The way startups raise money is changing, fast. Angels, super angels and VCs have to figure out the new rules, but that’s good — really good — for founders themselves.

I have been reading about the changing landscape of how technology companies get their initial outside funding after friends and family have chipped in. Seed or early stage investing, as it is referred to by entrepreneurs, angels, VCs and their investors (limited partners) is a critical part of the technology innovation and funding ecosystem because it has historically been the only consistent source of returns for the industry.

This is where angels and VCs make their money and why so much has been written about the subject over the past 6 months.Paul Kedrosky started the discussion with “The Coming Super-Seed Crash” in which he argued that a crash was inevitable as a result of too many companies getting funded by too many angels and third string VCs at skyrocketing valuations.

Entrepreneur, angel investor and blogger Chris Dixon picked it up and wrote an interesting post about how the changes were caused mostly by entrepreneurs getting smarter about raising money, which I believe is part the reason. Successful venture capitalists and bloggers Fred Wilson, Mark Susterand Brad Feld felt compelled to chime in and describe their approach to seed investing and their thoughts on the evolving funding landscape. 

Dave McClure, the most outspoken of the angels wrote this now infamous post “Moneyball for Startups” in which he called traditional VCs dinosaurs and on the way to extinction and talked about how investors had to innovate to remain relevant. Angels and VCs even publicly discussed the evolution of deal terms and the pros and cons of straight equity versus convertible debentures at the seed level. As you can read my post “Equity vs Convertible Debt: What’s best for Entrepreneurs“, I believe equity is the way to go for investors and entrepreneurs alike because it aligns the interest on both sides.

Read More on Fortune.com

Good luck.

Calvin Wilson
Founder and CEO
Upstart: Business and Management for 20-40 Year Old Professionals
calvin.wilson1@verizon.net
http://twitter.com/Upstart__Nation

Eighty years ago, Ralph Heilman, the dean of Northwestern University’s School of Commerce, wrote an article entitled, “Can Business Be Taught?” His answer: yes. Take the lessons about what works and what doesn’t, analyze and organize them, and then teach them—just as we do with engineers, doctors and lawyers.

Clearly, the process works for training M.B.A.s. So, why not entrepreneurs? After all, entrepreneurs are the ultimate general managers. They can benefit from much of the same knowledge that business students gain about marketing, finance and other topics, complemented by lessons that are specifically tailored to start-ups.

And those lessons are getting better all the time.

Early entrepreneurial education was largely based on case studies and anecdotes. Over the past decade, though, academics have brought a new level of sophistication to analyzing what leads to entrepreneurial success or failure. We’re now developing a “Moneyball for Founders”—rigorous data with which to scrutinize anecdotes and rules of thumb—that promises to revolutionize entrepreneurial education just as a similar movement revolutionized baseball a decade ago.

Beyond Gut Feelings

Founders tend to put a lot of stock in their gut feelings, but sometimes the data say just the opposite. We can teach founders to use that data to avoid common hazards.

Read Full Article in Wall Street Journal.com

Good luck.

Calvin Wilson
Founder and CEO
Upstart: Business and Management for 20-40 Year Old Professionals
calvin.wilson1@verizon.net
http://twitter.com/Upstart__Nation

If you’re creating a career platform for aspiring Gen-Y women, it’s smart to line up star businesswomen as angel investors. Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, Gilt Groupe’s Susan Lyne, and serial entrepreneur Gina Bianchini invested slivers of the $1.25 million that Levo League has raised to get off the ground, but so what that their stakes are tiny? The two young entrepreneurs behind the new site know how to ask for help and how to get attention as well.

Attention toward Levo League is high right now because co-founders Caroline Ghosn and Amanda Pouchot are officially launching their site today. Fortune is the new company’s exclusive media partner.

Fortune has no money in the venture but saw an opportunity because Levo League aims to be a sort of LinkedIn (LNKD) for rising-star women. Ghosn, who is 25 years old and the daughter of Nissan (NSANF) and Renault (RNSDF) CEO Carlos Ghosn, met Pouchot, 26, when they both worked as consultants at McKinsey & Co. The two twentysomethings were surprised — and frustrated — that the web offered no go-to hub for smart, career-driven types like them.

“We want women who want to be on the Most Powerful Women’s list,” says Pouchot, referring to the Fortune Most Powerful Women rankings, about Levo League’s mission. This is actually the second try at a startup for her and Ghosn. Their first venture, PYP (Pretty Young Professionals), had similar goals as Levo, but infighting led to a split from two other partners. Levo (the Latin root of “elevate”) is going more smoothly. With five full-time employees, Ghosn and Pouchot have convinced 100 companies, including AOL (AOL), Pfizer (PFE), and Teach for America, to post job openings on their site. The companies pay a fee, but job-seekers and other visitors use Levo for free.

Read Full Article in Fortune.com

Good luck.

