What began as a social gathering for like-minded entrepreneurs and VCs has evolved into one of the Valley's most dynamic accelerators. Meet the man with the connections, Saeed Amidi.

When international entrepreneurs want a shot at Silicon Valley stardom, they call on Saeed Amidi.

The angel investor is the son of Amir Amidi, who owned the Medallion Rug Gallery where fellow VC Pejman Nozad famously built up his contacts. And his ties to the tech hub span 35 years. As co-founder of the investment firm Amidzad Investments, Amidi has the expertise and deep pockets to show for it.

Since 2006, Amidi's passion project has been Plug and Play, an international network that's accelerated 1,200 start-ups and collectively raised more than $1 billion in venture capital. Last year, the organization made 62 investments, while helping 150 start-ups from Silicon Valley and another 100 from abroad find resources and make connections.

Helping foreigners get their foot in the door is perhaps what Amidi, an Iranian exile, does best. During their time at Plug and Play, which Amidi describes as a sort of "start-up university," ambitious entepreneurs learn the ropes of launching a business from those who know it best: veteran VCs and serial entrepreneurs. The most promising start-ups get to pitch during Plug and Play's Expo Event, which wrapped up last weekend.

Plug and Play vies with the likes of Y Combinator and TechStars for talent, but it boasts a fair share of big names on its roster: Lending Club, which has funded $1.6 billion in consumer loans, and Zong, a mobile payment start-up founded by PayPal President David Marcus that sold to eBay for $240 million. What's more, Plug and Play has become synomous with "international talent," not a small feat in hyper-competitive tech land.

I spoke with Amidi by phone about what makes a great pitch, why he loves nurturing start-ups, and why the Silicon Valley bubble isn't going to burst in his lifetime.

How did Plug and Play get started?
We started by investing in companies that were leasing space from us, like PayPal and Andy Rubin's Danger. For 12 years, we used to invest for fun and then Plug and Play got started about seven years ago, in 2006.

Did you always have an international focus?
The main objective for me is finding a great investment. We found the companies that are in Palo Alto are already connected. They didn't need our help as much as the companies that may be just as good but are not in Silicon Valley. We love to participate in the seed round, but more importantly, we like to be part of their success. It increases the value of our investment.

What compels you to invest in a start-up?
It's the passion, the intelligence, and the team. If I like the team and feel they are brilliant and passionate, I don't even care about the idea. The second thing is what idea they are going after. Is it something that can scale? Something that is missing in the market? This is much easier to do with a serial entrepreneur, but a lot of the entrepreneurs we work with are first-timers, so you have to check out what they are focusing on. Can it be a big business?

We see what they have done in the last three, six, or twelve years. If they haven't put in a lot of sweat equity and don't have a product or prototype, we tell them to come back later when they do.

Tell me about the environment at Plug and Play.
We host 300 companies in one building. If a start-up is local, they stay with us for two years. If not, they stay for three months. They go through something called start-up university, where we show 20 case studies on average from 20 entrepreneurs who have gone on the same journey before. It's done professionally and casually. The entrepreneurs who stay three months meet about 20 other entrepreneurs who have raised money, exited, failed, and can explain why they've failed. Most of what they learn, they learn from other entrepreneurs.

Where do they stay if they're international?
We got a couple apartments years ago, but it was too much of a headache, so now I tell them, "You're the entrepreneur, figure it out. Rent a room from AirBnB or Craigslist."

What's your typical day like?
My goal every day is to meet with four startups and then I usually like to have a meeting with one or two investors. That translates to one investment a week. Each company we're looking at is in a different stage.

Why is Silicon Valley so valuable to entrepreneurs?
Some people were worried during the downturn that Silicon Valley might lose its charm, but I really think that if you want to be serious about being in movies, the best place to be is Hollywood, and I feel the same way about tech innovation start-ups. You have to be connected to Silicon Valley.

I have an accelerator in Valencia and another in Berlin, and you can build a great company just about anywhere. But I urge entrepreneurs to be connected to Silicon Valley, because I think the culture that is here, the investors that are here, as well as all of the success and failure stories that are here is like a crash course in entrepreneurship.

Is Silicon Valley on the verge of another bubble?
No, because I see a lot of companies with real business models. B2B is coming back really strong, and if you take most of the world's corporations like Walmart, its labs are here. Even Amazon has a big technical center here. Groupon has a very big office here in Palo Alto too. No matter what Silicon Valley becomes, the heart of innovation of the start-up world--at least in my lifetime--will be here.

The seasoned VC says Silicon Valley will remain a tech hub for years, but Silicon Alley, with its focus on content, is paving the way for exciting changes.

What's in a name? A lot, according to Mark Suster, founder and CEO of Build Online and an investor with the Los Angeles-based GRP partners.

That's why his firm is changing its name.

"I think it's a bit rich that we go around to entrepreneurs and say markets are being disrupted, you need to change," he said during the Venture Forward Conference in New York on Tuesday.

The new moniker, which he wouldn't disclose at the conference but plans to unveil next week, will be the first such change for GRP in 17 years. It's meant to reflect GRP's renewed focus on transparency and investment in infrastructure--two things entrpreneurs say they want.

The idea came after polling a group of entrepreneurs, who also said they look for operational experience, industry insight, marketing help, and people who can bring capital to the table from their VC firm. Since all those encompass what GRP does, "We felt we needed a name that would represent all those things," he said.

When asked how hard it's been to do business "so far south of Silicon Valley," Suster acknowledged the challenge, but pointed to markets outside of the tech hub.

"Silicon Valley will always produce the biggest hits; it will always be the tech ecosystem for the foreseeable future," he said. "But there are market conditions that make it easier and better to build outside Silicon Valley."

Focusing on software-based start-ups has proven this: Many things which revolve around the Internet--content, commerce, and communication--aren't dominated by the Valley, he found.

"Commerce is something great trading cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles have always done well," Suster said. In terms of content, "New York has a significant advantage there." And communication has strongholds in Washington, D.C., Kansas City, and "of course, New York. That's why we've seen companies standing out more."

This vicious curse can take you down if you let it. Here's how to beat it.

Anyone who has started and ran a business knows the entrepreneur's curse.

The frustrating dichotomy between never having enough spare time outside the business and the frightening reality when you do.

When I started Wild Creations a number of years ago, I lived the curse firsthand. As someone who had just come from the corporate world and was a master at leveraging vacation days with three-day weekends and long holidays, the entrepreneurial transition was challenging. I had lofty aspirations of "being my own boss" and having more freedom and independence.

Nothing could have been further from the truth.

Like any new business, it consumed every minute of spare time and every ounce of energy I had. When I actually took a few hours off, for example on a weekend to indulge in a simple college football game, the enthusiasm and pleasure of doing so were always dampened by the heavy guilt I felt for not working at the business. If we were slow enough to take time off, should I not be focused on trying to get more business?

It was a vicious cycle.

After a while, however, I learned to effectively deal with the "curse" and in fact became quite adept at avoiding it altogether. Here are a few tips on how other entrepreneurs can do the same:

Many entrepreneurs, by nature, are soloist. While completely understandable, I personally find it to be less optimal. I was fortunate to find a trustworthy partner and co-founder at Wild Creations. We had met and worked together on a USAID project overseas and discovered that we shared similar entrepreneurial aspirations. It took a number of months to establish the rapport and the trust we needed, but the patience paid off. When one of us needed time off, we could always feel confident knowing that the business was in capable hands.

If you cannot find a good partner or opt to go at business yourself, make sure to find better employees. And by "better" I mean better than you. Let's face it, the most capable and trusted person you are going to find to run your business is you, so do not compromise on selecting employees that you will trust to do it for you.

For many entrepreneurs (present company included), giving up control of any aspect of the business is difficult. I often compare my business to my children. As nice as it might be, turning over the responsibility to watch and protect them is not easy. It is important to understand, however, that you cannot do or control everything. Indeed, there are individuals much better qualified for particular tasks. Understand your strengths and the priorities of the business and trust the rest to your team.

Like any parent, you will always worry about the business, regardless of the team you have in place. For me, I find it useful to have a "happy place" where I can go and tune out the business and outside noise. The time allows me to recalibrate, mentally, so I make certain I am focused on what is important. Whether it is a beach, a reading bench, a set of headphones, or a state of Zen, find your place and be willing to allow yourself the indulgence of "letting go," even if for a short time.

It may be a cliché, but it is spot on. Most entrepreneurs choose to start businesses to pursue a personal passion or interest but quickly get lost in the rigor, stress and anxiety of running the business. When you start to get frustrated, remember why you started your business and reclaim the enthusiasm you had before. Working tens of hours in the business then feel a little less like a chore.

The entrepreneurs curse is, for the most part, mental. It requires the ability to turn the business "on" and "off" at a moment's notice, which is completely achievable but takes practice ... lots of practice. In the end, you may not find more spare time to enjoy, but you will most certainly learn to enjoy the spare time you have.

As for me, I finally learned to enjoy my ASU Sun Devil football games ... outside the office!

Have any other tips for beating the entrepreneur's curse? Please share them below!

Vishal Sankhla, the founder of a VC-backed start-up in Silicon Valley, explains what it feels like to have his visa status hang in the balance of the current immigration debate.

Over the next several weeks, the Senate is set to debate immigration reform legislation.

Some following the debate will be trying to divine the future ambitions of various Republicans or the general direction of the recently troubled party, others will argue the economic and demographic impact of reform. But in his office in San Mateo, California, Vishal Sankhla will watch closely for other reasons.

His professional and personal life both hang in the balance.

A U.S.-trained engineer originally from India, Sankhla was employed on a H1b visa when he got the idea for Viralheat, the social media start-up he has since co-founded.

"In late 2008, I got together with [his co-founder] Raj and we started toying around with ideas. That’s when we came up with the idea. I was itching to start my own company and my only option was to either stick with Cisco till I get my Green card, which could take several years, or take a risk and start Viralheat. I decided to take the risk," he explained to Inc. in an email.

In some ways that’s a gamble that paid off. The company has 17 employees and is planning to add more, and has also managed to raise $4.25 million in Series A funding. By just about every standard that’s a promising beginning for a start-up and a plus for our job-hungry economy. But Sankla’s success hasn’t been enough to win him a stable immigration status. After spending a year applying for a Green card, he was denied. Now he says he is applying through another category, but the uncertainty has an outsized impact on his business.

"I was on an H1b visa that made it impossible for me to join my own company that I had founded. I was lucky to have a co-founder who was a US citizen to even be able to explore this opportunity and get the company to where we are today," Sankhla says. The current immigration system affects his start-up in other ways too.

"We also have employees who are on H1b visas, so we have to spend a lot of time, resources and energy on their immigration paperwork. Being a small company we do not have full-time HR resources who focus on this, so it ends up taking my precious time away in making sure everything is going smoothly," he says.

All of which sounds like a nightmare for any growing business, but Sankhla notes that his immigration struggles have taken a personal toll as well. "It became very tedious to travel outside the country. Every time I travelled, I had to get a stamping done in India. The stamping process takes up a lot of time in terms of collecting all the immigration paperwork, employment paperwork, employment verification, pay-stubs. A lot of people end up getting stuck in their countries. The process never ends, you are always worried. Your immigration status becomes your number one source of stress," he reports.

And immigration challenges have affected other members of his family as well: "My wife is currently with Netflix on an H1b visa and her Green card is stuck Perm. audit so basically we are still quite far from getting a Green card done. Also, I worry about my mom. She has a visitor's visa that allows her to stay for up to six months in the U.S. after which she has to travel back to India. It becomes harder and harder for us to stay together, especially as she grows older."

Unsurprisingly, Sankhla has joined efforts to get immigration reform through Congress and is watching the debate closely. He’s optimistic, he says, but nervous.

"I worry because the debate is still largely focused on whether to create a path to citizenship for low-skilled, undocumented workers or illegal immigrants. The issues of legal immigrants go largely unnoticed and our issues are bundled tightly, so any delays around the former provision, also ends up delaying issues for people like me."

What’s he hoping for? A higher number of H1b visas, so that employers can access talent from abroad and "an easy way for people to apply and get their Green cards in a reasonable amount of time and a clear and timely pathway to US citizenship."

As a business owner, you can keep Sankla and his family in mind as the immigration debate unfolds in the coming weeks for humanitarian reasons, but he makes a far more hard-nosed business case for fellow entrepreneurs to get involved in the conversation.

"We need to recognize that and double down on entrepreneurs, because other nations are figuring this out. There is a billboard up on the freeway here inviting people having immigration issues to Canada. In the end, if US cannot attract, engage and retain top talent, it will be left behind."

Are you following the progress of immigration reform? What are you hoping to see come out of the process?

What's holding you back? Rob Ashkenas, managing partner of Shaffer Consulting, points out the root of the problem, and smart ways to fix it.

Slowdowns are inevitable, but to get through those slumps, you've got to know what's behind them, says Ron Ashkenas, managing partner of Shaffer Consulting, in The Harvard Business Review.

Here are three signs you've been stunted:

The law of large numbers. "As a company gets bigger, each percentage of incremental revenue suddenly represents a fundamentally larger number," says Ashkenas. There's also more pressure on the sales team to find new markets, categories, and geographies.

Market maturity. As a market moves through its life cycle, it becomes more crowded, prices stabilize, and the opportunity to grow through price increases, well, decreases. When a market gets saturated, it becomes that much harder to lure away buyers who are loyal to particular brands.

Psychological self-protection. Innovation is hard. So it's no suprise that rather than take a risk with a new product, many companies succumb to the pressure to preserve the base business and focus on "adapting existing products and services," says Ashkenas. Sadly, playing it safe leaves the door wide open for disruptive competitors.

There are two ways to keep up the growth, he continues:

Regularly re-examine your business model. "Don't limit your innovation and research to the development of new products and services, but also focus on the possibility of new business models," says Ashkenas.

Next, consider downsizing. Are all your products producing sufficient returns? Would you be better off shedding some customers? Acting on the answers "can liberate you and your resources to focus on new opportunities and will lead to more growth in the long term," he says.

The interview coach of the future is here, and it goes by the name of MACH. Developed by MIT, the computer software tells you exactly where you need to improve just by hearing the sound of your voice.

We've all been there: Your ideas are fresh and your team is top-notch, but you still aren't attracting investors.

Perhaps it's time to brush up on your interview skills.

The Automated Conversation coacH (nicknamed MACH) might be able to help. Developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the robot functions as a career coach, giving mock interviews while monitoring facial expressions and prosody (speech pattern and intonation) to see where participants need to improve. Such feedback might include the number of times an interviewer paused or turned to crutch phrases like "you know."

Shortly after MACH was designed, researchers tested it on 90 students. After lumping them in three groups--one that watched a taped interview, another that used MACH and watched a taped interview, and a third that received feedback from MACH, the video, and an interview coach--they found the latter group made the most strides.

Soon small business owners will be able to reap the same benefits via desktop--all they'll need is a camera and microphone. MACH's software will arrive on mobile platforms shortly.

Beyond pinpointing areas in need of improvement, MACH can help entrepreneurs gain an edge over the competition. It'll do so by gauging reactions to interviewers of the opposite sex and see how they fare when asked certain questions. Eventually MACH will analyze sentiment and how well a respondent explained a topic.

Watch the video below to see it in action:

If you want to position yourself as a thought leader in your industry, there's no better way to begin than becoming an author. Here's how.

What convinces you to buy one product or service over the other? For me it's a combination of credibility, expertise, and quality. Oh yes, and price: I want to make sure that I'm getting a fair value. But I will pay more if I see proof of greater experience and expertise. The old adage, "you get what you pay for," is one I stand by.

As an entrepreneur it's important that you exude expertise and confidence, in person and in your marketing efforts. Whether you own a hot dog stand or you're a professional speaker, positioning yourself as a thought leader in your field is one sure-fire way to help future clients know, trust, and want to do business with you. And publishing a book can do just that. From the day your book arrives on shelves, you possess one of the best marketing and branding tools available.

