted into 500 startups get a chunk of funding in exchange for equity, access to a network of mentors and resources, the ability to participate in various events, and  a spot presenting in front of potential investors at the accelerator’s Demo Days conference.

500 Startups put together a short video for the new batch’s debut, inspired by the new Hunger Games movie, but we’ve created this more scannable roundup of the latest startup hopefuls. You can also see screenshots of their products in the slideshow at the bottom.

ActivityHero

This website is a directory of activities that keep kids busy while freeing up a few hours (or days or weeks) of down time for their parents. Calling itself a “Yelp for kids’ activities” the company grew out of a listing of listing summer-camps that started last year called Sign Up For Camp.com. Now it’s expanding the business to include shorter activities such as dance classes, art programs, and other after-school time-killers in its two pilot locations, the San Francisco Bay Area and Philadelphia. On the site, parents can read program descriptions, locate a program on a map, or check out user reviews.

A lot of the company’s copy is angled specifically at moms, but the assumption that fathers wouldn’t be equally interested in finding extra-curricular programs for their brood seems old-fashioned, not to mention bad business. Dads want some alone time too, you know? The company was founded by Silicon Valley vets Shilpa Dalmia, Chandini Ammineni, and Peggy Chang.

Bluefields

At first we thought this was another fantasy league startup, but were pleasantly surprised to see that it a tool for organizing real live sports teams. Using a combination of the startup’s desktop, web, and mobile apps, you can organize a your amateur soccer team, sloshball league, or quiddich playoffs. Send invites over email or text, track who’s in the lineup as people respond, create a landing page for game details with a map, and quickly let everyone know about last-minute changes or cancellations. The London-based company was founded by Andrew Crump and Piers Rollinson.

Bombfell

Getting dressed can be hard, especially for fashion-challenged dudes. Bombfell just wants to help. This is actually a startup that Silicon Valley’s hoodie-wearing hoards desperately need (perhaps for when they’re presenting their company to potential investors ahead of a major IPO). The subscription-based service asks you what you need in your closet — perhaps you want help with finding non-jeans pants, decent collared shirts, maybe even a sweater vest that brings out your eyes. A stylist will handpick the requested item from a selection of hip brands (Ben Sherman, French Connection) and talented new designers (Descendant of Thieves) and ship it to you. If you don’t like what they’ve sent, mail it back with free shipping and don’t pay anything for the clothing item. If you decide, hey, this button down makes me look pretty fly, you can keep it and Bombfell charges you a $69 flat fee.

Bombfell was started by a couple of Harvard alums, Jason Kim and Bernie Yoo. Kim has worked at Nickelodeon Games, MTV Networks, and Morgan Stanley. Yoo put in time at LOLapps, Goldman Sachs, and Microsoft, as well as Y Combinator alum Foodoro, an online marketplace for gourmet food.

CardFlick

Sometimes we’re at tech conferences or events and think, dang, how crazy is it that we still exchange paper business cards? Following in the footsteps of Bump, CardFlick is taking a stab at the virtual business-card space with a design-centric iOS app that came out last year. You can design a slick-looking virtual card using photos from your Camera Roll or Instagram and then physically flick the screen to send your card to someone else who has the app. If they don’t have it installed, you can just email, text, or tweet it. The info is automatically added to the iPhone’s Contacts app, and if someone updates their CardFlick information, the same data is automatically updated for all the people who have their card. An Android version of the app is currently in beta. Unsurprisingly given its beautiful interface, CardFlick was founded by a designer, Ketan Anjaria.

Chalkable

This tool for school is a web-based platform that helps teachers and institutions manage day-to-day tasks. There is an app store filled with compatible web-apps on a variety of middle school and high school topics. Those apps can use the Chalkable API to work with any of the service’s core features, including a shared calendar, grading tools, attendance tracking, and a custom emailing interface. For Chalkable to work best, a school needs to set it up so all teachers can take advantage of it. The cost is $10 per student a year, with half of that going into a budget for apps. The New York City based startup was founded by Michael Levy, who previously founded Entertainment Teller Machine and worked at TriSpecs Inc, and  Zoli Honig, who started the IT firm ZZ Tech and fro-yo chain Berrylicious.

Fontacto

One of this group’s international entries, Fontacto is a Google Voice-esque tool for people in Mexico and other parts of Latin America. An entrepreneur or freelancer working out of a home office or coffee shop can use a virtual Fontaco number to sound more professional, like they’re in a proper office and wearing pants. A Fontaco number can be rerouted to any landline, mobile phone, or even a Skype account. You’re not limited to a number for your location, you can get digits for other cities and give the impression of being everywhere at once. The startup was founded by a team of four: Daniel Martinez, Joaquin Martinez, Jose Antonio del Rio, and Ricardo Cacique.