Calvin Wilson
Founder and CEO
Upstart: Business and Management for 20-40 Year Old Professionals
calvin.wilson1@verizon.net
http://twitter.com/Upstart__Nation

In 22 years of working with venture capitalists, Steven M. Cohen, co-manager of Morgan Lewis’s emerging business and technology practice, can only remember one time when a venture capitalist returned feedback to a presenter and ultimately invested. When the odds are that slim, “how do you get that first meeting and give yourself the best shot at getting a potential investor?” he asked.

Cohen moderated a panel titled, “VC Confessionals: Why We Funded, Why We Passed,” during Wharton’s recent 2012 Entrepreneurship Conference, whose theme was “Turning Painpoints into Opportunity”. In explaining that tagline, the conference organizers noted that “pain has often been embedded in entrepreneurship. The pain of a personal frustration inspired a new venture. The pain, sweat and tears of an idea turned it into a viable business. The growing pains of the startup helped it morph from being in a league of its own, to one in which it became an industry leader. Pain has often revealed opportunity.”

Perspiration has helped, too. As conference panelist Gil Beyda, founder and managing partner of Genacast Ventures, a venture capital firm in partnership with Comcast Ventures, noted: “I like to paraphrase Thomas Edison, who said that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. To me, a startup is 1% a good idea and 99% perspiration and execution.” According to Beyda, while millions of people have good ideas, it is not about the idea; it’s about the execution.

Gauging the Risks

To bring an idea to fruition, Cohen reminded the audience of the importance of evaluating various types of risk: the size of the market, the potential for market penetration, the ability to secure financing, adequate technology development, and an assessment of barriers presented by the competition.

All risks are not equal, said venture capitalist Josh Kopelman, who has helped found many companies, including Half.com, Infonautics and TurnTide. As a seed stage firm, his current company funds prelaunch concepts. “We bet on the team,” he said. “The bulk of what you are selling in your first pitch is yourself. The investor has to have confidence in you and in your ideas.” Then Kopelman looks at the product and its market through the “lens of the entrepreneur … how you prioritized your key decisions.”

Read Full Article in Knowledge@Wharton.com

Good luck.

Calvin Wilson
Founder and CEO
Upstart: Business and Management for 20-40 Year Old Professionals
calvin.wilson1@verizon.net
http://twitter.com/Upstart__Nation

After Megaupload got busted by an anti-terror squad in January and another 16 domains got slammed by the feds in February, several file sharing sites decided to scale back or shut down their operations to prevent similar downfalls.

Remember that BitTorrent behemoth BTjunkie signed off the web permanently and The Pirate Bay plans on deleting BitTorrents starting Feb. 29, to transition to a magnet link setup.

Now, it looks like RapidShare will also follow suit, TorrentFreak reports.

A lot of file hosters have moved to RapidShare’s service, but the site has responded by slowing down download speed for non-paying users — as a means of pushing out potential pirates.

The speeds have been cut to 30 kbs — and some think that RapidShare is trying to capitalize off of MegaUpload’s collapse.

The going theory is that people will become so frustrated with the slow, free service that they’d be driven to subscribe to the site’s faster, premium membership.

Not so, says RapidShare. The company tells TorrentFreak that the shift is a means of preventing piracy.

Read Full Article in Village Voice.com

Good luck.

Calvin Wilson
Founder and CEO
Upstart: Business and Management for 20-40 Year Old Professionals
calvin.wilson1@verizon.net
http://twitter.com/Upstart__Nation

If you often find yourself too busy (or broke) to travel, fear not. Google Street View lets you virtually explore 360-degree views of many exotic (and run-of-the-mill) locations around the world, as if you were really there.

Thanks to Google’s most recent forays into the world’s hidden nooks and crannies, not only can you travel underground to an ancient Japanese silver mine, you can also check out a limestone cavern in Japan and enjoy the views around a few wineries in South Africa’s Western Cape.

To poke around underground in Japan, visit Google Street View Japan’s homepage where the Okubo-mabu mineshaft and the Akiyoshi-do limestone cavern are featured alongside other Japanese landmarks.

The Western Cape winery additions — Boekenhoutskloof, Groot Constantia, Hartenberg Wine Estate, Môreson Winery, Rustenberg Wines and Warwick Winery, according to TechCentral — can be viewed by searching each of their names on Google Maps, and dragging the yellow “Pegman” (located in the upper left-hand corner of the maps) onto one of the surrounding blue roads. Using the wheel in the upper left-hand corner to rotate your view or clicking on the right or left arrows to move down a road will allow you to more deeply explore any Street View map Google has available (for more information on how to use Street View, see its website).

Since the service first launched in five U.S. cities back in 2007, Street View’s offerings have expanded to include ground-level images from all seven continents. With the help of cars, trikes, trolleys, and even snowmobiles outfitted with elaborate camera systems, the mapping service has compiled enough photos to allow users to peek inside buildings, visit the Antarctic’s Half Moon Island, or check out Rome’s Colosseum.

Read Full Article in Huffington Post.com

Good luck.

Calvin Wilson
Founder and CEO
Upstart: Business and Management for 20-40 Year Old Professionals
calvin.wilson1@verizon.net
http://twitter.com/Upstart__Nation

You’re smart. Creative. And terrific at solving challenges. So why does it seem that the number of things you can’t figure out is increasing?