"Most people think writing and publishing a book is a daunting task, but it's easier than you might think" says Cliff Suttle, Chief Excitement Officer (you know, CEO) at ExciteYourAudience.com. Suttle believes that too many people think (and think...and think) about writing a book, but never get to Page 1. "One of the most popular blocks to success is the fear that they don't have anything original to share," he says. "But nothing is further from the truth."

Create a Noteworthy Idea

It's time to set aside the myth that you have nothing original to share. "There are books on every subject imaginable, but you have a unique perspective to share with the world," Suttle says.

To find your book idea, make a list of everything you know about. Write, write, write and don't erase anything. You'll be amazed at how much you know. Don't limit your ideas to business, list everything: making sales calls, dealing with vendors, writing contracts, parenting, building a deck, playing piano, picking out flowers for a wedding, etc. You know a lot, don't you? This should give you a boost in confidence! Now cull out the ideas that will shape themselves into an informative book. Here are some examples.

If you own a moving company: How to Pack Without Pulling Your Hair Out, or How to Make Your New Community Feel Like Home

Financial firm: How to Avoid the Pitfalls of Investing in the Stock Market, or Demystifying Your Small Business Financial Statements

Bakery: Great Taste Without Exploding Your Waist, or How I Turned My Passion Into Dollars

The possibilities are endless!

Stop Writer's Block Before it Begins.

The second thing that hangs people up is that they think they can't write. You're probably better than you think. Remember, no one can benefit from your knowledge if you never write it down. If you struggle with writing, hire a ghost writer or an editor. eLance.com, LinkedIn, and other such sites are a great source for finding people who can help you with this.

Buyer Beware: Always check out references and work samples for anyone you find on such sites.

Choose Your Publishing Options Wisely.

With the vast majority of books being self-published today, it has become the norm. However, this can be a pitfall for many new authors because there are almost too many publishing options to choose from. Be careful: not all publishers are created equal or have your best interest at heart.

Suttle recommends you choose a company that has automated and personal-interaction options for printing and produce quality products with a quick turn-around time. Make sure they do not take ownership of your book. This is important; read the fine print.

"Some publishers feel that just because they print your book, they should own the rights to it and any sequel," he says, "And you certainly don't want that."

The Book is Done, Now Promote.

Once you have written, edited and printed your book, the real work begins. You have to get the book into the hands of your potential customers. According to a recent study from a major publisher, the average self-published book sells 57 copies. Not good. That's pretty much your friends and family. You really want to sell 1000s of copies of your book in order to make it worth producing.

Speaking is a powerful way to sell books--and to promote your company at the same time. Suttle typically sells 100 books at the back of the room after a speech. Of course there is a skill to being successful from stage. You can learn more about that from Suttle's "Speaking for Authors," program, which teaches the techniques to increase the back-of-the-room sales of your book.

Another way to market is with a book launch campaign. These can be tricky and will take research and planning to pull off, but can be well worth the time and expense. Again, there are training programs available that can fast-track your mission.

Lastly, give your book away for free. Books are the best business cards you will ever have. The average business card is kept for about an hour. The average book stays on someone's shelf for two years. How much is a new client worth to you? Books are an inexpensive and awesome way to advertise.

With a determination and desire any business person can be an author and noted expert. Write the book already, and share your experience here on The Successful Soloist!

Come learn more as I interview Suttle on Million Dollar Mindset Radio Monday at 2 p.m. ET.

By emphasizing outfits rather than pieces, the Finnish start-up stands to succeed in the virtual try-on space. Here's how customization, shopping carts, and social features are changing the game.

Start-ups have tried virtual clothing try-on solutions time and time again.

They attempt to make a viable solution for trying on clothes online, with the hopes that it will actually save people from making terrible purchases on the web or from shopping in bricks-and-mortar stores.

Already, there's Metail, TrueFit, Clotheshorse, True & Co., Fitiquette, Fits.me, and PhiSix.

But Finnish start-up Stylewhile is different from other virtual try-on start-ups in the sense that rather than licensing its technology to retailers to integrate onto their platform, Stylewhile functions somewhat as its own online retailer.

Stylewhile also places more of an emphasis on outfits, rather than pieces, Stylewhile CEO Jutta Haaramo tells Business Insider.

Its iPad-optimized platform allows customers to mix and match items from various retailers on top of a model with a similar body type. Once you've created your ideal look, you can save that style and even share it with friends to get their input. Or you can buy those pieces on the spot. For now, it's only available for women.

If you find something you like from both Neiman Marcus and Shopbop, you'll be directed to each retailer's respective shopping cart. But that will likely change, Haaramo says.

In the future, Haaramo envisions one shopping cart to make purchases from multiple retailers on Stylewhile.

Stylewhile has agreements with online retailers including Shopbop, Asos, Ivana Helsinki, Neiman Marcus, and My-wardrobe.com. For every transaction facilitated through Stylewhile, the company takes a percentage of the revenue.

Users typically try on about 17 pieces per visit, Haaramo says. About 10 percent of users actually click the purchase link, which is pretty respectable given that add-to-basket conversion rates average around 12 percent.

Haaramo founded Stylewhile in 2011 alongside Mika Martilla in Helsinki, Finland. Its four-person team is backed by The Finnish Foundation, Tekes, and Lifeline Ventures.

This story originally appeared on Business Insider.

Lunch isn't just about physically fueling your team, argues Cater2.me co-founder Alex Lorton. Breaking bread together is a powerful way to build a company culture and stir innovation.

You, you there, holding the third, bland turkey sandwich you’ve shoved in your mouth for lunch this week, put it down right now!

That’s the message from Alex Lorton, co-founder of food start-up Cater2.me. Your schedule may force you to wolf down something less than super appetizing alone at your desk every once in awhile. But if, as a business owner, you haven’t at least considered getting your team to together for a midday meal from time to time, you’re missing out on a seriously good opportunity to spark conversations, build bonds and get their creative juices flowing.

Cater2.me allows teams of 10 or more accomplish this by connecting them with catered meals to suit even finicky requirements (or voracious appetites for BBQ) from local chefs, food carts and general purveyors of tastiness in San Francisco, New York, and Chicago. But if you're elsewhere, Lorton feels that you don’t need a service like his to reap the benefits of breaking bread together. What are they?

Food isn’t simply about calories and vitamins. It’s also a tried and tested way to start conversation. Just think of how many times you’ve struck up a cocktail party chat by commenting on the food, though Lorton offers another example of the how food can catalyze conversation.

“Where do you go with your friends when you really want to have a good conversation? You go to dinner,” he told Inc.com.

And this is particularly important in the modern, wired workplace where we spend so many hours staring at screens. “What I’ve seen from modern workplaces I go into, especially tech offices, is so many people are there with their headphones on staring at a computer. That’s just the the way the workplace has gone,” he says. But with the appearance of the Cater2.me crew, “we actually see people lift their heads up to see what’s coming in for lunch. That’s a way to draw people away from what can become a very solitary workday,” Lorton adds.

So what are Lorton’s tips for getting as much refreshment and idea and culture-generating conversation out of your shared meals as possible? First provide the right infrastructure -- a space to sit down and eat together with plenty of chairs and table space is best if you have the room. Then provide the conversation starters. Put simply: "lunch shouldn’t be boring."

Repetitive uninspiring offerings aren’t just less tasty, they’re also less likely to spark the kind of informal talk that will bond your team and help them come up with innovative ideas about not just what to order but also how to improve you business. "We’ll actually have the chef come in and do the final bits of assembly right on site to make it more interactive," Lorton offers by way of example. "Those kind of things add a little extra social element, bringing people together and having them talk."

But you don’t need a guy flipping made-to-order crepes in your break room. Simply spending some time finding lesser known vendors and cuisines can get the conversational ball rolling. "Seek out local providers. Rather than going to Subway, find the local artisan sandwich shop," he suggests. Your team won’t just discuss the prosciutto and salami, they’ll also end up chatting about ways to improve your products and services too.

"The idea of breaking bread together is really, really powerful," Lorton concludes.

Do you agree?

Interns at Google receive eye-popping salaries, but some tech start-ups offer much more. Check out some of their awesome perks.

A glittering resume no longer cuts it. If you want a job, or even a graduate degree, you've got to put in time as an intern.

Some internships evolve into full-time positions. Others offer little beyond busywork. But in tech land (a.k.a. Silicon Valley and New York City) some start-ups are Wonderlands, where interns can get real responsibilities and cool perks.

We've rounded up the best perks out there for interns working in tech today:

Google

Fresh faces--i.e., Nooglers--get a real taste of the Silicon Valley experience, as depicted in the movie The Internship. Software engineers receive a hefty $6,763 salary, plus access to microkitchens, cafes, and gyms. They also work on real production code and get to meet with possible mentors.

Microsoft

Microsoft's interns have flexible schedules, and like Nooglers, they too have access to gyms and cafes, and solid compensation ($6,004 per month).

Quora

Interns working at the question and answer site are basically treated like real engineers. They get to attend panels, design APIs, and work on homepage feeds.

Twitter

An internship at Twitter offers catered meals (for those in San Francisco), dry cleaning, and weekly in-office yoga and pilates classes. One intern got to meet Russian president Dmitry Medvedev when he was still in office and Kanye West.

10gen

Interns enjoy weekly events ranging from bowling to movies, Q&A sessions with 10gen's CEO, and events with Union Square Ventures' portfolio companies. Interns also get to meet bigwigs like software engineer Joel Spolsky.

Palantir Technologies

These interns feast on chef-crafted meals, play in media rooms, and go outside for a pickup game of Frisbee. Inside, they have access to a small gym offering yoga classes, a chiropractor, a doctor, and ... massages. Evenings feature weekly wine and cheese tastings.

There's no such thing as a fast, simple, billion-dollar check. Three founders explain the dark, dirty, and occasionally comical aspects of their exits.

Cashing out of your start-up: It's often seen as the light at the end of the tunnel. Only it rarely looks like heaven.

So say Svpply co-founder Greg Leppert, OMGPop founder Charles Forman, and LinkShare co-founder Stephen Messer, who spoke at the fifth annual Northside Festival in Brooklyn Thursday.

Leppert, who sold Svpply, an online retail curation company, to eBay in September, says there are plenty of misconceptions about how a big-price-tag deal goes down. He mocked a typical over-simplification of the process as: "You're running a business and one day someone says, 'How about a billion dollars?' and you say 'That's great!'...and suddenly you're buying a Ferrari."

If only. It's more like a long negotiation over creating a life-partnership, Leppert said.

In the case of Svpply, when interest from a potential "partner" started heating up, the company's board advised Leppert to explore--and amass a portfolio of--other options.

"That's when you start to run a process, and you go out and talk to all the other companies that have expressed interest in working with you, as well as companies you'd be interested in working with," Leppert says. "So when you sit down at the table you have not just one offer, but multiple offers. And that gives you good 'leverage,' which is a word board members like to use a lot."

Forman, whose company was behind the uber-popular game Draw Something, which sold to Zynga for $210 million last year, says his "leverage" came from not other acquisition offers, but rather from collecting term sheets from three venture capital firms that affirmed the valuation he wanted.

The acquisition process for a start-up usually takes between three weeks and nine months. But for Draw Something, "the house was on fire" already when the game was the most popular in the iTunes store, Forman says. So its acquisition to Zynga was a lightning-quick 10 days, start-to-finish. "Which is the fastest a deal of that size has gotten done," Forman says.

While that timeline is certainly atypical, and founders usually have weeks or months to digest a deal, start-up employees are usually in the dark until a deal is inked--and news of an acquisition can be earth-shaking for them. Messer, who started LinkShare with his sister, and sold it for $425 million in 2005 to Rakuten (a company he calls "the eBay of Japan"), says his employees didn't adjust well to the news of the acquisition.

"The thing about a start-up is, it does become the dreams and aspirations of everyone who is in it," he says. So, when you reach the moment where a big deal is about to happen, "everyone starts to splinter," Messer says.

One point of contention and confusion for employees affected by the OMGPop acquisition was that stock options varied a lot based on employee tenure and salary. "Some people thought that whatever the sale price was, it would be evenly distributed among the employees," Forman says, getting a laugh from the crowd. But there are more subtle seeds of ill-will that can grow among start-up employees during, and after, an acquisition.

"As a team, you are conditioned to hate that company that acquired you," Forman says, because that company is often a larger competitor. "But all of a sudden you are part of that company." And that can become a cancerous situation--one that contributes, Forman says, to start-ups being shut down by their buyer.

Leppert says he had the same experience: "One day you're trying to take down the giant; the next day you're holding hands," and that was jarring to his small staff of fewer than 10 employees.

Sure, a big payoff is the reward for the founding team. But it's not always easier after the deal is signed, Messer says. "There are companies that come in the day after signing and paint. They paint over your logo, they burn your old stuff...That's scary."

Intelligence isn't simply a fixed quantity, a learning expert explained in a talk recently. How smart we are is powerfully affected by our situation, and that's something we can control.

Somewhere along the way in life you’ve probably taken an IQ test and were give some number as an answer. That figure -- seemingly definitive and said to portray some inborn capacity -- may have given you the impression that your level of intelligence, no matter how high or low it might be, is a fixed quantity. You can learn, sure, but basically you’re only as smart as you were born to be, right?

But that’s not what the latest science actually says, learning expert and author Annie Murphy Paul recently explained in a speech, which she helpfully transcribed to her blog. Intelligence, it turns out, is way more complicated than that.

In the lengthy but fascinating talk, Murphy Paul lays out eight ways intelligence is affected by context in which we put it to use and suggests ways that we can rethink intelligence to get the best out of the brain we were born with. The complete speech is well worth a read if you’re interested in the subject, but to get your warmed up, here are the basic ideas she explores in greater detail in the complete post:

Situations can make us smarter. They can be the physical conditions that learners experience by way of how much stress they’re under and how much sleep and exercise they get, and the mental conditions learners create for themselves by the levels of expertise and attention and motivation they’re able to achieve. Situational intelligence, in other words, is the only kind of intelligence there is.

Beliefs can make us smarter. Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck distinguishes two types of mindsets: the fixed mindset, or the belief that ability is fixed and unchanging, and the growth mindset, or the belief that abilities can be developed through learning and practice. These beliefs matter because they influence how think about our own abilities, how we perceive the world around us, and how we act when faced with a challenge or with adversity.

Expertise can make us smarter. Experts don’t just know more, they know differently, in ways that allow them to think and act especially intelligently within their domain of expertise... Expertise takes a long time to develop, of course, but it’s never too early--or too late--go deep in a subject area that interests us.

Attention can make us smarter. There are information-processing bottlenecks in the brain--everybody’s brain--that prevent us from paying attention to two things at the same time. The state of focused attention is a very important internal situation that we must cultivate in order to fully express our intelligence.

Emotions can make us smarter. When we’re in a positive mood, for example, we tend to think more expansively and creatively. When we feel anxious--for instance, when we’re about to take a dreaded math test--that anxiety uses up some of the working memory capacity we need to solve problems, leaving us, literally, with less intelligence.

Technology can make us smarter. The problem is that our devices so often make us dumber instead of smarter... In order for tech to make ourselves smarter and not dumber, we need understand when to take full advantage of our devices, and when to put them away.

Our bodies can make us smarter. All the things that make the heart work better--good nutrition, adequate sleep, regular exercise, moderate stress--make the brain work better too.

Relationships can make us smarter. If you have a spouse or significant other: it’s likely that one of you is “in charge” of remembering when the car needs to go in for inspection, while the other is “in charge” of remembering relatives’ birthdays. This is called transactive memory, and it’s just one of the ways that relationships with others can make us smarter than we would be on our own... a feeling of belonging is critical to the full expression of our ability.

Check out the complete post for much more detail on the science behind each of these eight ways of thinking about intelligence.

How could you change your context to boost your brain power?

The founder of Weedmaps.com is about to tap into a $200 billion industry.

Justin Hartfield has been involved in the business of selling marijuana for years, running the Yelp-style website WeedMaps.com and serving as the gate keeper and advertiser for legal marijuana dispensaries across the U.S.