Groupiter

This new collaborative offering piggybacks on wildly popular cloud sharing-tool Dropbox. Groupiter adds real-time conversations to file sharing. Upload that power-point deck and sit back while your co-workers discuss the pros and cons of using Comic Sans on the title page. Share a few photos of wedding dresses and get immediate opinions from a sibling overseas. The company is still keeping details under wraps and is not currently offering the tool to the general public (you can sign up on the homepage to be on the invite list), so its hard to tell how much it has in common with similar offerings in the space such as 37Signals’ Campfire. It will most likely be aimed at more creative types and workflows, and founder Chris Dyball (formerly of Getty Images and Surfing Magazine) said recently on Twitter “we’ve been working with leading creatives at Warner, Sony, Lego, Hulu.”

Happy Inspector

When you think “property inspections,” the word “happy” might not immediately pop into your mind. If you are a property manager who has to do these types of tedious inspections for a living, being able to do them on a slick iPad app is probably very happy-making indeed. You can fill out the default fields (the kitchen sing is good/fair/dirty/broken) on the checklist or make your own custom entries, and attach an image to each one. When you’re done with a report you can automatically generate a PDF for the house, apartment, TV studio, ice cream parlor, or hospital and email it to any relevant parties. The app is free, but each inspection will cost $1.79, or you can inspect your little heart out with the unlimted $45 a month plan. The company has two offices in Australia and was founded by Jindou Lee, Jindou Lee, and Andrew Mackenzie-Ross.

Ingresse

This ticketing and events-discovery site lets organizers or performers add their own events, sells tickets, and shows attendees which of their friends will be at the same concert, art show, conference, or football match. It will even share where their buddies are seated. After collecting a bit of information from a user, the site will even be able to recommend similar events they might enjoy. Afterwards, attendees can leave reviews or comments about an event. The company is based in Brazil, where the founders saw an opportunity to provide much-needed electronic-ticketing technology to ticket vendors. The co-founders are Gabriel Benarrós, who studied behavioral economics at Stanford, Sébastien Robaszkiewicz, who studied Computer Science at Stanford and Marcelo Henrique.

Monogram

One of a number of fashion-related startups in this group, Monogram is a shopping app for the iPad that turns an algorithm into a personal stylist. Similar to popular news-reading apps Flipboard and Zite, the app learns what brands and fashions you like over time and edits down the content it delivers to fit your tastes. However, the Monogram founders were smart enough to add some humans to the mix because “machines alone have no sense of style/trends and do a poor job of fashion recommendations.” The app groups things into categories such as price (purses under $500? We’ll take four!) and new, or by store or flash sale site, such as Gilt Group. Leo Chen and Josh Chen aren’t just co-founders of the Mountain View-based company, they’re also roommates! The two met on a Geeks on a Plane trip and have another startup together, Packagetrackr, which covers their rent with AdSense money.

PocketOffice

This iPhone app wants to make it easier for small businesses to communicate with their clients or other business contacts, improving customer retention. Using the app, you can connect with people using text messages, email, Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. You can have one-on-one conversations or send out mass promotions. The app will automatically address each email to the individual person, saving you the pain and misery of a mail merge. It can also be used to encourage referrals and book appointment slots. The service costs $25 a month after a free one-month trial period. PocketOffice is a San Francisco based startup, co-founded by Alan Wells (formerly of Zynga, Affinity Labs, and Nextive) and Glenn Allen (a co-founder of OpenTable).

PublikDemand

Firing off an angry rant to a customer service email address can be satisfying, but does it really make a difference? PublikDemand helps organize your outrage against companies, union-style. Customers can band together to make demands such as taking on Comcast for violating net neutrality. To up the stakes, if a company doesn’t comply PublikDemand will work with its competitors on exclusive offers. Naturally, the idea was inspired by customer service black hole Time Warner Cable, which charged Courtney Powell hundreds of dollars for a router they claimed she didn’t return. Powell is now CEO of PublikDemand, which she started in Austin, Texas with co-founders Jim England, A.T. Fouty, and Richard McClellan.

Sqoot

After last year’s deluge of daily deals sites, many of us were suffering daily deals fatigue. (Group-yawn, amirite?) Sqoot has a different approach that may bring a little life, and money, back to the genre. Using the Sqoot API, apps can integrate daily deals offers into their existing apps, giving them a way to make some money. For $99 a month, apps can keep 50 percent of the revenue on any deals sold through their app. It’s a nice alternative for any publisher or developer with a location-based app. The Chicago-based co-founders Mo Yehia and Avand Amiri are still distancing the company from a gross bit of sexism while promoting a hackathon earlier this year.

Storypanda

Storypanda makes interactive kid’s stories for the iPad. The app acts as a bookshelf and marketplace for Storypanda books — the selection will be updated monthly. A modern day choose-your-own-adventure book, kids can re-mix their favorite stories and share the results with their friends. The Vancouver-based startup’s co-founders, James Chutter and Pavel Bains, bring an impressive amount of experience in interactive entertainment, including time in the game, film, and TV industries.

Teamly

Work productivity-booster Teamly starts by having employees enter their top five priorities for the day and month, and then sends them helpful daily email reminders. Managers can track what their minions are working on and see the latest status of any tasks, as well as charts showing their productivity over time. The micromanagement app claims it will help ease micromanagement, perhaps by making it an unspoken, passive sort of activity. If unspoken isn’t your management style, you can leave comments on different tasks (“Stop reading MSNnow and finish that feature. -Dylan Tweney”). Teamly will only let you set a handful of goals, which can help you focus on what’s important. The UK-based startup was founded by Scott Allison, Matthew Berman, and Edward Robertshaw, who met in Omaha, Nebraska.

