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In a long-awaited follow up to an earlier post, entitled, " 10 Common Mistakes That Startup and Small Companies Make ," here are 10 suggestions to improve the chances of your startup's success: 1.  Test your ideas constantly and be hyper-critical about why you might be wrong --many young entrepreneurs will prepare the requisite SWOT slide for investors, but don't really do the analysis. Validate your ideas with people who will really buy your product/service. If you can't get them to work with you early on, your idea is probably not that compelling ... or they "don't get it." Either way, you have got your work cut out and it's better to know early on. 2.  Keep an eye on the market  -- If you had a good idea, it is reasonable to assume someone else out there also thought of it as well. Ignoring the competition is a big mistake. 3.  Keep an eye on the finances --you will need more money than you think. Much has been written about this, but...

Click here to watch the video “In the Studio” turns the corner into the winter months by welcoming a career finance journalist with a widely-read and often-cited daily email newsletter and, in my opinion, is the single best writer covering venture capital and private equity today. Fortune’s   Dan Primack  has been covering the world of private equity and venture capital for over a decade . His work speaks for itself, with his daily “Term Sheet” email that reaches nearly everyone in both industries, and his willingness to share his opinions freely and dig and dig to get to the bottom of a story. Primack has a sort of “gumshoe leather” journalistic work ethic, and while he can certainly ruffle feathers  (even the feathers of very powerful people) with his work, he has built a loyal following, over many years, that just continues to grow. In this video, Primack joins me “In the Studio” on one of his recent trips to San Francisco. Because of his deep knowledge coverin...

The  future of work is changing , and only those who adapt will survive. The trends that define this new era of work are entrepreneurialism, flexibility and innovation. Kyle Westaway , a Harvard lecturer, attorney and thought leader, outlined these ideas succinctly  in a PowerPoint presentation , which he shared in Las Vegas at  Tony Hsieh's inaugural Speakers' Series . (Hsieh, who is CEO of  Zappos , is  investing $350 million to transform Vegas ; a cornerstone of his initiative is bringing in creative minds from around the country to share their ideas.) In his presentation, Westaway included a chart inspired by  Google's 70-20-10 model  for innovation. He says  everyone should   use this chart as a career roadmap, devoting 70 percent of their time to their core competency, 20 percent on related projects, and 10 percent to learning new skills and working on side projects . "Kill your core career competency," says Westaway, who launc...

Taking a team from ordinary to extraordinary means understanding and embracing the difference between management and leadership. According to writer and consultant Peter Drucker, "Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things."  Manager  and  leader  are two completely different roles, although we often use the terms interchangeably. Managers are facilitators of their team members’ success. They ensure that their people have everything they need to be productive and successful; that they’re well trained, happy and have minimal roadblocks in their path; that they’re being groomed for the next level; that they are recognized for great performance and coached through their challenges. Conversely, a leader can be anyone on the team who has a particular talent, who is creatively thinking out of the box and has a great idea, who has experience in a certain aspect of the business or project that can prove useful to the manager and the team. A...

Rapid Digitization Creating Haves, Have Nots As IT capabilities quickly improve and IT costs decrease, machines do more work; productivity and wealth grow, but employment levels and median incomes stagnate and fall, said Brynjolfsson, who co-authored the book "Race Against the Machine" with Andrew McAfee. "Digital Technology has changed very rapidly, but organizations and [worker] skills simply aren't keeping pace. As a result, millions of people are being left behind. Their incomes and jobs are being destroyed, leaving them worse off than they were before the digital revolution," he said. "There's no economic law that says technology has to help everybody. Tech progress has been helping parts of the company, but not other parts of the economy." Rising Productivity, Shrinking Employment As we continue our rebound from "The Great Recession," unemployment rates remain high and median incomes are stagnant -– if not shrinking...

Researchers have developed a solar cell made entirely of carbon, an inexpensive substitute for the pricey materials used in conventional solar panels.   The Bao group's all-carbon solar cell consists of a photoactive layer, which absorbs sunlight, sandwiched between two electrodes. (Photo: Mark Shwartz / Stanford University)     in Share 4   October 31, 2012  By Mark Shwartz  Stanford University scientists have built the first solar cell made entirely of carbon, a promising alternative to the expensive materials used in photovoltaic devices today. The results are scheduled to be published in the online edition of the journal  ACS Nano  this week.  "Carbon has the potential to deliver high performance at a low cost," said study senior author Zhenan Bao , a professor of chemical engineering at Stanford. "To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of a working solar cell that has all of the components made of carbon...

1.  Aerogel Aerogel holds 15 entries in the Guinness Book of Records, more than any other material. Sometimes called “frozen smoke”, aerogel is made by the supercritical drying of liquid gels of alumina, chromia, tin oxide, or carbon. It’s 99.8% empty space, which makes it look semi-transparent. Aerogel is a fantastic insulator — if you had a shield of aerogel, you could easily defend yourself from a flamethrower. It stops cold, it stops heat. You could build a warm dome on the Moon. Aerogels have unbelievable surface area in their internal fractal structures — cubes of aerogel just an inch on a side may have an internal surface area equivalent to a football field. Despite its low density, aerogel has been looked into as a component of military armor because of its insulating properties. 2.  Carbon nanotubes Carbon nanotubes are long chains of carbon held together by the strongest bond in all chemistry, the sacred sp 2  bond, even stronger than the sp 3 ...

From law-violating subatomic particles to entirely new, earth-like worlds, 2011 was an incredible year for scientific discovery. In the past 12 months, scientific breakthroughs in fields ranging from archaeology to structural biochemistry have allowed humanity to rewrite history, and enabled us to open to brand new chapters in our development as a species. Here are some of our favorites. The world's lowest density material With  a density of less than one milligram per cubic centimeter  (that's about 1000 times less dense than water), this  surprisingly squishy  material is so light-weight, it can rest on the seed heads of a dandelion, and is lighter than even the lowest-density  aerogels . The secret — to both its negligible weight and its resiliency — is the material's lattice-like structural organization, one that the researchers who created it liken to that of the Eiffel Tower. "Feeling" objects with a brain implant It could be the first ...