He's made a fortune from the venture, all the while remaining firmly on the legal side of the business by working on the sidelines and never personally selling weed.

Hartfield is involved with the privately held Ghost Group, and he and his business partner Doug Francis just announced the launch of Emerald Ocean Capital, a venture capital firm that seeks to invest in marijuana businesses in the newly-legal industry.

The firm comes along at a critical time in the marijuana reform process. Two states, Colorado and Washington, have legalized the drug, while several others are reportedly considering making the substance more available.

Indeed, the "green rush," as many entrepreneurs involved in the rush have taken to calling it, is a critical part of the construction of a legitimate marijuana industry.

Hartfield's new venture taps into that entrepreneurial spirit with the intention to bring investors directly to the most exciting companies in the legal marijuana space.

We interviewed Hartfield about his new venture.

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Business Insider: How did you become the first guy to start a marijuana venture capital firm?

Justin Hartfield: In 2008 I was running a Search Engine Optimization consulting business. I got my medical marijuana card and I stumbled upon a hole in the market.

I wanted to go to a dispensary but there wasn’t really a website where they all were. I decided to create this site [WeedMaps.com] and slowly but surely we built it up to be one day acquired by a publicly traded company, SearchCore.

Through a year or two I was going back and forth with SearchCore. They decided to sell their marijuana assets off to a private group, which I’m now part of.

It’s been an interesting journey between then and now. I’m happy to say the company’s doing great as a private company and we’re trying to expand into other opportunities.

This fund is just a natural extension of what we’ve seen. People--in the last six months or a year--were asking us, “How can I be involved?” and “how can I invest?”

We really believe this is the future, and we decided we couldn’t turn down all these people who wanted to give us their hard earned money to invest in a legalized future.

BI: So it came organically from investors trying to get involved?

Justin Hartfield: Exactly. It’s what the market demanded and we’re putting it out as an experiment just like how we launched our other businesses.

That’s why we don't have a set target dollar amount for this fund, we want to take inquiries and see how many individuals, how many institutions want to get involved.

Then, once we have a good idea, create a kind of cap toward the end of the year, then we'll start the process of our investments.

BI: Who is interested?

Justin Hartfield: A lot of it is entrepreneurs from all over the spectrum who have made money privately. They’re kind of disruptive individuals themselves. They see an opportunity and want to invest.

We’re also seeing interestingly enough an investor pool aged 70, 55 years plus. They made their market exit like 20 years ago, they have their cash on the sidelines and they see this as a golden opportunity to get back in the game again.

Most of them were introduced to cannabis because a loved one or themselves needed it for a medical reason. They discovered how amazing it was for their condition and they’re like “S---, I can make a lot of money off of this."

BI: Are you still seeking investors?

Justin Hartfield: Yeah, we are. We’re seeking accredited investors and if people are interested, we welcome them to go to Ghost Group.com.

BI: What kind of investments are you looking at?

Justin Hartfield: We’re targeting businesses that are on the ancillary of the marijuana industry. We’re not looking right now to invest in manufacturing and distributing or retail end of the the actual plant.

We are looking at all the opportunities that exist to the side of that, in the ancillary business, particularly technology--both software and hardware--and also in medicine, product development.

We’re building brands that are going to be sustainable post-legalization.

BI: How is the ancillary side of the market helping the legitimization of legal marijuana?

Justin Hartfield: Every business that opens up strengthens the industry. It brings more legitimacy to it and increases the size of the pie for everybody.

It’s not an industry if there’s only a couple of players or cartels or whatever. What we’re seeing is people getting more and more invested in marijuana and therefore ending marijuana prohibition. It’s been really kind of amazing to see.

BI: What firm would you like to invest in that doesn’t necessarily exist already?

Justin Hartfield: There’s a tremendous amount. This is a potentially $200 Billion industry if you look at what James Shivley is saying.

In that size of an industry, it supports an ecosystem that’s very rich. It supports B2B [Business to Business], B2E [Business to Employee], B2T [Business to Technology] products that don’t exist in the marijuana market.

If you look at any mature industry, like alcohol, there’s so many different products that exist for that which don’t currently exist for marijuana.

We’re looking for new technology and new software. That’s what’s really driving innovation in the world.

BI: How big do you think this can get?

Justin Hartfield: That’s the billion dollar, hundred billion dollar question.

I’m comparing it to the wine market right now. Between 15 and 25 billion dollars at a minimum, but it doesn’t really include what other value created additives that marijuana has.

Like coffee shops in Amsterdam. In Amsterdam there’s so many different locations that depend directly on the marijuana tourism.

Maybe they’re gift shops that say marijuana needs apparel, maybe there’s head shops that sell bongs.

There’s so many different businesses that feed off the marijuana business that it’s very hard to estimate how much. We could all be underestimating it when you think of the medical markets.

BI: What advice do you have for other investors thinking about jumping into the marijuana industry?

Justin Hartfield: I would say that as an emerging market it’s always changing and it’s always completely dependent on loopholes in the federal and state law.

For a truly sustained market, for international players to try to be involved in it, it has to be federally legal. It has to be regulated like alcohol with sensible, reasonable regulations for everybody. A market can be created and the government can get their cut as well.

Specific advice I’d give to investors? Hop on in, the water’s warm.

BI: But of course, even with this firm--and with your time behind WeedMaps--you’re actually doing nothing illegal.

Justin Hartfield: Exactly! It gives us great position to understand the market.

And when legalization finally comes, we can pivot towards that market.

We said that with Marijuana.com, we want to sell more marijuana than anyone else in the world when it’s federally legal. Marijuana.com is the perfect place to do it.

BI: The Amazon.com of pot?

Justin Hartfield: Exactly.

BI: From a business perspective, what do you think of what’s going on with legalization these days?

Justin Hartfield: I really want to encourage what’s happening in New York and what’s continuing to happen in Colorado and Washington.

Politicians--Liz Krueger in New York being a good example--they’re finally coming out of the closet on this issue.

They’re saying “Medical is great, and we need it, but we also need legalized marijuana in this state for about a hundred different reasons.”

So anyway, I’m really encouraged by what New York and other states like Illinois are doing to move this issue forward.

This interview originally appeared on Business Insider.

An ex-Microsoft employee has plans to create a national marijuana business. Can the barriers standing in his way be scaled?

Jamen Shively spent six years at Microsoft as corporate strategy manager. Now, he has a new venture: legal marijuana.

Shively recently announced plans to create the first national brand of retail marijuana for both medical and recreational users. He has purportedly already acquired a Washington-based company that operates two Seattle medical marijuana dispensaries and is close to purchasing others in California and Colorado.

He's also calling for the U.S. government to legalize the trade of marijuana with Mexico but his plans for the total legalization of the substance in the U.S. remain unclear. Pot remains illegal under U.S. federal law as well as international trade rules.

The dream, Shively stated, is to one day control 40 percent of the global marijuana market. "Let’s go big or go home," he said. "We're going to mint more millionaires than Microsoft with this business."

But before he starts to grow his fortune will his dream of a new pot empire go up in smoke? Here are a few of the hurdles facing Shively and Mary Jane as they set off on this grand new venture.

1. Legality

The first major flaw in the business concept is that it seeks to establish a business that, under current U.S. law, is illegal. As such, the business has a seemingly massive hurdle to surmount prior to beginning operations: it must first make pot legal in the U.S.A.

A few years ago I was involved in a failed, or significantly stalled, business that sought to bring Las Vegas-style gaming to your mobile device. From the ability to purchase lottery tickets to apps that actually allowed the user to game on their smartphone the potential revenues stretched into the billions per year. The problem? It was, and remains, illegal. And although the business had every intent to have gaming on smart phones legalized it never did. In large part this was because there was no concrete plan to change the regulatory system to legalize the same to truly effectuate the business plan. Sound familiar?

The same issue faces Shively's planned pot business. How does he intend to legalize marijuana in the U.S.? To date, no concrete plan has been announced. Presumptively there is a recognition that they must first get a bill introduced by the Republican-controlled Congress, passed by that same body and then passed by the Senate before heading to the Democratically-controlled White House.

But does anyone think that a party still reeling from its inability to re-capture the White House that has seen a dramatic shift to the right in its core leadership in the past few years (Hint, maybe they can't see the forest for the extremely right-leaning trees) will be the party that wants credit, or the blame, for legalizing pot?

From a fiscal perspective, the argument exists that the tax revenue generated would be significant and would assist in balancing the budget. But how could they justify legalizing a controlled substance to their base while preaching moral superiority? They can't. They won't.

So the most evident problem with this new venture is that it is illegal and in the current political climate, no matter the lobbying dollars involved, is unlikely to change the laws sufficient to allow this business to ever launch.

2. Incurring Costs for Your Competition

But lets assume for a moment Shively gets over this first hurdle without spilling his bong water, he will need to do so on his own lobbying dime. Then, having just incurred a massive upstart cost, his sure-to-follow competitors will be the likely beneficiaries.

One of my favorite shows on television is ABC's Shark Tank. Each week aspiring entrepreneurs pitch their products to a panel of wealthy and experienced venture capitalists. If they like the product (i.e., believe they can make money from investing) they will make an offer to buy some or all of the product or company. Within this context, one of the questions most frequently ask is do you have a patent or other intellectual property protecting the product or idea? Why? Savvy investors like Mark Cuban and Kevin O'Leary (aka Mr. Wonderful) want to know that if they invest in a product the product's concept is protected to the point that they will have a monopoly on supply to satisfy the demand for the product for a period of time. In short, they are the only ones who can sell it so they are the only ones who can make money off of it.

No such monopoly will ever exist for Shively's venture. In short, even if he gets it legalized overnight there will be a landslide of new and recently legalized pot products the likes of which have not been seen since the repeal of prohibition and its affect on the liquor industry.

So Shively and Shively alone may incur the costs to bring the product to market, but he will do so to the benefit of the new industry that will be created. One must then ask with these significant sunk costs will he be able to compete on price in the very marketplace he has created?

3. Old School Competition

There is another logical fallacy that has largely been ignored by proponents of legalizing marijuana. One of the principal arguments in favor of legalization is that it will increase tax revenue and decrease the illegal sale of the substance. Does anyone really think that legalizing pot is going to stop the illegal distribution of the substance overnight?

You can buy cigarettes in a store. Why then were the cigarettes sold out of a trunk in the iconic movie Goodfellas so popular? Because they were cheap. They were tax free.

Drug dealers aren't going anywhere, at least not as a result of the legalization of one of their signature products. Criminals, yes. Stupid, not really. They know their markets quite well. You could even argue they get them hooked. So if pot is legalized, regulated, and taxed how then will they compete? By selling it cheaper than the tax-ladened legal stuff. Their crime may change from possession with intent to distribute to a tax or regulatory matter, but so long as there is a demand for cheaper, tax-free product there will be a supply. And that supply will again be in direct competition with the legal market.

4. No Trademark Protection

Lastly, you knew it was coming. After all I am a trademark attorney. The last major issue with Shively's business plan to build a national pot brand that I see is this: He can't protect the brand as a trademark. What you might say? I'll say it again, you can't protect the brand as a trademark!

How are you going to build a national brand if you yourself cannot preclude others from using your "trademark"? What do I mean?

The Trademark Act of 1946 prohibits the registration of a trademark that is scandalous or immoral. This is often extended to trademarks for products which are illegal meaning that even if the trademark itself is otherwise innocuous the Trademark Office will, nonetheless, refuse registration and protection of the same if it is used in connection with an illegal substance.

Perhaps the most famous trademark that will most likely be cancelled under this statute is that of the Washington Redskins. For years different groups of Native Americans have challenged the continued registration of the trademark on the grounds that it is, effectively, a derogatory racial slur. In previous challenges a technicality or some other issue has always saved the registrations. But it is widely held that all such technical hurdles have now been erased and that later this year a challenge that began over a decade ago will finally spell the end for the protection of the Washington Redskin's federal trademark.

Returning to the subject of creating a national pot brand, it is highly unlikely that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is going to change its stance anytime soon in regard to the registration of trademarks used in connection with marijuana. Even if made legal the Commissioner could still deny protection under the belief that such marks used in connection with pot are immoral.

In this regard, how do you create a national brand without trademark protection? Securing trademark rights in your brand is what grants you the exclusive right to use a brand. In the absence of those rights others may freely use your trademark on their goods, on their pot. Then your not promoting and building your brand, your simply promoting everyone's use of a common name on a product. And any way you slice it, that is a big problem.

So can Shively build the first national brand for pot? Perhaps. But until he comes up with a concrete plan to address the issues above his pipe dream may simply go up in smoke.

While building a killer app for the hospitality industry, Monscierge hit more than a few classic start-up hurdles. Here's how it survived.

I love lessons learned. Unfortunately learning a lesson means making a mistake or doing something wrong, so that's why I also love people who are willing to share the mistakes that result in wisdom.

So here's a guest post from Marcus Robinson, Chief Experience Officer of Monscierge, an interactive software company specializing in hospitality solutions for hotel, convention, travel, and healthcare industries.

Here are four things Robinson says Monscierge got wrong--and one that continues to pay off:

1. We made it about us.

We built something for hospitality that really works. It isn't just a marketing mock-up, it actually performs on the back-end while also rivaling any major design firm's application on the front-end. But, guess what? No matter how well we perform compared to other companies, no hotel will ever say, "Valued guests: Download our mobile app. It's called Monscierge

After burning up inspiring YouTube scenes of Ben Affleck in The Boiler Room, we realized we just want to play in the game, to sit at the grown-up's table, and are happy to be a (paid) cog in the machine.

Branding our products for each hotel played a crucial role in achieving momentum.

2. We hired "star" industry leaders.

Three out of four start-ups will fail. Those that stay in the game realize that it's about more than a good product. Inserting an industry veteran in a team that has carefully crafted an idea from conception could potentially block your yellow brick road of progress.

Don't ignore the inner voice inside saying, "That doesn't sound right, but this industry cowboy must know what he's talking about."

Look around and assess. If there are three washed-up start-ups to your left and you're still going strong then you don't need a shining knight to ride in and save the day. Besides, regardless of their number of years in the industry, the average corporate nine-to-fiver may not realize the energy it takes to weather the start-up storm.

3. We decided just because we could, that meant we should.

We lost our focus and we paid for it. We set out to create hospitality and travel apps that were both well designed and had a badass framework.

After releasing some of our products, clients and vertical markets both began offering to pay us to develop various one-off pieces. Those may have been no-brainers to create, but they also took away from our (small) team's original goal of fleshing out the rest of our core products and left us playing catch-up to the rest of the market.

Stay laser-focused--don't let compliments and a little up-front cash veer you off course from the bigger payday.

4. We assumed we knew our customer's problems.

Engineering a B2B product based on thorough research alone can halt your start-up before it, well, before it starts up. How many times have you come across a product and thought, "Now, if it could just do this it would be perfect. I'd totally spend the money to buy it!"

We spent countless hours going back to the beginning, starting with our team working behind the scenes at a few test hotels.

Feel your customers' pain, or risk being just another app.

One Thing That Keeps Paying Off

Partof the start-up hype seen over the past few years might not be all marketing-speak. Let's be straight: You can't work at a start-up and not be entrenched in some sort of a weird yet dynamic group. One of the absolute best moves as a start-up was filming a two-minute video about our culture, not our software.

Humanizing your product and showing the dedication and passion that got you in the elite 25 percent of companies still in the game will push you over the line.

Sell yourself and you also sell your products.

They're smart, savvy, and super connected. Do you have what it takes to engage them?

Millennials comprise a huge chunk of consumers, but not everyone understands them.

At the World Innovation Forum, William Pearson, co-founder and president of Mental Floss trivia magazine, explained why they're important.

"Millennials are an incredibly resilient generation," he said. "They are actually one that has risen to the challenge of the current economic struggles in a way that other generations haven't. And they are adapting faster than any generation before them."

Here's what else you should know:

Millennials are smart. This generation of goal setters is investing in its future earlier than previous generations. Think of who they look up to--Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs. You can opt to present information in a rapid way, but never dumb it down, advised Pearson.