TeliportMe

TeleportMe is a panorama photography app for Android smartphones. The app lets you take large panoramic images with your phone’s camera and stitches them together. The final product can be shared on Twitter or Facebook, or though TeliportMe where you can set up a profile for yourself. The fun part is browsing other users’ panoramas from around the world. The app will compete against similar products, Photosynth and TourWrist. TeliportMe was founded in Bangalore, India by Vineet Devaiah and Abhinav Asthana.

TenderTree

This startup connects people who need help with older or infirm family members with qualified caregivers in their area. Trusting a stranger to take care of a loved one can be stressful, but TenderTree helps by carefully screening the candidates for you. Caregivers are subjected to a federal background check and interviews with previous clients before they can even be listed. Once you hire someone, the service helps with the little details like managing payment, contracts, and tracking hours. The service is in beta in San Francisco, but will be rolling out to other cities in the near future. The Bay Area company was founded by Andy Agrawal and Dana Wu.

Tie Society

When you hear the name “Netflix” you immediately think of ties, right? Us too, which is why Tie Society is offering online rentals for men’s neck ties. As the company’s founders explain it, not every upstanding man has the opportunity to buy a new tie for every event. Tie Society allows them to choose between ties of all colors, materials, and widths to keep up with the trends no matter how small their closet is. With only 300 ties for all those necks, we hope they will grow their inventory as they grow their customer base. (The Tie Society customer makes us think of that Tea Party YouTube video created by Smirnoff Iced Tea. It features Martha’s-Vineyard-20-somethings, swaddled in seersucker and cable knit, “chillin’” on golf courses.)

Timbuktu Labs

This iPad app is an interactive magazine packed with a variety of content to keep your kids entertained while they’re learning. The issues are filled with great design, things to read, quizzes, photos, simple games, and videos. For example, in the Night issue there’s an article shows you how to make shadow puppets, tips on sleeping tight, and fun stats and facts. The Italy-based company was started by Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo.

TokyoOtakuMode

Representing Japan, this year-old news site (called TOM for short) has the latest on Manga and Anime culture. Currently, all of the action is taking place on the startup’s Facebook page, which has 3.7 million likes. Our favorite detail about TOM is that once a month everyone comes to work in full cosplay getups. We hope they’ve carried that tradition over to 500 Startups.

Toshl

You hate tracking your finances, you love playing games. What if your bank accounts were a little more game-like? Toshl wants to make finance and budgeting fun, and it uses actual adorable monster characters to do it. Impressively, the app is available on most every phone platform, including BlackBerry and Nokia. The Slovenia-based company was founded by Matic Bitenc and Miha Hribar.

TwitMusic

This startup out of the Philippines gives musicians a way to promote their music on Twitter by auto-tweeting songs and directing followers to a special landing page for each tune. The page is optimized for maximum sharing, hashtags and all, to help your ditty go full Rebecca Black (only good, hopefully). The company already has some pretty impressive musicians using it, including Duran Duran, Bow Wow, Jason Mraz, and Brian Adams, who released a single exclusively on the platform. The company goes up against similar audio-hosting service SoundCloud. It was founded by Stefano Fazzini and Christian Fazzini.

UmbaBox

Another monthly delivery service, UmbaBox is packing up handmade products for the ladies who love Etsy. Each shipment contains one to three products such as jewelery, bath products, or home decor. You never know what you’re going to get, but the crew at UmbaBox is handpicking the goods to prevent any Regretsy-worthy shipments. Memberships costs $23 a month, with a minimum three-month commitment. The Washington D.C.-based company was founded by Lauren Thorp.

Uscoop

College kids might spend most of their time in sweatpants, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have style, right? Uscoop is another fashion-deals site, this time just for kids in college, who have their own micro-trends to stay up on. Instead of using an algorithm or stylist, Uscoop looks at what college kids are wearing to give other college kids an idea of what college kids are wearing. The D.C.-based company peddles “all-American” brands and was founded by Jocelyn Gailliot, Madeline Moore, and September Rinnier.

Wanderable

Registering for kitchen wares is so old school. Hip young couples getting married want to pool their guests money for exotic honeymoons instead. Traveler’s Joy has been the go-to site for honeymoon registries for years. Wanderable hopes to make a dent in its market share by giving users a bit more control over the design of their landing pages, and by adding a community layer so newlyweds can share (the g-rated) details about what they did on their honeymoon. The co-founders, Marcela Miyazawa and Jenny Chen, met when they were assigned as roommates their freshman year at Stanford.

Yogome

Finally, Yogome disguises learning about topics such as math, languages, recycling, and health, in a cool game that pits a squad of super-smart heroes against the evil Queen Ignorantia. Each game is a stand-alone iPad app with bright comic-book-like illustrations. The Mexico-based startup was founded by Manolo Diaz and Alberto Colin.

Additional reporting by Tom Cheredar and Meghan Kelly.