The problem may not be you. It could be the way you were taught to think.

From kindergarten on, we’ve learned Prediction Reasoning—a way of thinking based on the assumption that the future will be pretty much like the past.

Demographics are one simple example of how Prediction Reasoning (from now on, let’s just call it Prediction) works. You can calculate with a high degree of confidence what the world population will be in 2050 because you already know a lot of things: how many people are alive today (about 6.8 billion); distribution by age; the number of people in their 20s and 30s, the age when most people decide to have children; and recent trends in population growth—it’s slowing as people decide to have fewer kids.

Studying all this data—and much, much more—you can, as the United Nations did recently, say with a reasonable amount of certainty that by the year 2050 there will be about 8.9 billion people on the planet. Armed with that data you can also make a number of fairly accurate estimates of such things as how many diapers will need to be produced, how many gallons of water those 8.9 billion people will drink each day, and how much the U.S. will need to pay out in Social Security benefits when we reach the midpoint of this century.

Because it works so well in these kinds of situations—and countless others you can think of—we (like you) became accustomed to using Prediction all the time.

And yet …

Not everything can be foreseen (and thus predicted). Want to know if the cute guy across the hall is going to ask you out? Sorry, Prediction can’t help. Is the world ready for your brand-new product or service? Prediction does you no good.

When the future is unknowable, the way we traditionally reason isn’t much help. We need a new approach for navigating in an uncertain world. Well, we found one. And we know it works because it’s based on how the people who best deal with uncertainty—successful entrepreneurs—think.

Those who write about entrepreneurs invariably focus on their behavior: what Howard Schultz or Michael Dell did while building their respective companies. If you take that approach, you probably would conclude that every entrepreneur is unique, so there’s little to be learned from studying them.

Enter our friend Saras Sarasvathy, author of Effectuation: Elements of Entrepreneurial Expertise. Saras made a fascinating discovery, one that ran counter to conventional wisdom. She studied serial entrepreneurs, but instead of looking at their behavior—which is indeed unique—she focused on how they think. There she found amazing similarities in how they reasoned, approached obstacles, and took advantage of opportunities.

http://www.upstartnation.biz/wp-admin/post-new.php

Read Full Article in Bloomberg/BusinessWeek.com

Good luck.

Calvin Wilson
Founder and CEO
Upstart: Business and Management for 20-40 Year Old Professionals
calvin.wilson1@verizon.net
http://twitter.com/Upstart__Nation

With home values still depressed—and likely to remain so in the coming year—many people who plan to start businesses won’t be able to leverage their personal properties to raise capital they need.

There are several alternatives, however, some newer than others.

Some 39% of business owners with less than $5 million in annual revenues said a bank loan would be the best way to raise capital in 2012, according to a survey of 2,851 owners of small businesses conducted by Pepperdine University in early January. Other top prospects were personal savings (36%), friends and family (19%), and credit cards (17%), according to the survey.

By contrast, only 11% said home equity would be the best capital source.

Despite significant funding challenges, including depressed home prices and a tight overall credit market, entrepreneurship rates have risen from 2006 through 2010, according to the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, a small-business research group in Kansas City, Mo.

The foundation has an annual Index of Entrepreneurial Activity but hasn’t yet measured the rate of new business creation during 2011, it says.

Here’s a look at some of your choices:

Read Full Article in Wall Street Journal.com

Good luck.

Calvin Wilson
Founder and CEO
Upstart: Business and Management for 20-40 Year Old Professionals
calvin.wilson1@verizon.net
http://twitter.com/Upstart__Nation

Read Full Article in Washington Post.com

Good luck.

Calvin Wilson
Founder and CEO
Upstart: Business and Management for 20-40 Year Old Professionals
calvin.wilson1@verizon.net
http://twitter.com/Upstart__Nation

Angel investors—wealthy individuals who provide capital to start-ups with the potential for fast growth—are an increasingly important source of capital to early stage companies, including in Europe, one recent report says.

The report by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development is among the first to gauge angel investing activity around the world.

Calculations by the Paris-based think tank suggest that the total amount of capital raised from angel investors in the U.S. was $17.7 billion in 2009, compared to $18.7 billion for venture capital. The bulk of the venture capital money went to companies that were at later stages in their growth cycles, the report notes.

In Europe, the angel market in 2009 reached $5.5 billion, surpassing all venture capital funding by some $250 million, according to the report, which is based on interviews with roughly 100 investors, entrepreneurs and business leaders in 32 countries.

With banks reining in all but the safest loans since the recession, and venture capital firms now targeting less risky late-stage business startups, angel investors are nearly alone in backing young, fast-growth companies, the report says.

The VCs tend to target high-tech hubs, like Silicon Valley.

Read Full Story in Wall Street Journal.com

Good luck.

Calvin Wilson
Founder and CEO
Upstart: Business and Management for 20-40 Year Old Professionals
calvin.wilson1@verizon.net
http://twitter.com/Upstart__Nation