Millennials are distracted. They switch devices 27 times in an hour, so it's hard to get their attention. To succeed, put your content on every platform, in every medium. You want to grab their attention as they scan Twitter and wait to cross the street, Pearson said.

Millennials are cautious. They're also nice and not rebellious, said Pearson. As a result, they think the media's biased and perceive a lot of content to be propaganda. Join the conversation in a meaningful, sincere way.

Millennials back brands they believe in. Doing so gives them a sense of ownership. It makes them feel as if they are part of your business, and therefore, they might come back. Said Pearson (emphasis ours):

"They are much more likely to engage with a brand on social media. And so I think the mistake that a lot of companies make when they try to engage with their consumers on social media is they think it's all about driving traffic back to their other properties -- back to their website, back to purchase something. And although that is a huge part of the goal, where the large companies fail is in recognizing that if they don't make each experience meaningful, they'll lose. They'll not build that audience, they'll not build that following."

Focus on the user experience to build the trust with customers.

Millennials like to rent, but go shopping too. Make sure your product is worth its asking price, said Pearson.

Usually, Fathers Day is a chance to say thanks to Dad. This year, I think I owe my kids a bit of appreciation for teaching me these business lessons--regardless of whether they were intentional.

I've never been a big fan of business books. Aside from Malcolm Gladwell's The Outliers, I can't say tomes like Who Moved My Cheese have provided me with much of anything concrete in terms of helping me improve my firm.

What has proved invaluable, though, are the industry gatherings I've attended at which entrepreneurs let down their hair and share the issues keeping them up at night. Those networking sessions, in addition to the personal advice I've received from other leaders who lie awake nights worrying about the same things as me, have enabled me to stay at, or near, the top of my game.

There's another big factor in my success that often goes unmentioned, even at these sorts of events: My kids. I'd go so far as to say they are key reasons for my success--even though they're neither aware of the roles they've played nor compensated for their help. So, in a sort of a reverse Father's Day homage, here are five things my kids taught me about running a business:

1. Roll with the punches.
During her high school years, my daughter, Catharine, went through a particularly brutal bullying period. Shunned by a few of the more popular girls in her class, Catharine nonetheless maintained her cool, ignored their taunts, and graduated with honors. I watched her roll with the punches, and copied her devil-may-care attitude after such seismic events as the dot-com bust, the post 9/11 business inertia, and the 2008 Stock Market crash threatened to bring down the curtain on my business. Cat's resolute demeanor instilled a similar quality in me, and helped me rally the troops when the chips were down.

2. Put people at ease.
I've never been very good at business or social events in which I'm a stranger. My son, Chris, though, reminds me of a young JFK. No matter where he goes or who he meets, Chris is always personable, engaging, and able to put strangers at ease. Indeed, it was my son's natural grace in front of crowds that first compelled me to study stand-up comedy. Knowing I lacked his natural command of audiences, I've purposely performed comedy in order to begin acquiring some of those very same talents. And it's worked. I've become far better at building rapport and deepening client relationships as a direct result.

3. Become a subject-matter expert.
Catharine is positively insatiable when it comes to learning more about the antebellum South and Tudor England. Don't ask me why, but she never ceases in her quest to read more books, articles, and blogs about each. Cat has even visited most of the war's major battlefields and arranged private tours for herself. That voracious appetite for becoming a subject-matter expert has driven me to reformulate my firm and focus our services and offering in three clearly defined areas. It's also driven me to insist our top managers become, like Cat, subject-matter experts in various fields, including financial services, business-to-business, and all things related to the so-called "mom" audience.

4. Avoid the pack mentality.
Despite intense peer pressure from their respective friends, neither Chris nor Catharine pierced their lips, ears or other body parts. Nor have they tatted up their bodies. That reluctance to follow a pack mentality toward the latest trend has steeled me in my resolve not to embrace what every other public relations and strategic communications firm does simply because they do. Instead, I stay laser-focused on the wants and needs of clients and prospects. So, rather than advising clients to immediately immerse themselves in all things digital, we counsel them to first listen to make sure their audiences even want to engage in social media circles. Listening first, last, and always has subsequently become our unique clarion call. And, guess what? It was inspired on that matter by my kids.

5. Weather the storms.
Both of my kids have sustained serious setbacks in their quest for success. Catharine endured back-to-back downsizings that put her out of work. But, she picked herself up and is now a star. While he awaits word from various Ph.D. programs, Chris is pursuing a back-up plan that calls for him to launch his own rock-climbing gym. That sort of flexibility and resiliency is critical to an entrepreneur when the phone rings and your largest customer tell you it's all over (which has happened to me on more than one occasion). Watching Chris and Catharine battle their demons has helped me fight my own.

So, the next time you're looking for best practices, do the unexpected: observe your kids (or nieces and nephews--just take a moment to appreciate a generation younger than yourself, hard as it may be) as they handle success and failure. If you're lucky like me, you'll learn some invaluable lessons for improving yourself and your business.

Do you run a service business? Your obsession with time may be messing with your pricing and seriously limiting how much you make, argues a new ebook from FreshBooks.

Whether you’re a dog walker or a designer, your approach to pricing is probably pretty similar, at least if you’re relatively new to the game. Most likely you take a look at your costs, figure out what you need to cover them and then add a bit on top for what seems like a reasonable profit and present the final product of these calculations to prospective clients as a daily or hourly rate.

It’s a tried and true method, but it’s probably costing you a bucketload of money and creating schedule feast or famine -- periods where you stress through the lean times and run like a lunatic in the busy ones -- according to a new ebook titled Breaking the Time Barrier from online accounting company FreshBooks.

There is a better way, it claims.

The book, which is a quick read, follows the trials and tribulations of a fictional website designer named Steve who’s struggling to make a healthy living as a freelancer. He enlists the help of a more experienced and successful designer named Karen, who acts as a sort of pricing Yoda, guiding Steve to discover his potential as a high earner and acting as an oracle to dispense FreshBooks' wisdom. What’s her central insight?

Quit all that obsessing about time and focus on value instead.

Your clients, Karen insists, don’t really care how long it take you to do something; they care about the value it creates for them. Focusing on clock watching isn’t just limiting your income, it’s also downright selfish.

"I look at pricing from [my clients’] point of view,” she tells young padawan Steve in the book. "They don’t hire me to design a website for the sake of designing a website. They hire me to design a website that’s going to help them grow their business. I find when I look at it like that--from their perspective--it’s clear I’m not selling time. Instead, I’m selling a solution that is going to make an impact for my client and achieve some business objective."

By having an in-depth conversation with prospects about what they’re trying to achieve and really listening to their goals, you can set value-based prices that are higher for you and also deliver more for the client, ideally, offering clients a menu of options to help them reach their objectives.

Getting hard numbers for your clients’ goals is best, Karen tells Steve. If you can get a prospect to tell you they’re looking to gain an additional $100,000 in revenue based on your work, you’re more likely to get them to agree to pay you $20,000 for it. If you thought about the project in terms of hours, perhaps you’d charge a tenth of that, she warns.

Increase your income by a factor of ten is, of course, awesome for you, but its not bad for the client either -- they may be paying more but they’re much more likely to get greater value for their dollars. "Selling hours actually creates a conflict of interest," according to Karen. "It puts you and the client on opposite sides of the table. If you’re selling hours, it’s in your best interest to take longer, to bill more hours. But your client is interested in getting solutions that work as promptly as possible," she argues. "Clients don’t care about our costs. They care about the value we create for them, so that’s what we should be asking them to pay for."

Of course, this approach doesn’t work for everyone, pricing guru Karen concedes. “When I started out I charged an hourly rate and I think hourly rates make sense for someone just starting out, someone with little experience and limited skill,” FreshBooks has her tell Steve. "But over time... you begin to outgrow the cost-plus pricing model of charging by the hour. So if you stay with that pricing model, you’ll find it very limiting," she adds.

But that’s not the only potential stumbling block to value-based pricing. How do you handle clients that push back against the idea of paying for value? What do you do if your skills aren’t broad enough to meet the client’s fundamental objectives? How can you change your image from a gun for hire to a collaborative partner in solving a client’s problems? And how do you price small jobs and routine maintenance?

Check out the complete ebook if you’d like to hear more on these questions from FreshBooks (it’s available on a pay what you want basis).

Is your obsession with pricing by the hour holding you back?

At Edison Nation, you'll find high-tech design studios, 3-D printing labs, and ultra-modern offices bursting with products that have made millionaires out of amateur tinkerers.

Exoskeletal body armor designed for protecting guards in prison riots. Infinitely gyroscoping bowls designed for spill-prone toddlers. High-powered pneumatic pogo sticks designed for… people who are really into falling from extreme heights.

They’re the kind of instruments of miscellany you would expect to find in an MIT engineering lab or a Silicon Valley incubator. Turns out, they’re housed in a renovated grist mill on the outskirts of downtown Charlotte, North Carolina.

Hop the ragged chain-link fence behind Panthers stadium, scale a gravel embankment, scramble across the old train tracks, and you’ll come upon a nondescript warehouse with an unmarked door. This is Edison Nation, and inside, you’ll find a winding labyrinth of high-tech design studios, 3-D printing labs, and ultra-modern offices bursting with products that have made millionaires out of amateur tinkerers who came to the company with little more than an idea. Hope you brought a good one.

“Ideas on their own have no value,” says Louis Foreman, chief executive officer of Edison Nation. “You may have come up with something extremely innovative, but without a complex team of engineers, marketers, and lawyers, it won’t go anywhere.”

That’s where Edison Nation steps in. For a 50 percent cut of the royalties, the 55-person company will take your idea from a table napkin to a store shelf, handling product design, patent filings and pitches to corporate executives who are increasingly looking beyond their firms’ R&D departments for innovations. General Electric, for instance, said in April that it had inked a deal with Quirky, an online community of inventors, to give its users access to GE’s huge portfolio of patents.

Edison Nation, however, runs more targeted searches for large companies looking to launch particular types of products. One such company, Bed Bath & Beyond, partnered with Edison Nation in 2009 to conduct a search for new dorm room gadgets.

As with all product searches on Edison, anyone could submit an idea confidentially via the firm’s site for a $25 fee.

Bed Bath & Beyond chose Jonathan Smith’s idea for a bed riser that features a built-in AC outlet and USB charger. The retailer plans to carry the item in all U.S. stores during this year’s back to school season, enriching Smith and Edison Nation as the royalty checks come in.

According to Edison Nation, the company runs between 50 and 60 searches per year, charging retailers $5,000 each time.

To be sure, Smith, an industrial designer by trade, could have earned twice as much had he taken it upon himself to develop the product, instead of handing over those duties--and the intellectual property--to Edison. But he would have had a tough time getting a prototype in the hands of Bed Bath & Beyond execs without Edison’s support.

“It’s not easy to access the attention of the companies we work with,” says Mary Dickson, an Edison spokeswoman. “Big corporations are wary of working directly with inventors given the proprietary nature of inventions.” Rubbermaid, for example, accepts online submission forms from inventors but will typically only consider patent-pending product ideas, Dickson notes.

For its part, Edison has been involved in more than 700 patents during its 12-year existence, serving in most cases as a middleman between large corporations and inventors who don’t have the time, money, or expertise to deal with the patent process.

Foreman, the CEO, is quick to point out--showing off a wall of framed patents in the company’s front foyer--that inventors get to keep their name on each filing. After all, each plaque has a personal story behind it. The IBM employee in Charlotte who came up with a new kind of trash can is now collecting checks from its sales at Williams-Sonoma. The parents in Wilmington whose idea for a spill-resistant bowl for kids became a breakout hit, having generated close to $60 million in sales since 2011.

“They came to us hoping to earn enough money to remodel their kitchen,” Foreman recalls of the Gyro Bowl creators. “Now they’ve bought a few homes.”

Edison Nation’s newest initiative is Edison Medical, a partnership with Carolinas HealthCare System that seeks to bring the ideas of medical professionals, from doctors to physicians’ assistants, to the market.

“We’re looking for innovations that improve patient care, lower the cost of producing care, or improve the patient outcome,” says Foreman in Edison’s brand new medical wing, flanked by massive water jet cutters and buzzing 3-D printers.

Already, Edison has helped produce everything from a prosthetic hand that employs pulleys instead of robotics to a simple latex glove with measuring marks on the index finger. Why? “Nurses were actually sticking Q-tips into people’s wounds to eyeball their depth before,” Louis explains, adding that the gloves allow for a quicker and more accurate measurement in situations when seconds count.

Statistics on the average depth of wounds from extreme pogo-stick crashes were unavailable at the time of publish.

Tour Guides Nate Hindman and Joe Epstein are "On the Road With Free Free Enterprise," visiting small businesses and entrepreneurs checking out local events, and telling the story of free enterprise in more than 20 American communities this summer. Follow their travels on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Ellie Cachette, CEO of ConsumerBell, reflects on the middle ground of running a business.

There were so many times our start-up almost failed, we joked it was a cockroach, a life form in its own right that, simply put, would never die.

There were times when we barely could pay our Rackspace bill, and one time I distinctly remember our blog being down because we forgot to pay that bill. There was also the time one of our investors cut our credit line in half, unexpectedly, right as we made a huge payment. And then the time our lead customer, two days before integration, committed suicide. Then the time a few weeks after that when our CTOs wife committed suicide.

There are so many things privately and publicly known about ConsumerBell that its nearly a miracle that we’ve made it where we are today. Any person close to us will say we have had no shortage of miracles and most startups that really make it far have similar stories; years where founders did contract work, or full teams were let go. We even moved my full apartment into the office hallway for a day while I was 24 hours between a lease, and experienced two hurricane blackouts in NYC and an earthquake that rocked our Park Ave office one summer.

Many of these things happened in our first year as a startup when our sole focus should be product. I remember after a trip to D.C, a water pipe exploded above our printers. We just went around the corner to a cafe. There’s always a wifi spot, a cup of coffee or an employees apartment to stakeout. ConsumerBell just would not die.

Similarly to a recently engaged couple and the way grandparents always ask, “When are you having kids?” there reaches a point where for a startup people are wondering, when you are going to IPO or raise the next round? Or have rocket ship growth? And sometimes it just never happens or even worse, sometimes like with Pandora or Tumblr it takes a while. There is this correlation between staying alive and rocketship growth. To get there the first part is staying alive and many other variables added to rocketship growth. Simply put just breath.

Yet at some point something changes: the founder gets bored, the company starts making money in a pivot that wasn’t part of the original vision or even funds run low but not low enough to justify shutting the doors - especially when there's revenue involved. Sometimes a startup is well funded but just can’t seem to see a path of success like it thought and returns its money to investors, sometimes the market changes or the industry changes and now what was a “big” idea is only a feature but something need and so is true for the opposite when what was once a feature in time becomes a company. Not every startup becomes a huge success like Facebook but not every startup fails either. There are plenty of startups in the middle, in purgatory of success waiting for the right VC or new CEO or market environment to change.

In the meantime, what is a team or founder to do?

1. Sabbatical

From what I have heard, founders who take sabbaticals or vacations actually come back refreshed and with a new sense of balance. There's a couple reasons for this: after massive sleep deprivation and zero separation between work and personal life, taking a step back often reminds a founder of the things that they want in their personal life and gives motivation to the work life and while in a lull this can upset investors or look like avoidance, its in almost every case helped the company and lets be honest, if a company is going to die it isn't going to die in one week but be surprised at how much sleep a founder might need and you probably wouldn’t want many friends around. Stories of founders sleeping for days straight are not uncommon.

2. Reflect and Document

Having a lull or time for reflection can also be inspiring, its a good time to document all HR files, product road maps, organize digital assets, clean up email boxes and media content accounts like YouTube, upload missing content, re-share content on twitter. In many cases potential acquirers will be want to know many of these things like how many digital assets (files and images) to taxes and press lists. It never fails that when the acquisition opportunity arises founders are usually too busy with other things so doing it when possible is not only therapeutic but efficient. Also in the process you might find a gem or two of inspiration.