Mechanical Turk is Amazon’s army of pieceworkers, ready to help you blend computation with human tasks in web apps.

What I didn’t know is that MTurk is also a powerful tool for testing and refining ideas. I learned this while interviewing Dan Shapiro onstage at the Founder Showcase last week.

Shapiro is a remarkably successful entrepreneur. His second startup, Sparkbuy, was acquired by Google just six months after he launched it.

That’s after a successful go with his first startup, Ontela, which merged with Photobucket in 2009. That company took a relatively pokey four years to arrive at an exit. Of course, by most people’s standards, four years would be plenty fast.

But what makes Shapiro’s approach to starting companies so interesting is the thorough, pragmatic approach he takes to market testing.

“I’m always skeptical when I get too in love with an idea,” Shapiro told me.

So when he had an idea for making it easier to find and compare electronics on e-commerce sites, he turned to Mechanical Turk to test and refine the plan.

(It also helped that a Google business development executive he met on a plane expressed interest in the idea, but “that was just a tiny, positive indicator in the grand scheme of things,” Shapiro said.)

Mechanical Turk, a project Amazon.com started in 2005, is a brilliant fusion of human labor and programmatic computation. Using it, you can incorporate human effort into your web-based software simply by making an API call. It’s no surprise that entrepreneurs are excited about using MTurk as a low-cost way of recruiting help, particularly for repetitive tasks.

But it’s also a great, low-cost tool for doing surveys, and that’s exactly what Shapiro did.

The first part of his surveys is always the set of eight questions from the U.S. Census. That helps him determine demographics and figure out how “normal” his respondents are.

Then he follows up by asking them a ton of questions.

First, Shapiro asked 100 people to describe a laptop as if their friend was going to buy it for them. Then he analyzed the responses, categorized all the words they used, and did a second survey to measure how important each of those words were. After that, he did follow-up interviews.

What Shapiro found was that the #1 criterion for laptop shoppers was price (no surprise there). But the #2 criterion was quantity of RAM, which was a bit surprising because it is an unusually geeky metric. Who really cares how much RAM their notebook has, after all, except really techie people? After doing some interviews, he realized that what people really wanted was speed, but there was no way on electronics sites to specify “I want a laptop that’s fast enough to run PhotoShop.”

Using these answers from a series of surveys, Shapiro was able to craft a business plan for a company that would let you shop for laptops based on criteria people actually care about, such as the ability to run PhotoShop, or weight, or color. What’s more, he knew from his market research that these were the criteria customers would be most likely to respond to, so his business idea was essentially pre-tested.

“I love MTurk,” Shapiro said.

He also used MTurk in the course of business, not just for business plan testing. For example, Sparkbuy’s database of laptop attributes was built in part by an army of “Turkers.” And at Ontela, he’d put out surveys with 100 or more questions about the wireless industry, using them as a valuable market research tool.

The price is almost ridiculously low. Shapiro said he would pay about 26 cents apiece for people to answer these 100-question surveys.

Shapiro’s not a solitary genius — others, particularly academics, have discovered the value of using MTurk in research. In 2009, someone named Alex Frakking described in detail how he used Mechanical Turk for conducting surveys. He paid a bit more: about 3 cents per survey question, in an attempt to keep the hourly rate between $8 and $12.

Frakking makes an interesting point, which is that the very people who fill out your survey on MTurk might turn into some of your earliest customers. You can make that easier by letting them opt-in to a mailing list so you can contact them when you launch. “In the last big survey I did, about 20 percent of respondents gave their email for just that purpose, meaning the survey can pay for itself in leads,” Frakking concludes.

Are Mechanical Turk surveys statistically valid? Absolutely — or at least as valid as phone or website surveys.

“The funny thing is,” Shapiro told me onstage, “if you actually look at the methodologies behind the way everyone else does it, it’s just the same.”

In a 2010 study, researchers compared surveys done with MTurk to those done using the traditional sociological pool, Midwestern university students, and with people found on Internet discussion boards. MTurk compared favorably.

The study concluded “experimenters should consider Mechanical Turk as a viable alternative for data collection,” although it warned that subjects are susceptible to the same kinds of experimental bias found in other arenas. The takeaway: Design your surveys carefully.

Also, the authors warn, unlike undergraduates, MTurk workers aren’t replaced with a new crop every few years, so there’s the potential for long-term relationships between surveyers and those surveyed. So don’t be a jerk: Treat your survey respondents right and they’ll be there for you, potentially for years.

For people who are interested in following Shapiro’s lead, there’s an open-source set of tools for doing MTurk surveys, called Lime Survey. And IT World published a detailed list of tips on running experiments or surveys on MTurk.

The rest of my discussion with Shapiro covered topics such as who should raise venture capital (not everyone), his experiences selling Sparkbuy and merging Ontela and Photobucket, and his thoughts on crowdfunding. It’s worth a listen. The whole 30-minute interview is below.

Mechanical Turk image: Wikipedia

Traditional hiring is extremely painful. But with the explosion of online work, businesses are breaking the limitations of geography, and they aren’t going back — 76% of businesses characterize online work as a long-term strategy, and 90% say it makes their business more competitive, according to data released by my company, oDesk, a few weeks ago based on a survey of over 7,000 of our clients.