3. Help Other Startups

Dedicate a portion of time to help other startups in different phases. This will be refreshing to transfer knowledge and also help spread the word of what you are working on in a way that could spark new ideas or allies. When all seems lost helping others often reminds a founder of the world outside its own startup and can give perspective.

4. Do Something Different

One thing founders certainly give up is their personal lives and can albeit even forget what a personal life is making decision one sided. Take a class, do something random, spend a week with family somewhere far. Do something totally different and step out of the founders role.

5. Don’t shut down

airBnb had to sell cereal at one point to keep their company alive, in the early days of FedEx their CEO gambled his money at blackjack to win and make payroll. Evernote the night before closing its doors received a $500k investment from a user in Sweden and Blogger (which sold for rumors between $20MM and $50MM) to Google had to lay off every single employee before finally getting acquired. That founder, Evan Williams went off to start what is now Twitter today, so the greatest thing a founder can do when their startup isn’t failing is to make sure it doesn’t die. Timing is everything.

This post originally appeared on Business Insider.

There are a million tricks for more productive meetings out there, but here's one idea you probably haven't heard before.

Meetings are a favorite whipping boy of the business world, and it’s not hard to see why.

Often aimless and inflated, they pop up in your calendar like dandelions in your lawn, breaking your concentration and eating up your workday. Then, in the end, they often get hijacked by the most insistent participants rather than the most insightful ones rendering the whole exercise pointless.

Ugh. But if there are many reasons to hate meetings, there are also many ways to improve them. Geoffrey James recently offered nine ideas, while other experts have suggested everything from making people stand, to limiting participants or forcing them to prepare by penning lengthy memos. Seth Godin has even offered a field guide to common types of meeting trolls. With so much advice out there it’s hard to imagine uncovering a truly fresh tip or trick.

But Twitter and Medium co-founder Ev Williams may have done it. For a recent post he steals an idea for better meetings from Holacracy and urges readers to consider stealing it as well. What’s the essence of the idea? You could probably improve the way you close your meetings by having a "closing round." What’s that?

In a closing round, you go around the room and give everyone a chance to comment on the meeting. There is no discussion or back-and-forth allowed. People tend to talk for less than 30 seconds (often a lot less), so you could close a large, 10-person meeting in less than five minutes.

An example closing-round comment might be something like:

"Good meeting. I’m glad we got a chance to finally discuss the Flimflam situation, because that’s been bothering me. Next time, I think we could be crisper with our status updates, so we can get to the meat faster."

The closing round is worth doing, because it gives everyone, in a sense, a “last word”--the chance to get something off their chest that they might otherwise carry around or whisper to their colleagues later. It creates more mindfulness about what just happened--and how things might go better next time. And it lets you know where the group is at emotionally, as well as potential issues to follow up on that weren’t strictly part of the proceedings.

A closing round, like keeping a journal but quicker, pushes meeting participants towards self-reflection, requiring everyone to stay conscious of the good and bad of your meetings, and encourages your team to make continuous improvements.

Keep up with Williams’ posts on Medium for lots of other insightful ideas for founders and managers.

Will you give the idea of a ‘closing round’ a try at your next meeting?

Thanks to its few minutes of fame during Apple's keynote, the tech world now knows--and loves--the robotics start-up Anki.

You know you're doing something right when Apple highlights your start-up at its Worldwide Developers Conference.

After a brief introduction from CEO Tim Cook during the keynote address, Anki's Boris Sofman took the stage to unveil Anki Drive, a gaming app that lets people use their iPhones to race toy-sized, sensor-laden robotic cars around a track. The "smart" cars are packed with artificial intelligence, making them aware of their surroundings and the competing cars, which they can literally shoot off the track when they're in "weapons" mode. Everything's controlled from the speed to the braking. The product demo went smoothly, and might go down as one of the most coveted launches in history.

But the future wasn't always so bright.

"There were a lot of really unglamorous years," said Mark Palatucci, Anki's co-founder and chief product officer, a day after the Apple event. "It took so much work to get to this point."

In early 2007, Palatucci and his friends Sofman and Hanns Tappeiner--who met in the robotics Ph.D. program at Carnegie Mellon University--spent many nights at home, batting around ideas for a start-up. In early 2007, they finally settled on one they liked: Bring video games to life with the help of edgy robotics.

The next year was spent juggling coursework with Anki. By late 2011, four years after their original brainstorming session, they had a protype worth showing to investors.

"The biggest challenges we faced were local challenges--things like sensor noise, motors not working, and connections coming apart," says Tappeiner, Anki's president. "But the idea always stayed the same." In fact, "as we continued to work on it, we got more excited," added Palatucci.

Though both founders admit they missed the mobile revolution in 2007, it took no time to catch up and find willing investors--or get face-time with Apple.

The founders are mum on how exactly that went, but will say they approached Apple, "because mobile devices are so central to what we're doing." For its part, the tech giant loved Anki because "we're using all the public APIs everyone else can use, but doing it in a way that is really unique and novel."

Marc Andreessen of the influential VC firm Andreessen Horowitz instantly jumped on board and contributed to Anki's Series A round in early 2012 and a more recent Series B round along with Two Sigma and Index Ventures. Anki raised a total of $50 million from both rounds.

"[Andreessen Horowitz] has this mantra, 'Software eats the world,' and that just fit really well with us," said Tappeiner.

Palatucci says he has always focused on "the core tech" of his product, but he knows that won't be enough to sustain his business. "The great companies are great across all aspects," he says, and "from the beginning we said we want to be a world-class company."

That meant hiring a "really great set of advisors" and asking the right questions when interviewing candidates. Cultural fit is everything, stresses Tappeiner.

"We want people that believe in robotics and AI as something that's fundamental. We're programming physical things and making them intelligent, adaptive. That's the thing that's really exciting."

The Israel start-up behind the popular traffic app gets acquired for $1.03 billion.

It's official: Google is buying Waze, the company's vice president of GEO Brian McClendon announced Tuesday. No terms of the deal were disclosed, but according to The New York Times, the price was $1.03 billion.

The Israeli mapping service has a very engaged--and global--community of nearly 50 million users.

But that's probably not what piqued Google's interest.

As Inc. reporter Eric Markowitz wrote Monday, the real reason Google was eyeing the Israel start-up was data.

Nothing users submit on Waze is private or confidential and that offers goldmine of data that can be repackaged and sold to third-party advertisers--"something Google is famously good at," said Markowitz.

For now, Waze's product development team will continue working in Israel and stresses they'll (mostly) stay the same.

"We will maintain our community, brand, service and organization - the community hierarchy, responsibilities and processes will remain the same," Waze founder Noam Bardin wrote on the company's blog. "See you on the road."

Technology doesn't make us work smarter, argues Jeff Bussbang.

Think about all of the amazing technology innovation that has impacted businesses over the last three years. Since 2011, we have seen an explosion in cloud computing, in mobile, in technology-enabled business services and in globalization. All of us feel more productive as professionals and our businesses feel more productive instutionally. As a nation, the US must be cranking in productivity. Killing it -- particularly after rebounding from a recession, right?

Now look at the latest US productivity statistics (Q1 was just released last week):

• Q1 2013: 0.5% (annualized)
• 2012: 0.7%
• 2011: 0.6%

In other words, despite three years of amazing innovation and growth, we don't seem to be gaining in productivity. What's going on?

In 1986, observing a similar phenomenon on the heels of the PC revolution, MIT Economist Robert Solow quipped: "You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics."

Those of us that are immersed in the innovation economy may find this hard to believe, but we are not, as a whole, actually more productive when we are in the midst of an innovation cycle boom. New technologies take time to absorb, refine and make mainstream. Computer software can be reprogrammed quickly. Humans can't.

Forrester captured this phenomenon nicely in a chart they produced a number of years ago predicting "the next big thing" in computing:

We can't imagine a world without broadband wireless, iPhone 5s, iPads and the cloud. But we've got a lot of work to do to absorb these amazing technologies and make us all more productive as a whole.

This post originally appeared on the blog Seeing Both Sides.

When you're just starting out, it's hard to tell the pros from the cons. Here, Jeff Bussgang offers his take.

Last month was Demo Day for Techstars Boston. I love Techstars Demo Days for many reasons, not the least of which is the amazing community that gathers to hear the brief, well-rehearsed pitches from the various start-ups who have spent months planning for this big event.

As accelerators like Techstars gain in popularity, many entrepreneurs wonder whether they should be applying and, if admitted, joining an accelerator and when they shouldn't. I get this question a lot from my students, particularly as they're graduating and scrambling to figure out where they should start their company, how to raise capital and whether an accelerator is right for them. Here are a few guidelines that

I would think about if I were an entrepreneur making such a decisions.

First, broadly speaking, accelerators serve a very valuable role in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. In many ways, as Eugene Chung of Techstars NY points out, they are like finishing schools for entrpreneurs. Like a college, there is a rigorous admissions process. And once admitted, the participant receives an extraordinarily rich education, in this case in the field of entrepreneurship. Also like college, the best accelerators represent valuable networks, where your "classmates" and even other alumni as well as boosters all become a part of your professional support system. Finally, the brand of the network will always be associated with your brand. Dropbox and Airbnb will always be known as "Y Combinator companies", which initially helped buttress their brand, and more in more is helping enhance the Y Combinator brand.

So with that in mind, here are a few reasons when I think an accelerator is a great choice for the entrepreneur:

• Outsiders to the Entrepreneurial Community. You are early in your entrepreneurial career and want to super-charge your entrepreneurial network. To be clear, this is not a comment about age - you might be in your 50s and new to entrepreneurship. But, as Launchpad LA's Sam Teller observes, "Across the board, accelerators provide one key value: dramatically expanding your network."

• Outsiders to the Particular Community. Every major innovation hub in the world now has an accelerator and most have numerous (Boston alone has over a dozen). If you are from outside that particular community, the accelerator is an amazing way to build a network in that particular city. As Brad Feld points out in his book on innovation ecosystems, there is tremendous power in being connected to a hyper-local, dense entrepreneurial ecosystem. Accelerators are magnets for the leaders in a given community - at Techstars Demo Days, it's always a "who's who" of that particular community. The quality of the mentors at the many events and one-on-one sessions over the are course of the program is outstanding - typically, you can't get access to these people any other way.

• New to Fundraising. Accelerators pride themselves, and often measure themselves, on their ability to help their graduates raise capital. For example, across nineteen Techstars classes in its four year history, over 70% of all Techstars graduates have raised capital (Techstars publishes an amazing chart that lists every company in every class and their fundraising status as well as employee count). If you don't have existing relationships with investors, accelerators are great ways to establish instant credibility and an instant network.

That said, not all accelerators are created equal. Just like with a college, your personal and professional brand will always be associated with that particular accelerator, so choose wisely. Some accelerators specialize in certain domains (e.g., Rock Health for healthcare or Learn Launch for edtech). Others have stronger reputations for fundraising vs. product development.

If you want to get a sense of the quality of the particular accelerator you are considering, you should ask around about them - graduates, senior entrepreneurs, VCs, start-up lawyers, bankers and accounting firms will all have their opinions. One tech reporter, Frank Gruber, publishes an annual ranking of accelerators that is pretty good, although it leaves out hybrid organizations that aren't technically accelerators, like Boston's Mass Challenge (which is a contest) and NYC's First Growth Venture Network (which doesn't take any equity).

Accelerators are thus not for everyone. If you are already well-connected to a particular entrepreneurial community, have a entrepreneurial track record and network, and are comfortable with your fundraising skills and relationships, then an accelerator probably isn't worth it for you. But if those attributes don't describe you as an entrepreneur, an accelerator may be an excellent choice.

This originally appeared on the blog Seeing Both Sides.

It's not unlike becoming a parent, from the blissful ignorance of what is about to happen to the sheer terror of realizing there's no turning back.

I’m a new dad (for the second time). In between the feedings, the changings, and the naps over the last few weeks, it dawned on me that becoming a parent is a lot like birthing a start-up.

Let’s dissect for a moment:

Stage 1: Conception.

You will never have so much fun again until you see your “baby” actually born. This is when you have all kinds of energy and vision about what the end result will be--yet absolutely no clarity as to what you’ll endure together to get there. You should relish this period as a Zen-like bubble. Float around with your happy thoughts before the actual work sets in.

Stage 2: Development.

The harsh reality check. Now you’re all experiencing the pain of growing your idea from a little tiny seed (“Wouldn’t this be awesome?”) to actual, 1.0 reality (“Why did we do this again?”). You hope your approach is suitably creative, colorful, and positive to influence the outcome, similar to what’s required to raise a Baby Mozart. You’re willing to get your engineers mountains of Doritos and rivers of caffeine, when the instant cravings strike. In general, it’s sleepless nights, perhaps some queasiness as you contemplate investor questions, weight gain from stress eating, even mood swings that fluctuate from utterly downcast to wildly euphoric.

Stage 3: Testing.

The finish line is so close you can feel it. The technology is nearly ready for a public audience. Now you have to run through final testing--like packing your hospital go-to bag or driving the route two or three times--which helps you feel ready for the inevitable last-minute questions and bugs. But you are ready. Or you’ve reached the point where you know everyone is thinking (because you are too), “I can’t take any more! Get out. Getoutgetoutgetout!”

Stage 4: Birth.

It’s that time. Pushing your tech start-up live is exciting, scary, sweat-inducing, pain-filled, and joyful at once. You can’t believe it’s really happening! There are fits and starts. But once the train starts moving out of the station, there’s no going back. There are only fervent prayers for success.

Stage 5: Euphoria and sleeplessness.

Your black-and-white world has exploded into vibrant, unmistakable Technicolor. Customers are active on your website and you’re discovering so much you didn’t know about your own technology, based on their reactions and interactions. There are many “learning moments”--some of them humbling (actually, most of them).

Stage 6: Contemplation.

Some time has passed. As your product has grown and changed, guided by your collective insights and wisdom, you begin to forget the pain of its infancy. It’s all obscured by the rosy, gentle glow of memory. That’s good--because your team is already starting to think about the 2.0 version.

From iTunes Radio to Rdio, here's a rundown of the biggest players in the streaming music space.

It's official: Apple is in the streaming music business. The company unveiled its much-anticipated streaming music service Monday at its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. Dubbed iTunes Radio, the service debuts this fall. It's likely to be a game-changer in a crowded industry that thus far has crowned no clear winner. Here's a look at the leading contenders vying to win the streaming wars.--Jill Krasny

Background: Despite entering a crowded space, iTunes Radio could take online radio mainstream, much like iTunes did with digital music. Specs: Free, but iTunes Radio will be ad-supported, so users will have to pony up for an iMatch subscription, which is a cloud back-up service for music that costs $25/year, to listen ad-free. ITunes Radio will feature a "buy" button hooked up to iTunes, personalized radio stations, and unlimited skips. Will it work? Seeing as how Apple has an ecosystem to fall back on (and plenty to sell), iTunes Radio has plenty of advantages on its side. All three major music labels have signed on, and Apple reportedly negotiated the terms of its advertising payouts to copyright holders in its favor, bypassing the "pureplay" license that has hampered Pandora.

Background: Unveiled during its developer conference, Google's service is mostly notable for beating Apple to the punch. Specs: $9.99 per month for streaming access to "millions" of songs, plus a radio service in the same vein as Pandora, which allows unlimited skips. Is it working? So far, it's received favorable reviews, but it's early yet. The service arrives on iOS soon, and though the Web app isn't quite as elegant as anything Apple has done, it's got enough features to keep users interested.

Background: Since it launched in 2011, Spotify has been gunning to become the industry leader, though it lags behind Pandora in terms of users--24 million with 6 million subscribers versus Pandora's 70.8 million users. Specs: Beyond the option to build and share playlists, Spotify's $9.99 per month subscription offers radio, plus unlimited skips, and a Discover feature. Is it working?: No. The company has yet to turn a profit, though Goldman Sachs says it's worth $3 billion and closed a $100 million funding round late last year.

Background: The "personalized radio" has an enviable user base--70.8 million active users as of May 2013--but not so enviable legal woes and royalty concerns. Specs: Pandora offers a free ad-supported version, though its ads aren't great at targeting users, and an upgraded ad-free service for $3.99 per month or $36 a year. The company plans to expand to game consoles, including the PlayStation, and TV via HTML5</>. Is it working? Definitely not. Despite going public in 2011, royalties and bandwidth are crippling its bottom line growth, though Pandora pays the lowest royalty rate in the industry ($0.12 per 100 songs versus $0.35 per 100 songs by Spotify).

Background: Rdio launched in 2010 and is available worldwide. Last week, CEO Drew Lerner stepped down. Specs: Rdio is known for built-in music discovery and offers three types of monthly subscriptions--Web ($4.99), unlimited Web & mobile ($9.99), and unlimited family ($17.99). "Heavy Rotation" selects music based on what you've been listening to and who you follow, while "Collections" houses playlists in an easy-to-search tab. Is it working? It's hard to tell, but the executive shake-up doesn't inspire confidence. In an interview with Bloomberg, Lerner said "momentum from last year has been tremendous," but declined to give specific figures.

Background: From the makers of Turntable.fm comes Piki, a Pandora-style radio app that serves up songs hand-picked by friends. Launched in December last year, it bills itself as a "music discovery application" that can be used with Spotify. Specs: Free on mobile and desktop, Piki is super social--you can dedicate, share, and build playlists with friends--and has no listening limit. An Android app is due sometime this summer. Is it working? Turntable.fm has kept its user numbers and growth close to the vest. The company is rumored to have raised $7 to $7.5 million at a $37.5 valuation.

Background: In early 2011, Grooveshark's mobile app was pulled by Google and Apple, hampering any potential on mobile. After halving its staff to around 60 and enduring lawsuits from all four major record labels, the start-up is just beginning to regain its footing. Specs: Grooveshark's redesigned free Web app focuses more on recommendations and social profiles. Drag-and-drop is possible, ads are all but nonexistent, and listeners can build playlists from previously streamed tracks. A premium, no-ads version goes for $9 per month or $90 per year. Is it working? Not really. Co-founder and CEO Sam Tarantinotold Mashable he's broke and is trying to lower his rent. Grooveshark's user numbers are back around 30 million and its HTML5 player now has 3 million monthly users, with 200,000 new users joining every month.

Background: The New York City-based start-up has received its share of press, but has struggled to scale in a meaningful way. Specs: Songza's free "Music Concierge" service recommends playlists by mood, which is a potential differentiator in a crowded market. Is it working? Not yet. The company raised a $1.5 million convertible note from some notable investors late last year, and 2 million new users joined last summer. But it still hasn't said how it plans to monetize nor has it figured out a way to add users. The Associated Press reports Songza racked up 2 million listeners in May last year versus 1.2 billion on Pandora's website.

Long-term overwork doesn't just cause physical exhaustion and a short temper. Here are some less expected tells that you're on your last reserves.

Exhaustion isn’t just easy to identify, it’s actually pretty impossible to ignore. Fuzzy thinking, a short temper, drooping eyelids, and the need to practically hook yourself up to the coffee pot with an IV drip are all tried and tested signs that you’re physically spent.

But burnout is a more complex beast.

Sure, you can get physically burnt out and feel any of the above symptoms, but sometimes burnout is more about monotony, lack of motivation, empty creative reserves or the slow but steady accumulation of little stressors and slightly too long workdays. This sort of burnout can creep up on you, slowly changing the way you function at work and at home and go unrecognized until it reaches a final, critical stage.

So how can you recognize this sort of creeping burnout and intervene before it tanks your productivity, alters your personality, and compromises your physical and emotional health? Experts have suggestions. For the real deep dive, Mind Tools offers a 15-question burnout self-test to score and evaluate exactly how worn out you are. But Business Insider offered a more quick and dirty guide to the signs recently. The signals of impending burnout the post outlines include some that you may be less aware of:

Inability to concentrate: The post quotes David Ballard of The American Psychological Association, who explains that the human brain is only designed to handle short bursts of stress. "When stress becomes chronic, this narrow focus continues for a long time and we have difficulty paying attention to other things,” he says.

Guilt: “You're constantly working, but can't seem to get all of your work done (maybe because your work load is too heavy or you can't concentrate) and you eventually feel guilty for not completing your work, which leads to working even more.”

Frequent mood changes: “A report published by the NASW Assurance Services, Inc., says that burnout may cause emotional exhaustion and a loss of a sense of personal accomplishment, and therefore lead to depersonalization, alienation, and depression,” reports BI.

Social isolation: Burnout leads to depression which can lead us to isolate ourselves from others which leads to yet more depression, and thus begins a vicious cycle. “When people are burnt out, they will start feeling ashamed about their work and will start to isolate themselves from others and decrease the number of social interactions they're involved in,” says the post.

Increased drinking: “If you find yourself at happy hour a bit too much, this could be a coping mechanism to avoid all the feelings that are weighing you down. The Mayo Clinic asks potentially burnt out workers if they are using food, drugs, or alcohol.”

If all of this is setting off alarm bells of recognition, what can you do about it? If you’re adventurous (and solvent), taking a sabbatical is a radical cure that has a high likelihood of knocking you out of your rut. But if you, like many, are too tied down to empty your desk and strap on a backpack, there are other interventions that can help.

When addressing the topic of recovering from burnout, everyone from doctors to tapped out creative types to techies with marathon workweeks leads with the same key bit of advice-- enlist the support of others. The first step to recovery is to get your mood and energy levels back up a bit and your perspective readjusted. Seeing loved ones is a surefire way to expand your focus beyond your work and raise your happiness levels (exercise, as always, also helps, but you knew that already).

Once that’s accomplished you should have the mental and physical resources to start thinking about more practical steps such as delegating more, developing a healthier relationship with your communication tools, setting boundaries a work or starting a side project or hobby.

What’s your best tip for those in burnout recovery mode?

According to recent reports, Snapchat, the super-hot photo-sharing app, is close to being valued at a billion dollars. But does it have enough users to justify the 10-digit valuation?

Late last week, Om Malik of Gigaom reported that Snapchat, the self-destructing-photo app based in Los Angeles, was in talks with investors to raise a Series B investment round of $100 million, which, despite the fact that the company has no revenue, would value Snapchat at about half a billion dollars.

A couple of days later, TechCrunch reported that the half-billion dollar valuation was a ridiculous sum...because it was too low.

"Several sources have told us Snapchat co-founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy are shooting for an even more ambitious valuation near $1 billion," it reported.

In an attempt to explain the 10-digit valuation, there have been two charts that have been widely circulated. They are both taken from the report compiled by Mary Meeker, the Kleiner Perkins partner known for her annual Internet Trends paper.

This is the first, which shows how insanely active Snapchat users are:

And this is the second, which contextualizes how many photos Snapchat users share, compared with Facebook, Instagram, and Flickr.

One chart that doesn't seem to exist is Snapchat's user growth--and that's important.

When you look at the first chart, titled, "Short-term Sharing Exploding," it's easy to think that more and more people are using the app. In fact, some articles, like this one, made the claim that "More People Share Photos on Snapchat than Instagram."

But that's not necessarily accurate. And it's a semantic error with real consequence. If you read it carefully, the chart simply implies that more photos are being shared--not that more people using the app.

While Snapchat's founders are quick to offer statistics about the number of photos shared--which is approaching a mind-boggling 150 million daily Snaps--there's notably less talk about the number of users. And that's probably because those data points are not as impressive.

According to VentureBeat, at last count in April Snapchat had about five million users. When Facebook acquired Instagram for $1 billion, it had about six times that.

Tech giants such as Facebook, Google, and Yahoo are willing to pay billion-dollar sums for companies with little or no revenue, so who's to say Snapchat wouldn't be "worth" a billion dollars? Markets are set by what buyers are willing to pay, and Facebook's 2012 acquisition of Instagram made it clear that, for better or worse, revenue takes a back seat to popularity. But it's important not to confuse virality among a concentrated group with mainstream popularity.

One of the biggest criticisms against Snapchat is that the site's usage is pretty much dominated by the 13-to-25-year-old demographic. That criticism often gets couched in the complaint that Snaphat's primary utility is to send lewd or sexually suggestive photos to friends (or in the less mature nomenclature of my peers, "dick pics").

Regardless of whether that's true, from a business development perspective, the complaint shouldn't be so much judged by the content of photos being shared--but it should be by the lack of diversity among its users, and the difficulty the company will have in achieving a mainstream following.

From the company's own marketing material, it's clear that the founders are trying attract a more diversified user base. Check out this recent promotional video, which features more than one aging grandparent, and a pair of baby-boomers awkwardly explaining how they send each other "really interesting" pictures. The company is maturing, and in creating a video like this, it's trying to distance itself from the much-joked-about image as an app that's used primarily for sexting.

"Snapchat captures the human experience," the narrator of the video explains. "Life is a series of moments and memories that happen and then disappear. Fleeting Snapchat moments are so magical and vibrant. So much like life."

It's a good strategy--probably an essential strategy--but only time and execution will tell if it will work. If Snapchat's founders really want to achieve their desired $1 billion price tag, then it's going to take a big push to expand the user base.

Building the right team is crucial. Do you know who you want on yours?

Launching a great start-up is not easy. But one thing that can make it easier is a great team, writes Michael Fertik, CEO of Reputation.com, in The Harvard Business Review.

Here are some things to keep in mind when assembling yours:

Pick the right co-founder. "A good co-founder is vital, especially since co-founder issues are the reason many early start-up crash and burn," Fertik says. Partner up with someone whose strengths complement yours. If you're an expert in one field, make sure their expertise differs.

Find a chief technology officer who won't break. To survive the "make it or break it" stage of launching a start-up, find someone who will work through the tough times. "Without this person, there is no product. You need someone whose intelligence exceeds your own and whose hunger to be the driving force behind bringing a product from concept to creation is overwhelming," says Fertik.

Hire a forecaster. Every start-up needs a specialist who understands the product/market fit. "You need that person to be a forecaster, both a realist and a dreamer, who can give you reasonable assurance about the right direction to take the product and company at different point in time," says Fertik.

Be efficient. "Don't hire people you don't need," warns Fertik. Instead of focusing on hiring PR, focus on the product and managing your finances instead.

Be realistic. Don't focus on things you're not ready to do yet, such as hiring IT and getting your product to scale. "Remember -- the easiest money in the world comes at the end of this phone call: 'I'm turning away 90 percent of my orders because my servers can't keep up with demand,'" says Fertik.

The streaming music business is getting more crowded and competitive. Get ready, start-ups: A shake-up is coming soon.

Stereomood CEO Eleanora Viviani doesn’t mince words on how she plans to make money off her start-up: "We want to get acquired."

Unless she invents a new business model--and a way to conquer music licensing fees--she's dependent on a corporate giant that does it all. If a deal comes through, Stereomood--a free music streaming service that curates playlists by moods and has a $1.5 million valuation--would become part of a larger, more visible app but be lost to history.

"It's not easy to monetize and have a strong business model if you just have music streaming," says Viviani, who resides in Italy. "Acquisition is the solution for a small company like ours."

A Perilous Business

Dozens of would-be Pandoras and Spotifys have launched in recent years, with varying degrees of success. Some spawn from corporate giants such as Google Music All Access and Apple’s forthcoming Pandora killer that's expected to be revealed at its Worldwide Developers Conference Monday. Others like Stereomood, Rdio, and Grooveshark have millions of monthly users, but struggle to turn a profit.

More established streaming companies like Spotify, which received a $100 million round of funding and is valued at $3 billion, say they’re focused on growth, but refuse to share numbers. Pandora, which went public in 2011 and counted 70.8 million users as of last May, has yet to reduce its royalty burden and has never had a profitable year in more than a decade as a company.

"The music industry is inherently a 'sword in the stone' story," says Grooveshark CEO Sam Tarantino. "No one has really been able to succeed in streaming yet, and the prize for winning is very 'sexy.' Who doesn't want to work with rock stars and pop stars?"

But while passion drives his business, that hasn't sustained it. As he told Mashable in April, the majority of 2011 and 2012 was spent laying off employees or watching them go, and fighting legal battles with all four major record labels.

David Pakman, a venture capitalist and former CEO of eMusic, says he isn't surprised: "There is no start-up that is profitable and doing music streaming today."

Despite enviable user numbers, neither Spotify nor Pandora have turned a profit because of the cost of music royalties. Pandora generates revenue through a mix of paid subscriptions and ads, but licensing fees eat up a huge chunk of that revenue. In 2011, the company paid $149 million in content acquisition costs out of $274 million in total revenue--that's 54 percent of its revenue. Spotify reportedly posted a loss of $57 million in 2011, largely because of high licensing fees.

"When you are totally dependent on the music rights and on the licensing, that's where all your money goes," says Vincent Reinders, CEO of 22tracks, a music discovery service based in the Netherlands. "I think it's really hard to be a viable distribution platform. You can see them struggling all the time."

Why Apple Will Win

While numbers like these might keep an entrepreneur up at night, corporate giants like Apple and Google have less to worry about.

By virtue of being an established brand, both have a better chance of negotiating good deals with the major record labels. Apple reportedly negotiated its deals directly with three major record labels (instead of acquiring a "pureplay" license negotiated by the third party Copyright Royalty Board). Billboard suggests the move could help the company save $39 billion on the $156 billion it earned last year. But in going the direct route, Apple cut a deal to share 10 percent of its ad revenue with Warner Music Group. Pandora pays out just 4 percent, but unlike Apple, cannot precisely target users based on all their entertainment tastes, in addition to their sex, area code, and other listening habits. Google was able to launch All Access so quickly because it agreed to pay advances to some of the major copyright owners. A small, fledgling start-up couldn't possibly pull this off.

According to Ted Cohen, a digital entertainment executive who's worked for Napster and EMI, tech giants also have the advantage of using music as a loss leader, something a single-purpose start-up can't do. Apple has a whole ecosystem of products to fall back on, while Amazon, who is reportedly eyeing the music space as well, can sell music subscriptions so long as customers keep shopping on its site.

Beyond that, none of these companies have to deal with operational costs since all their offices, staff, and equipment are in place. "Apple has never been concerned about the economics of licensed content," says Pakman. "They just want you to use their device for consuming all media. They've got fantastic profit margins on that."

A Feature, Not a Business

Apple doesn't have much to lose the way a single-purpose start-up does. And that's why so many of these companies will either be acquired or lost to history.

Spotify proved it could do what Pandora was doing by adding a radio feature last year. It also introduced a Discovery tab in May, proving it could recommend songs just as well as Twitter Music, 22Tracks, and the French service Whyd.

Today's listeners want to make playlists, share songs, and stream stations. They also want to be local, which is why Clear Channel's iHeartRadio service, with its news, weather updates, and hourly traffic reports is winning. A single-purpose start-up can't do all of that, though it can make a useful accessory.

The Road Ahead

Up until now, small music services were competing with the likes of Spotify and other start-ups. But now that it’s Google and Apple, it's hard to tell how they'll fare in the long run.

"I think that there are way too many ships on the ocean, and you will see in the coming years, a couple of companies really winning and the rest of them will go away or be somehow acquired by other companies," says Reinders.

"These companies have a big structure, they have the market," adds Viviani. "We are a small company; we are Italian. If we are not acquired, I do not know what the future will be."

It's not just you and it's not just in your head. British scientists have measured the impact of email on stress levels and it's not good.

You know that buzzing, stressed out feeling you get when you look at your overflowing inbox of hear the ping of an arriving message?

Well, turns out that reaction is real and it isn’t just mental; it’s physical too.

A team of researchers out of Loughborough University in the UK used a set of 30 government employees as guinea pigs to determine the physical as well as psychological effects of email. To do so they tracked the blood pressure, heart rate and cortisol (a hormone related to stress) levels of the syudy participants, who were also asked to keep a diary of their work days. What they found probably won’t surprise you.