It’s easy to see why: Access to talent is a critical factor in accelerating success, especially for smaller businesses. MCF Technology Solutions, a development service for cloud-based platforms, is one of millions of startups leveraging online work for this reason. MCF started with just a few designers hired online, then turned to software developers, project managers, assistants, and more. Its 15-person on-premise staff is now empowered by 19 online team members, and CEO Govind Davis couldn’t imagine it any other way. Wiith online work “I have an army,” he said. “It is a huge breakthrough for us in allowing us to grow.”

According to Staffing Industry Analysts, 50% of the Fortune 100 workforce will be contingent workers by 2020, and there is no reason most of these workers shouldn’t be working online rather than on premise.

To stay competitive, it is imperative that businesses embrace this new working model. But when applicants are no longer sitting across the table from you, how do you assess whether they are a fit for your business? Here’s how:

1) Go above and beyond your typical job description to attract the most qualified talent

Having a global pool — instead of being limited to only candidates within commuting distance — increases your chances of finding ideal talent for your role. And when workers have literally a world of jobs to choose from, the ones who actually pursue yours are more aligned with your needs.

But to tap into this larger pool of motivated candidates, you need a job description that’s even more clear than usual, to increase the chances that the right candidates with the right qualifications find your job. The best descriptions not only outline skills required, exact objectives, and any key context, but also expectations for deliverables.

2) Single out exceptional communicators

As with local hiring, we typically look at four key dimensions when determining fit:

1. Personal characteristics
2. Motivation
3. Skills
4. Knowledge

However, some additional characteristics are particularly important online. Exceptional communication skills are especially critical — the best online workers check in frequently, ask smart questions, and skillfully articulate ideas and concerns. An ability to understand projects holistically is also key, as it allows online workers to foresee potential problems and propose new ideas.

3) Test drive your favorite candidates

For online hiring, it’s common to start with a test project — a small assignment, requiring only a few hours of work, that is representative of the larger project and assesses the skills required. Test projects are low risk and extremely informative. You may even want to test multiple candidates and hire the best fit. Take your time in making the final hire, since you can complete the entire process — from fielding applications to making an offer — in just a few days.

What are you waiting for?

The world of work is changing for good, and clinging to hiring processes that worked in the past will quickly render your business extinct. Like anything new, you have to invest time in online hiring to figure out what works best for your business, but starting now will help you build a trusted online team at your own pace. You will be amazed by what you can accomplish when talent is your only criterion and geography is merely an afterthought.

Gary Swart is CEO of oDesk and has more than 17 years of experience in the enterprise software market. Prior to oDesk, he was VP of Worldwide Sales for Intellibank and Business Unit Executive for IBM’s Rational Software Product Group.

[Top image credit: Andresr/Shutterstock]

Venture capital investment is hitting the skids in China, the world’s largest Internet market.

VC investment fell to its lowest level in six years this quarter, as reported by Dow Jones VentureSource. A slew of unprofitable companies going public have deterred overseas investors, who are no longer pouring funds into Chinese start-ups.

“The reason the venture capital market dried up is because the exit market is not there,” said Tim Chang, managing director at Mayfield Fund.

According to the report, this quarter saw steep declines: a 39 percent decline in deals and a 56 percent decrease in VC investment compared to the first quarter of 2011. Information technology and consumer internet services have taken the biggest hit.

“The market has stopped believing in the fast-growth-only story of China,” said Chang.

The rise and fall of China’s entrepreneurial economy is a classic cautionary “get rich quick” tale. As early as 2003, highly profitable tech companies like Baidu, the Google of China, whet investors’ appetites. Valuations were dirt cheap; Chinese companies went public and did very well. Overseas investors smelled opportunity and by mid-2010, according to Chang, “China went into crazy, hyper bubble mode.”

Filled with confidence, Chinese entrepreneurs would joke that they only needed to scrawl a business plan onto a napkin to raise funds. E-commerce companies were the darling of the Chinese VC market; for every Zappos or Groupon in the U.S., there were thousands of Chinese copycat companies vying for domination.

Why did the bubble burst? David Chao, co-founder and general partner at DCM, said that while the Chinese economy has stagnated (the GDP growth rate slowed down significantly in the second half of 2011), international funds are reallocating some of their investments back to the rebounding U.S. market. DCM, an early stage VC firm has been investing in Chinese companies since 1999, recently taking Chinese companies like Renren, Dandang and Vipshop public in the US.

Additionally, a series of recent accounting scandals in China, leading to trading halts and lawsuits, has kept investors at bay.

“Accounting fraud committed by some Chinese public companies and corporate governance issues have made foreign investors lose confidence in Chinese concerns,” said Chao.

Investors point the finger at management teams in China, who did not set expectations and prioritize investor relations during the height of the IPO frenzy.

Still, both Chang and Chao remain cautiously optimistic about the long-term investment prospects.

The economy will bounce back when investors see a world-class company go public in China. Chang points to several start-ups that are poised for success: Vancl, the Chinese equivalent of Banana Republic, recently received a sky-high valuation recently; while 360buy, another e-commerce company, raised $1.5 billion in 2011, and continues to dominate the market.

According to Chao, entrepreneurial zeal has not abated and there is still a buoyant market in China.

“We think smartphone and iPad, health IT services, and cloud-related deals in China continue to be very interesting places to look for deals,” he said.

Shanghai skyline photo via Arend Vermazeren/Flickr

Law offices bring to mind power suits, closed-door corner offices, serious conversations, and clients getting billed for every minute of advice. Collaborative work spaces with lounges, foosball tables, communal desks, and fun networking events are the bailiwick of hoodie-filled startups. But what if a law firm started acting like a startup?

Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, one of Silicon Valley’s top law firms for startups, is trying to be a bit more like the hip, lean companies it represents by opening a new open and collaborative workspace in San Francisco’s tech-heavy SOMA district.

“One of the goals is for it not to look like an office you’d expect to see us in. Look more like the kind of space our clients are used to working in,” partner Todd Carpenter told VentureBeat.

Partners Mark Reinstra, Rachel Proffitt, and Carpenter (pictured above, left to right) gave us a tour of the raw space ahead of their move-in. The bright ground floor office is mostly one big open space, with large street-facing windows, exposed brick walls and thick wood beams, a spot for the aforementioned foosball table and lounge, and a handful of offices with doors for confidential meetings. It’s in walking distance of many of San Francisco’s big tech players, as well as AT&T Park, the new Lucky Strikes bowling alley, and hipster chicken-and-waffle eatery Little Skillet.

The office will serve some traditional lawyery purposes — clients in the area can come in to meet with their attorneys. But the plan is for it to act more as a community hub where entrepreneurs, lawyers, angel investors, and venture capitalists can mingle and maybe even make deals. It’s not just for clients, but for any lean-startup entrepreneur who could use some advice (a.k.a. potential clients).

“We change as our clients change, and right now they are raising small amounts of money very quickly, from a totally different subset of investors than they were ten, twenty years ago,” said Proffitt. “We need to be in a place to help them.”

More and more startups are doing things on the cheap — getting smaller infusions of capital, working in the cloud and without a pricy central office space. Wilson wants to step in and help these lean startups with facilities for board and client meetings, presentations, or just a place to plop down and get some work done. The partners also plan on hosting bi-monthly events, workshops, office-hours, and other events that are “designed to bring the community together.”

This is the firm’s third Bay Area location, but the tiny satellite office will only house three lawyers full-time to start, with a revolving cast of visiting attorneys from the other offices in Palo Alto and downtown San Francisco, and no non-lawyer staff (that means they’re making their own copies and coffees). It’s a small-scale experiment (they say its in “beta”) for the 50-year-old firm, which has 180 partners total, 1,200 employees, and 11 offices in the U.S., Asia, and Europe.

In a classic startup touch, the partners are in negotiations for a large stuffed grizzly bear for the space.

NOTE: Names have been changed out of respect for “Bob’s” privacy

Most people would expect the billionaire owner of an NBA team to be kind of a jerk.

While I had spoken to Bob on the phone some months before and he seemed like a nice guy, I was still taken aback by the email that popped up in my inbox.

“Hi Francisco, I’ll be in L.A. next week and would love to get together. I’ll have a car and can drive to you if that’s easier for you.”

I thought back to all the random jokers who expected me to drive in from the suburbs or showed up late for appointments and could scarcely believe that this master of the universe was offering to drive out to meet me.

That was last September and I’ve spent the past eight months thinking about how Bob treated me, how he treated the waiter at breakfast, and how modest and down to earth he was.

I thought about what a stark contrast he was to so many of the self promoters that pass for heroes in the tech community.

Have we just been fooled by charlatans skilled at wrapping themselves in disguises of character, or does the fault lie with our own choices of who and what we believe worthy of respect?

As much as I’d like to point fingers at those that I consider imposters, I believe the fault lies in our own failure to discern actual strength of character from those who are simply skilled at self-presentation.

I once gave a talk at Harvard Business School where I asked the students, “Why are you friends with the people you’re friends with? Is it because they’re rich?” They all shook their heads “no.”

I’d like to think that their answer applies to all of us; and if I’m right, why then do we choose our friends based on qualities other than wealth while we seem to choose our heroes based almost entirely on wealth?

Shouldn’t our heroes be held to at least the same standards as our friends when it comes to character? Or has money become the great cleanser that can wash away transgressions of selfishness and vanity?

As much as I think it’s wrong to idolize money alone, I suppose it’s better than blindly looking up to inexplicable traits of popularity.

Just because someone is good at performing on stage at conferences or blogging about the secret to working less, being thinner, or acting bolder, doesn’t mean they are deserving of our respect. Who are they and what have they really accomplished beneath the veneer of claimed expertise?

There’s a scene at the beginning of Schindler’s List when the main character, Oskar, is still a proud Nazi seeking only to profit from the plight of the Jews. He says, “I’ll do what I’m good at, not the work! Not the work! The presentation.”