Though a single email was no more stressful than receiving a phone call, the amount of email that came at the study subjects throughout the day meant that email ended up being far more stressful than other means of communication. Dealing with all those messages raised cortisol levels as well as increasing blood pressure and heart rate -- all signs of elevated stress. If you need reminding, physical stress like this can lead to a parade of nasty conditions like heart troubles and high blood pressure over the long-term.

That email is stressing you out may be scary but satisfying as scientific confirmation of your intuitions. However, perhaps the more useful aspects of the study were finer grain details about exactly what sort of email is the most stressful. Email messages that contain timely information weren’t stressful, nor were those that acknowledged or expressed gratification for completed work. The kind of emails that did cause stress levels to spike interrupted tasks in progress or were irrelevant to the receipient.

Again, that’s not super surprising. But the conclusion for Professor Tom Jackson who worked on the study is the problem isn’t inherent in the medium. In other words, email isn’t really the issue.The problem is how we use email.

"Over the years email has been the focus of many research studies and is sometimes portrayed as a bad communication medium," Jackson says, but "email is no worse than any other media. Multitasking email alongside other communication media, such as phone and face-to-face meetings, increases the risk of becoming stressed." Multitasking, then, is the true enemy.

This bad news for multitasking comes on top of earlier studies that show constant interruptions not only make you physically stressed, they also make you stupider. So what’s to be done? Doctors have recommended a simple technique called set shifting (basically consciously choosing to focus your task on one task and then another), while short "email vacations" have been shown to lower the physical signs of stress in your body.

What began as a stair lighting kit has become Baltimore's most-promising start-up.

For start-up founder Scott Holland, coming up with a clever idea is as simple as asking, "Why not?"

It's how he took iLighting from fledgling stairwell-lighting kit supplier to $100,000 grand prize winner at the InvestMaryland Challenge in April, and how he plans to expand his small (but mighty) eight-person staff.

What the early-stage North East, Maryland-company lacks in pizazz, it more than makes up for in lighting products for indoor and outdoor stairs, decks, and cabinets. Its easy-plug wiring system is so simple to use, Holland tells customers they're doing it wrong if they think about reaching for wirecutters.

Inc. associate editor Jill Krasny spoke with Holland, a former Army helicopter mechanic and son of an electrical engineer, about iLighting's origins, why he listens to customers, and the importance of putting a Made in the U.S.A. sticker on every product.

Tell us how you got started.
We started eight years ago as Stairlighting Systems. In mid-2008, we invented a kit and received a patent. To have an international patent is very expensive, and a regular patent is expensive as it is. I felt that deterring people from duplicating your ideas in the U.S. would offer just a little extra sense of security, plus it's really nice to invent something and get it patented.

Who came up with the name?
Stairlighting didn't fit the outdoor decking world--it wasn't broad enough. So we started using Decklighting System. At the end of every deck is an empty connector, and it dawned on us one day, "Why don't we add our own line of masonry lights?" That would give us the ability to use one power supply for the deck, the stairs, and the landscape lights. When the phone rang, we don't know if we had an indoor, staircase, or deck customer, so we started doing business as iLighting. It's really a mother company and two sister companies.

What is your vision?
We want iLighting to be America's one-stop lighting shop at any given time in the year. When deck season stops, people start remodeling, so we need a line of products that can move inside with them.

How do you develop those products?
It really comes from our staff and spending a lot of time talking and listening to customers. Seventy-five percent of our product line has evolved through our ability to listen and create what they want, not what we want.

Where do you build and test your creations?
We're actually building a new facility in Baltimore, and as we move in we're putting in robotic equipment to manufacture our own circuit boards. That's what we'll use the InvestMaryland money for. Currently it's all done in China, and the freight and duty costs are expensive. We're really striving to be able to put a sticker on our box that says, 'Made in the U.S.A.'

Why is that sticker important?
I just think it's the right thing for America, and the right thing for my company. When a customer sees labels that say 'Made in Taiwan' or 'Made in China,' they think, "How did they cheapen this up?" When a product says it was made in the U.S.A., I think you have to live up to a higher reputation of quality than what you get from overseas.

Has being in Baltimore helped iLighting get off the ground?
Our state senator told me about the InvestMaryland Challenge, which helped put a value of $3 million to $4 million on our company. [In addition to the InvestMaryland grand prize, iLighting raised $5,000 from the Eastern Shore Economic Development Council.] That experience proved that we are doing something right, and it also helped us focus and define our direction. We also got involved with Tedco, another division of Maryland's economic development, which required us to write a very formidable business plan.

How are you spreading the word?
We rely on guerrilla marketing, because we have a really limited budget. We're commonly featured on the DIY Network's I Want This show, and were recently recognized by Home and Design magazine as the top lighting product for decks. The American Handyman Club also named us one of its highest-voted systems.

Did your background prepare you for what you do now?
I'm an active corporate pilot and fly for a pharmaceutical company. I also have an extensive maintenance background. I spent 30 years as an Army mechanic, although I never was in any combat situation. My father was an electrical engineer who started Project Mercury [the first U.S. human spaceflight program]. It's easy for me to look at something and see why I want it to work, and how it should work.

The co-founder of the taxi-hailing app Hailo has been eyeing the New York City market for years now. Last week, the company got a green light. Here's how that happened.

Last Thursday, the New York State Court of Appeals lifted a restraining order against e-hailing programs in New York City. That couldn't have been a bigger sigh of relief for Jay Bregman, the co-founder and CEO of Hailo, a taxi-hailing app whose launch has been put on pause multiple times in New York City.

The program has been on hold since last June when State Supreme Court blocked it due to the city seeking the state legislature's approval after the program was rejected by the city council. While the program is not completely in the clear until after the case is debate and the court issues a verdict, it's operating now--and Inc. caught up with Bregman to get a glimpse inside the process.

How does it feel being able to finally operate in New York?
First of all we've already been operating in New York since late April ...

In Beta, correct?
In Beta, right. I am just extremely proud to be a New Yorker and was extremely proud last week to have had a year-long partnership with the [Taxi and Limousine Commission, the agency responsible for regulating taxis and other for-hire vehicles in New York City], who we have been meeting with before we have even launched in London [in 2011]. They've been looking at and observing the growth of our operation as well as that of other networks. And then that developed into pilot program rules which we contributed to their development, and testified on their behalf. What I am the most happy about is that I think we have made the right decision to be the only app provider to legally intervene in the case.

Why do you think that Hailo was the only one to join in on the lawsuit?
We did it because we wanted to protect the rights of New Yorkers, both of the riding public and of the yellow taxis, to experience the technology that was both inevitable and unyieldingly positive to them in terms of their livelihood as drivers and lives as passengers. We felt we had to intervene on behalf of the New Yorkers, we felt we had to stand up for the truth that only we could tell. The TLC could tell their view from the perspective of a New York City driver, but we could put insight into what the future is and the fact that the technology is loved by the drivers and passengers around the world as well as those in New York. And we felt that was worth fighting for.

Even though the injunction was lifted, the court case is still going forward and will debated even as e-hail is to go forward. Is that accurate?
Look, let's take it back a stage. This case was frivolous at best to begin with. It was you know basically trying to argue that technology that was proven to be completely safe, that there were no laws against it and it only benefits elsewhere in the world, somehow should be denied to New Yorkers. That point never made sense to me. It was summarily rejected by the justice Carol Huff of the Supreme Court, who threw out the case, so they already lost.

Actually, we have been doing right by what Mayor Bloomberg has told entrepreneurs like us to do, which is invest in New York, hire people in New York, bring technology to new york, and you will be rewarded. This was great victory ultimately for that vision. You know, it required a little bit more work perhaps than just building a network of drivers and passengers, it required going to court fighting for the rights of drivers and the rights of New Yorkers, but then, ultimately we believe passionately in what we do and so we were happy to do that.

Now that you will be transitioning from Beta, what do you expect to happen in New York?
You know, this network right now ever since the decision, it's been the fastest growing network we have ever seen. And bear in mind, you know, I am sitting in a cab in London where half of all cabs use the app, as do hundred of thousands of passengers. In Dublin, in seven months, one out of every ten people in that city was a Hailo passenger. But, yeah, New York is growing faster than any of those cities did.

What could other start-ups learn from Hailo joining this lawsuit and how you handled this situation?
Put your principles on the line and go to court defending what you believe. Making it in New York is hard, but so is running a start up. It takes confidence.

Collaborative consumption is the path to growth for successful businesses, explains the internet entrepreneur.

I spoke this past week at the LeWeb conference in London, which was a superbly well run event with a very quality production team. Kudos. The 20-minute video of my presentation is here if you're interested.

And it was convenient for me because we also held our annual London board meeting of DataSift, who helps companies processes and analyze large volumes of social plus enterprise data in realtime.

The topic of the conference was "The Sharing Economy" and as I read many of the session title descriptions I realized that people would be talking more about "collaborative consumption" -- think Airbnb, Taskrabbit, Uber -- than about why people are sharing more on Instragram and Snapchat.

You can of course view the presentation in SlideShare above or download it directly for free here.

Why is Collaborative Consumption Becoming a Hot Trend for Startup Companies?

As I outlined in my talk, I believe the greatest Internet companies created over the past 15 years have been "deflationary" meaning they are driving down the prices or goods and services. They are also driving down the margins they make and are offering products that are initially lower functionality than their competitors.

I described that phenomenon in this post.

Declining prices and margins in a small market is much less interesting. But as we now know 33 percent of the world's population is now connected to the Internet, the majority of traffic to the major Internet properties is now global and at Benedict Evans pointed out in his recent report, more than 70 percent of the world's literate population will have a smartphone within four years.

Prices down. Network Up. But what else?

The world still has economic challenges that often aren't perceived by many of us in the tech world in our little cocoons of Silicon Valley, NYC or Los Angeles.

Example: More than 50 percent of all youth in Greece and Spain -- 34 percent in Italy -- are unemployed and if you take "under-employment" it is even worse. We know the if people miss getting on the career ladder for just three years, it can affect the entire trajectory of their lifetime earning potential.

In the US, that number is 17 percent, which is still too high.

Add unemployment to debt. Student debt alone in the US is now $1 trillion, which $100 billion being added every year.

These types of trends are unsustainable.

I believe that market conditions drive innovation as much as great entrepreneurs do. As they say, "necessity is the mother of all invention."

So those underemployed people who have part time jobs but need more wages will gladly take on five dogs a week in their house on DogVacay.

The person who is between gigs will gladly drive people on Lyft or offer out their spare bedroom on Airbnb.

Consider the case of Tradesy founder Tracy DiNunzio who could only launch her startup by giving up her bedroom for a year and earning $28,000 that allowed her to not have a full time job that year.

If your closet is full of clothes and your credit card is full of debt -- of course you're going to trade clothes with other people rather than only buying new stuff.

You can watch the 20-minute video of my talk if you want here.

What are the Types of Collaborative Consumption Companies?

I broke down the types of CC companies into five main buckets today to give a framework to think about your startup if you're entering this space:

1. Tapping into global markets: There are talented people in the world who can't earn a "global market rate" for their services but when you open them up to global demand -- boom! An obvious example of this is oDesk. Another is DeviantART, who are able to tap into hundreds of millions of people around the world who produce art and help them making a living. That's why dA has nearly 70 million monthly actives producing 2.5 billion page views making it the largest communities of artists in the world.

2. Empowering the under-employed: I spoke about this briefly already. When you have millions of unemployed youth plus millions more not earning a high-enough wage they are going to find ways to make extra money on the side by running tasks, sitting dogs or reselling their closets. Market meet reality.

One area I didn't talk about in the presentation that really interests me and seems underserved is helping to empower senior citizens. We know that this generation has retired without enough savings. We see our seniors increasingly at Walmart or Starbucks check-out lines. But who is going to put these people back to work part time in their homes and on their phones -- tapping into beautiful brains that don't have the same physical abilities they once did?

3. Moving from hierarchic to flat structures: Some of the peer-to-peer markets are driven where a flat structure is better suited than a top-down model. Here I talked about Lending Club where I understand hedge fund managers are now deploying capital to lend directly against pools of borrowers.

But an equally obvious case is BitCoin where people who live in Iran, Syria or Libya may rather put their money into non-governmental units (even knowing the risks) than to trust their local governmental leaders to protect their assets from inflation or seizure.

4. Breaking down markets requiring physical barriers - I am also very interested in cases where people break down physical barriers that limit wages of instructions while costing too much to students. The obvious cases I mentioned are ones like Udacity but I believe this trend will encapsulate personal trainers, financial planners, depression or substance counsellors, etc. Anywhere where the service provider can earn more at a lower margin by proving more service to the masses.

5. Making existing markets more efficient: There are, of course, markets that have always existed -- like the taxi or limo service markets -- that are simply being made much more efficient through companies like Uber.

Will this Trend Last?

In my mind, there is no doubt this a lifetime trend.

Venture capital will be easy and then hard. The press will romance the topic and then spurn it.

That always happens.

But the key drivers: un/under-employment, personal and governmental debt, globalization, resource scarcity, transparency and shifting demographics will mean collaborative networks will form throughout our life.

It is the antidote to top-down control.

I also spoke about the trend of open communications from radio to TV to telephon. I believe the natural success to that is Twitter more than any other technology of our generation. It is open and empowering. But with empowerment also comes awareness of what others have that you don't. Which leads to disenfranchisement. And rebellion.

Think Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and now Turkey.

Transparency can breed discontent.

And the solutions to many of the worlds problems will come from the people as much as from governments.

Collaboration. We've only just begun.

How Will it Evolve?

I did spend some time in the presentation to how consumption networks will evolve. It was my sixth trend and one I really believe in. In a world where P2P networks threaten existing business value chains some companies and systems will disppear.

But there are always ones who adapt and thrive. And if you can create a company that can help existing players jujitsu their nimble startups, you'll do well.

One such company is Deliv. They are taking the same approach as an Uber or Lyft -- finding drivers who want to earn a bit more-- and instead of matching them up with consumers they match them up with local retailers to deliver goods to people's homes.

Think about it -- most retailers can't compete with the scale and costs of Amazon.

But they do have a local physical location in your neighborhood.

And what if you could meet the holy grail of same-day delivery for the same cost as overnight on UPS.

That's what Deliv enables. Retailer wins. Driver earns extra income. Consumer gets same-day deliver.

Win.

I suspect you'll see many more companies helping business tap into consumption networks in the years ahead. Companies like this don't capture the sexy headlines in the same way as cars with pink mustaches on them. But they do tend to build large and profitable businesses.

This post originally appeared on Both Sides of the Table.

Is your plan to write a business plan holding you back? Just make sure your venture includes these key ingredients.

Bootstrapping your business? Nowadays even funded businesses need to be highly adaptable and operate on a shoestring budget. But those entrepreneurs have to account to investors for their every move, while bootstrapping entrepreneurs need only account to themselves and their customers. But to do that effectively you need a plan.

Bootstrapping your business commonly comes with the assumption that you don't need a big plan. And to some degree that is correct. If you're not seeking funding, then a business plan becomes a hoop that you simply don't need to jump through to be successful.

The founder and president of Business in Blue Jeans, Susan Baroncini-Moe, says, "writing a business plan in the traditional sense isn't really necessary to be successful--in fact, plenty of businesses have had formal business plans and have still failed miserably."

In her recently published book, Business in Blue Jeans, How to Have a Successful Business on Your Own Terms in Your Own Style, Baroncini-Moe says that your success is determined by your passion, marketing savvy, and state of mind. Here is her shortlist of necessary ingredients for the bootstrapping entrepreneur:

Fire
Love what you do and all that it makes possible in your life. (Flexibility, financial freedom and lifestyle choices for instance.)

Expertise
Hone your expertise; be really good at what you do. If you take what you love doing and merge it with what you do well, that's what your business should be about.

Business Model
Package what you love and are good at into a viable business model and a brand that's appealing to your target market. Market your business effectively. Baroncini-Moe calls this leaning into your marketing. When you lean into your marketing, you tell your target market that you care what they have to say; more importantly, you are willing to act on it.