Today it seems as though “the presentation” is the only thing that matters and that popularity for the sake of popularity is enough to make you a person of honor.

Some of you are probably wondering what this has to do with technology or entrepreneurship. For better or for worse, much of the nation and the world look to the technology community as a beacon of the future. Unlike other industries such as oil, tech is seen as relatively pure and uncorrupt. Many feel we hold the keys to economic revival.

It isn’t unreasonable to reject these labels since none of us actually asked to bear such a heavy cross. But if we are to lead the way, I believe what and who we admire set the path for what we do. If we continue to worship at the altar of personality over character, then we should also face the truth that any admiration of the tech world as being somehow better is nothing more than a case of the blind leading the blind.

Perhaps this post is unfair and I’m simply projecting my hopes for the technology community on to everyone. Perhaps I expect too much. I am, after all, only “in tech” because I believed this was the best place to find smart people. Perhaps I was wrong.

Or, as entrepreneurs, perhaps we should hold our heroes to higher standards of character.

Francisco Dao is the founder of 50Kings, a private community for technology and media innovators. He is a former leadership columnist for Inc.com, a lifelong entrepreneur, author and former stand-up comic.

Top image courtesy of olly, Shutterstock

It’s conventional wisdom (and true) that an entrepreneur who has failed is often better for the experience. But failing badly can hurt your reputation and, in the worst case, saddle you with personal liabilities. We’ll address two major sources of trouble: Unpaid payroll taxes and fiduciary duties.

Pay the Payroll Taxes!
Fortunately, officers and directors of a failing company usually are not liable for the company’s debts. There are some exceptions, and it is crucial to be aware of them. The major exception is payroll and withholding taxes. The responsible officers of a company are personally liable for these. You must pay the payroll taxes and you must pay any amounts withheld from employees’ wages. The government will pursue this liability aggressively. Another exception is employee claims for wages, severance, sick pay, vacation pay, and holiday pay. In some circumstances, corporate principals can be liable for failure to pay employees. Paying your employees their final paychecks (and paying the government the related taxes) will avoid these liabilities.

Notice Conflicts of Interest and Deal with them
You’ve probably heard of fiduciary duties. Directors and officers of a company owe them to the company and, in certain circumstances, its shareholders or creditors. In a growing company, fiduciary duties are usually (and rightly) far down the list of concerns for the officers and directors. That changes when you’re shutting down or selling at a price that won’t make everyone happy. First, when people are unhappy (and especially when some people are more unhappy than others), they tend to point fingers and find fault. Second, a struggling business often makes desperate deals to keep going. These deals can involve difficult conflicts of interest.

Fiduciary duty is a simple concept: When you agree to act in someone else’s interest rather than your own, you have a duty to do just that. The problems mostly concern conflicts of interest rather than outright dishonesty. The law recognizes that people’s decisions are strongly but unconsciously influenced by self-interest. So if you make a corporate decision in which you have a personal interest, the law usually assumes that you decided in your favor and against the corporation’s interests, even if you don’t think you did. The trick is to notice conflicts and find a way to take yourself out of the decision or get someone disinterested to help with it in advance.

So as you wind down, keep a look out for conflicts: the “circling the drain” convertible debt round from a few principle investors, the sale of the company’s IP to one of the founders who’s willing to put up some cash for it and then have another try at commercialization, the sale of the company that will get some money to the preferred stock but none to the common.

We’ll spare you the hellish legal detail. Get good legal advice if you’re facing a conflicted decision. But two simple rules can save you a lot of legal bills:

Get Consensus
First, try to get consensus, after complete disclosure. If everyone knows what’s happening and agrees, it’s hard for them to complain later. There are two major problems with this approach. First, it’s hard to get consensus. Try. Don’t assume that people want to fight. There’s usually not much at stake, and most of the people involved are repeat players — this isn’t their last rodeo and they care about their reputations. If you can’t get everyone, it can help to get nearly everyone, if you get the most likely troublemakers.

The second problem with getting everybody on board is figuring out who “everybody” is. In a faltering startup, “everyone” usually means all shareholders (preferred and common) and all lenders (e.g. convertible note holders). You might want to reach out to other known creditors, such as landlords. Think expansively. You’re trying to cover yourself. So the old adage that it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission doesn’t apply.
If you’re going for consensus, get a lawyer. The point is to make sure people can’t complain later, so it’s important to get the wording and procedure right.

Stay Independent
The old adage “He who pays the piper calls the tune” doesn’t apply to corporate fiduciaries. Directors and officers talk about answering to the shareholders, but the law is clear: They make their own decisions in the interests of the corporation. Corporate directors don’t take orders from anyone. Corporate officers answer only to the board and superior officers.
In normal times, this point is theoretical. If directors and officers don’t listen to major shareholders, they’re replaced. When the going gets tough and the participants’ interests diverge, however, deciding independently can be crucial. A majority shareholder who wants to buy the corporate assets for nothing may scream at you that you have to do what she says because she controls the corporation. So remember that the very worst that shareholder can do to you is remove you from office. If you think about it, that’s usually a reward, not a punishment, in the context of a failing business. With a good employment contract, you might even snag a payday as you leave. By contrast, giving in could get you sued. It will feel uncomfortable, but stiffen your spine and act the way the law expects: Decide independently.