A Village
Work hard but work smart! Building a support network will help you do that. Every village needs for groups of people: masterminds, networks, administrators, and advisors. Make lists of people to invite into your village and apply the expertise of others to help your business succeed.

A Clear Head
Rid yourself of the "brain junk" that's likely to thwart your success. Keep a list of the negative thoughts that run through your brain. Now, create the positive equivalent for each thought and practice replacing the negative. If your recurring thought is, "I don't have what it takes to be successful", then your positive equivalent is something like, "I'm learning the skills to become more successful."

As you see, a traditional, full-blown business plan is not one of the prerequisites for success according to Baroncini-Moe. But there are a couple of plans that you do need.

"First, you need a plan for your life," she says. "What do you want out of life? What matters most to you? It's not just important to know what you want your business to create in your life, it's important to know how much it costs so that you can build your business in a way that you can actually achieve those goals." Baroncini-Moe calls this your "Why Budget" and offers a "Why Budget Planner" tool on her website's resources page to help you figure out what your "dream lifestyle" costs.

Once you know what kind of income you're working toward, you'll be able to better predict whether a particular business model can sustain that lifestyle. For example, if you wanted to earn seven figures in a service business, you'd probably want to plan to grow into a business model that leverages the time of other people, so that you could have unlimited billable hours, otherwise you'd hit a ceiling in the amount of time you have available and the amount you can charge for your services.

When you're extremely clear on what you're working toward and why it matters to you, then you don't need inspirational sayings or motivational books. You already have all the motivation you need to get moving.

Second, a marketing plan is a critical component of success. If you don't have a marketing plan, then you'll be chasing strategies and tactics without a clear idea of why you're doing those things. "It makes much more sense to develop a marketing plan that includes a comprehensive review of the climate of your industry, a clear description of your target market and the competition, and a blueprint for reaching your potential customers," says Baroncini-Moe. And remember that a marketing plan shouldn't be a static document, it must be flexible and fluid, evolving as the market changes and your business grows.

A fascinating new study took an in-depth look at how custodial staff understand their work and uncovered wisdom for those on every rung of the career ladder.

What’s the worst job in the world?

Answers certainly differ based on personal preference (my vote goes to anything involving heights). But cleaning up after hospital patients would surely be towards the top of most people’s lists. So what could janitors possibly have to teach entrepreneurs about career satisfaction?

A fascinating recent study uncovered a surprising answer.

Amy Wrzesniewski, now a professor at the Yale School of Management, had the radically simple idea of talking to the custodial staff at a hospital in detail about their jobs to discover what strategies they might employ to find satisfaction in their admittedly low-skilled, low-paid jobs. The wisdom she uncovered should serve to humble anyone who has ever made the error of thinking of those who work in the profession with condescension or not at all.

Turns out, they have much to teach even the most high-flying professionals about maximizing career satisfaction. The essence of this wisdom, author David Zax reports, is the idea of "job crafting." That doesn’t mean changing your work, it means carefully crafting how you think about your work. Some of the custodial staff, he reports,

Felt their labor was highly skilled, they described the work in “rich relational terms,” says Wrzesniewski, talking about their interactions with patients and visitors. Many of them reported going out of their way to learn as much as possible about the patients whose rooms they cleaned, down to which cleaning chemicals were likely to irritate them less. “It was not just that they were taking the same job and feeling better about it, pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and whistling. It was that they were doing a different job.”

This second, happier group didn’t see themselves as custodial workers at all. One described forming such a bond with patients that she continued to write letters to some of them after they were discharged. Another paid attention to which patients seemed to have few visitors or none at all, and would make sure to double back to spend some time with them... What these workers were doing, Wrzesniewski came to realize, was quietly creating the work that they wanted to do out of the work that they had been assigned -- work they found meaningful and worthwhile. Wrzesniewski and her colleagues call this practice “job crafting,” and they think it could be the key to happiness in all sorts of jobs.

The idea of job crafting is available to everyone, Wrzesniewski believes. Though there are obviously times you should quit a terrible job, the impulse to always look for the perfect career situation rather than try to find ways to thrive in your current one and connect with the value of the work you already do, makes a lot of people unnecessarily miserable.

Could you use the idea of job crafting to reconceptualize any of parts of your work that drive you nuts?

Start-up founders love to talk about wellness and fitness, but are you actually helping your employees achieve it?

Employees today value a healthy work-life balance as much as they value a promising paycheck. Not only does an offering like an employee wellness program provide a more positive work experience, but it can also boost camaraderie, morale and--best of all--productivity at the office.

What are the must-have elements of an employee wellness program at a start-up? We asked nine successful founders from the Young Entrepreneur Council to suggest a few program investments that will pay off.

1. Look for Programs Catered to Your Needs

I would suggest looking into organizations that are catered to helping companies with their wellness programs. If you are a knowledge worker, I would suggest something like Keyboard Athletes. --Michael Bruny, The New Art of Conference Networking

2. A Dedicated Nap Room (Really!)

We offer our employees the use of a dedicated nap room, with a sofa and comfortable sleeping space. A short rest can make all the difference between a tired employee and a fresh, motivated one. --Robert J. Moore, RJMetrics

3. Host Wellness Workshops

Corporate employees tend to suffer from lack of sleep, poor eating habits and burnout. Tony Schwartz of The Energy Project created a fantastic program to raise awareness of each of these areas. Awareness is what will ultimately lead to action; after the workshops, get feedback to determine what is most needed (i.e. napping pods, accountability groups, food or gym stipends or standing desks). --Jenny Blake, Life After College

4. Make Fitness a Part of Your Company's Culture

When developing an employee wellness program, be sure to have a goal in mind and a purpose for the program. Provide a tangible goal that your employees can reach to increase motivation. Whether it's training for a 5K or competing on the company's softball team, providing something your employees can participate in will help them remain active. --Heather Huhman, Come Recommended

5. Get Fitbit for Every Employee

I love my new Fitbit, a high-tech pedometer with wireless sync that allows me to compete against my friends or team for the most steps each day. Create a group for the start-up to see each other's progress and build in friendly competition. It'll encourage more "Let's walk to lunch" and activity around the office, as well as building the team as a unit.
--Kelly Azevedo, She's Got Systems

6. Give Your Kitchen a Makeover

The strongest wellness programs are holistic in nature. After creating an exercise routine, give your kitchen or snack shelf a makeover. For starters, stock your fridge with ready-to-eat quinoa (e.g. Minsley) and salad greens, fill your shelves with organic seeds and nuts (e.g. sunflower, sesame, pumpkin, pistachios, pecans) and get a robust water filter (e.g. Berkey).
--Kevon Saber, Fig

7. Consider Social Wellness

At 'ZinePak, we recently implemented the rule that every employee can take two paid days off per year to volunteer for a charity of his/her choice. It's an excellent opportunity to empower employees to help our community and help them feel like they're a part of something larger. Wellness isn't just about physical fitness; social and emotional wellness are equally important to overall well-being. --Brittany Hodak, 'ZinePak

8. Implement More Standing and Walking

By offering standup desks and encouraging walk-and-talk meetings, our team can make small changes to existing routines. Our employees have found that standing and walking throughout the day, instead of constantly sitting, keeps them more energized and better-focused. --Bobby Emamian, Prolific Interactive

9. Offer Flexible Working (Out) Hours

The biggest challenge facing employees who want to be healthier isn't always the cost of a gym membership, but the time to fit it in. Gyms are packed before and after work, so allowing employees gym time anytime can inspire everyone to get up and get moving instead of the typical post-lunch afternoon slump. --Derek Flanzraich, Greatist

What happens when your company's business model doesn't necessarily jive with local law? You go on the offensive. Companies in the "sharing economy" space are doing just that.

Some of the fastest-growing comanies in Silicon Valley have capitalized on the idea of collaborative consumption and asset sharing. The only problem, of course, is that local regulators around the country don't always have such a breezy view of the sharing economy. (Think, for instance, of the Airbnb hosts sued by their cities, or the cease-and-desist orders delivered to ride-sharing start-ups in San Francisco, as well as the legal battles faced by SideCar.)

According to multiple sources, groups of these peer-to-peer start-ups are beginning to band together in the face of regulatory scrutiny. A source at ride-sharing start-up Lyft told Inc. there are at least two initiatives in the works that that will bring together policy (and potentially lobbying) efforts to the sharing economy. It's a little unclear at this point how many groups are actually being formed and who, exactly, is involved, but the wheels are in motion.

In a time when tech companies are starting to behave like industry giants of the past, taking their interests--and their money--to K Street to influence legislation (consider Mark Zuckerberg's immigration lobby), it seems natural that several of these scrappy sharing-based start-ups are beginning to band together.

On May 24, Poltico.com first reported that Airbnb, Etsy, and travel start-up Vayable were teaming up to create a "new advocacy effort." But it seems that more than one group is actually in discussions about how to approach both advocacy and political/regulatory influence.

Airbnb did not respond to our request for interview. However, our request was apparently diverted to FitzGibbon Media, a Washington, D.C.-based communications firm, which confirmed via email that there will be a "major announcement in the coming weeks." Vayable did not return a request for comment.

Etsy, also named in the Politico article, denies its affilition with any particular group. However, in a statement e-mailed to us, its director of public policy, Althea Erickson writes:

We haven't joined any organization specifically, but we've been involved in many conversations with Airbnb and other companies about joint efforts to support the peer economy, which we believe can be a powerful engine for sustainable economic development. Our top priority is to advocate for Etsy sellers and ensure that they can start and build independent, creative businesses on their own terms. A good part of our policy work is to educate legislators, academics and the small business community about how Etsy sellers are a really different kind of entrepreneur.

While it's unclear so far which group, exactly, will be leading the charge, Inc. has confirmed the existence of at least one: BayShare, which describes itself as an "advocacy organization in the San Francisco Bay Area whose mission is to make the Bay Area the best place on the planet for sharing." Its site lists several notable member companies, including Airbnb, Lyft, RelayRides, and several others.

Its spokesperson, Milicent Johnson, says that although the site is live--along with an accompanying Facebook page--the group has not yet officially launched. She was careful not to divulge too much information before its member sites had a chance to prepare official statements.

"So much of this work is in its infancy," she said in a phone interview. "We're still trying to figure out how we want to have our coming out party."

Johnson said the group's mission will be three-fold: To unite companies facing similar issues, to educate the public about the sharing and peer-to-peer economy, and, most importantly, to work with city regulators when it comes to legal matters.

"There aren't that many peers in the sharing economy," she says. "There was a real need to seek out your counterparts."

Not suprisingly, San Francisco politicians have jumped on the collaboration economy bandwagon.

Last March, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee announced the formation of a "sharing economy" working group, which would "bring together City Departments, neighborhood and community stakeholders and sharing economy companies to...explore policy alternatives and legislation to modernize those laws and/or address emerging impacts and issues."

In a statement, Lee said that the "growing 'sharing economy' is leveraging technology and innovation to generate new jobs and income for San Franciscans in every neighborhood and at every income level...San Francisco must be at the forefront of nurturing its growth, modernizing our laws, and confronting emerging policy issues and concerns."

Why the famed entrepreneur and author credits the military for advantages his civilian counterparts just didn't have.

For years, entrepreneur and author Steve Blank kept a secret from the people he worked with in Silicon Valley, he told me recently. The secret was that he'd first learned about technology and leadership in the U.S. Air Force.

If you're into entrepreneurship and customer development, you probably know Blank.

He's credited along with his former student, author Eric Ries, with developing the lean start-up paradigm. He's a serial entrepreneur who had big failures (Rock Star Games) and great successes (Epihpany, sold for $329 million in 2005), and a best-selling author in his own right. (His books, The Four Steps to the Epiphany and The Startup Owner's Manual are perennial Amazon bestsellers.)

Blank also writes columns for Inc.com. In reading one of his latest entries, I noticed that he'd served in the military. When I called afterward to ask about his experience in uniform--and whether it had any measurable impact on his later entrepreneurial success--he was eager to talk.

(I'm pretty convinced that military experience can offer fantastic, if misunderstood, preparation for life as an entrepreneur. I got some great responses to my recent column on the subject, and I'm always eager to hear about more of these stories. So feel free to reach out to me here.)

Airman Blank

As Blank tells the story, his military career began in 1971, after he dropped out of Michigan State, hitchhiked to Florida, and got a job at a Miami airport. He "fell in love with avionics," and enlisted in the Air Force to learn more about the field. He served for four years, including a year in Thailand repairing aircraft.

Afterward, he kept quiet about the experience, at least after he stopped working for big military and intelligence contractors and entered the world of start-ups. In the post-Vietnam era, he explained, there was little upside to mentioning a stint in uniform.

"It was very different than today. To say it wasn't respected was an understatement," Blank told me. "You did not advertise that you were ex-military in Silicon Valley."

Nevertheless, that military experience was Blank's secret advantage, he told me, a place where he'd "learned some of the best things I learned in my life." Here are five ways Blank said the military prepared him to become a successful entrepreneur.

1. Technical Training

Transferability of military training to civilian workforce skills is a huge issue in veterans affairs these days. Not all military specialties are created equally, but in Blank's case, he says his military training was a path to success in Silicon Valley.

"The Air Force at the time had the best vocational school in the world. They taught hundreds of thousands of airmen," he said. "We were at the bleeding edge of electronics."

His training also showed that he had a gut feeling for how systems worked.

"I learned I had great pattern recognition skills. If you're a tech, you can do it by the manual, or you can recognize over time that the manual doesn't teach you. That turned out to be my strength," he said.

2. Creative Problem-Solving

Creative people find a way to shine in spite of rigid environments, and the military can be a real proving ground for that skill. Blank said he realized what he'd learned when he returned to college after the Air Force and was trying to register for classes.

"I'm standing in line again like 'I'm going to get my fourth choice?'" Blank said. "[The heck with] this. I'd spent four years scrounging parts and figuring ways around red tape, all for the good of the country. I remember laughing like, 'you call this a bureaucracy?'"

He turned to his military schmoozing and scrounging skills, and emerged from registration with all of his first-choice classes.

3. Recognizing Opportunity

Blank threw the military maxim, "don't volunteer for anything" to the wind, and instead raised his hand just about every time someone asked.

"Ten percent of the time you wound up cleaning latrines, but the other 90 percent of the time I got to do amazing [stuff]," he said.

That included being stationed for a time at Homestead Air Force Base in Florida (considered a plumb assignment), serving in Southeast Asia, working on some of the most advanced avionics around, and even flying at times on board combat aircraft.

He saw later how the combination of experiences affected him: "Playing it safe is the antithesis of entrepreneurship."

4. Responsibility

In his book, Making the Corps, Tom Ricks described putting his life in the hands of a 22-year-old Marine on a patrol in Somalia. In his Washington office, he marveled, he wouldn't have let a 22-year-old "run the copying machine without adult supervision."

Blank discovered first-hand how that worked. "If you operated well in chaos, you got 'promoted,'" Blank told me. "By the time I was 19, I was managing 15 people. It wasn't because I had the rank. I was still a single- or two-striper then. But I was good at it."

5. Perspective

Blank is the first to admit he wasn't often in direct physical danger when he was in uniform. There were a few incidents when he was an in-flight repairman aboard an AC-130 gunship that came under North Vietnamese anti-aircraft fire, but by and large his job involved fixing airplanes, not getting shot at.

Still, he told me about the moment it suddenly clicked in his mind he was connected to a real life-and-death enterprise. He was working on a plane when he saw a group of airmen congregating at an empty revetment nearby, where an A-7D close support aircraft was normally parked.

"I wandered over, young and stupid and thinking this is a party," Blank recalled. The plane had been shot down, and the pilot was dead.

Fast-forward a few years: When Blank faced tough days in the first companies he started, he said he would think back to that moment. Failure is a relative term.

"You can describe that until you're blue in the face, but unless you've lived through it you never had the context," Blank said. "If you were anywhere near a combat zone--then, or now if you were in Iraq or Afghanistan--failing had a very different connotation."