This gets us to the final question of shutting down a business. How do you wind everything down?

Four Ways Out
There are four ways to close up shop. We’ll give a general idea of how things work, but this is not a safe DIY project. Get a lawyer to help you.

1. Walk Away. One way to deal with a failed company is to walk away. If the company has minimal assets and minimal creditors, this approach can work. But if there are assets or creditors, it can leave the directors with liability (for failing to do their jobs), so it is not desirable.

That brings us to the other three ways:

2. Bankruptcy. Bankruptcy is a court proceeding. In a “chapter 7” bankruptcy, a trustee takes over and liquidates. In a “chapter 11” bankruptcy, management remains in control under court supervision. The benefit of bankruptcy is that it stops all lawsuits and creditor collection. It also allows the company to sell assets free of liens and creditors’ claims, which can increase the sales price. Bankruptcy also allows the company, with court approval, to assign certain contracts without the other contracting party’s consent. Finally, shareholder approval is not required to file bankruptcy or to sell assets in the bankruptcy. The downside of bankruptcy is that it can be a long, expensive, and bureaucratic process.

3. Assignment for the Benefit of Creditors. Assignments for the benefit of creditors (“ABC’s”) are similar to bankruptcy. In California, an ABC is a private proceeding, so no court is involved. In an ABC, the company transfers its assets to a neutral third-party in trust for creditors. The assignee sells the assets and pays the proceeds to creditors. ABC’s offer speed and flexibility. The ABC and the assignee’s asset sale are often simultaneous, avoiding any interruption in an ongoing business and preserving the going concern value. An ABC also usually costs much less than a bankruptcy. Finally, there is much less publicity. On the downside, an ABC requires shareholder approval, which can be cumbersome, and the assignee can’t sell the assets free of claims. So an ABC is best if there’s a buyer willing to proceed without a 363 sale.

ABC’s are often used to sell the company’s assets to insiders. Insider purchases raise red flags because they involve divided loyalties. The officers or directors of the seller have a duty to maximize the sales price. But if the same people are also buying, they have an incentive to underpay.

Accusations of a breach of fiduciary duty are a definite risk. An insider buyer can sometimes inherit some of the failed company’s liabilities as a “successor” to its business, if the buyer is a “mere continuation” (i.e. basically the same people using the same assets to operate the same business), or if the transaction is for the fraudulent purpose of escaping the seller’s debts.

Finally, a buyer of assets from a failed company can be exposed to claims to claw back the assets as a fraudulent conveyance. Under fraudulent conveyance law, the failed company’s creditors or its bankruptcy trustee can claw back assets transferred for less than reasonably equivalent value when it was insolvent or lacked adequate capital. The reach back period is two years under bankruptcy law and can be as much as six years under state law. Value is arguable, so fraudulent conveyance law enables the company’s creditors to surface with claims years later.

An ABC with an independent assignee can help address these concerns because the assignee can independently evaluate the fairness of the insider transaction. The assignee can market the assets to other bidders or get an appraisal to validate the price offered by the insiders. Finally, the ABC insulates the buyer against fraudulent conveyance claw backs. An ABC does not offer as high a degree of protection as a 363 sale in bankruptcy but often will be good enough, especially where the sales price is not high enough to justify the expense of bankruptcy.

4. Dissolution. Dissolution means the corporation distributes its assets and ceases to exist. Dissolution (without a prior bankruptcy or ABC) is best when there are enough assets to address known liabilities. We’ll discuss dissolution under Delaware law (which governs most venture-backed startups), but remember that state laws and company documents vary.

There are two basic ways to dissolve a corporation: The board can dissolve by itself, or it can get court approval. Either way, the goal is to pay all known claims, provide for disputed and uncertain claims, give notice to anyone known to have a potential claim, and wait some time for claimants to appear. You always have to wait at least three years before you’re done, but the actual work is usually quicker.

Most liquidating corporations, especially failing startups, don’t go the court route because it’s expensive and slow. The advantage is that court approval can insulate the directors and shareholders from claims they improperly distributed the corporation’s assets and can force resolution of potential claims. But a contested dissolution can be as slow and expensive as a bankruptcy, and bankruptcy provides better protection.

The Confidence to Move On
No one enjoys failing. But doing it right can avoid future problems and enable you to move on. As you start your next venture, you want the freedom to keep your eyes on the road ahead and the horizon beyond, not the rearview mirror.

Ethan Stone is a transactional lawyer, focused on early-stage entrepreneurial companies. He represents clients in company formation and financing (company and investor-side), mergers and acquisitions, technology transactions, executive employment agreements and other transactions. He writes the Stone Business Law Blog.

Bennett Young is a partner at Jeffer, Mangels, Butler & Mitchell focused on insolvency matters. He represents financially distressed companies, their investors and creditors in workouts, restructurings, bankruptcy and related litigation. He also represents buyers of distressed companies.

[Top image credit: mypokcik/Shutterstock]