This is a guest post by Ingrid Vanderveldt

2012 was a good year for the entrepreneur. Exponential leaps in technology have made it continually easier for widespread adoption of a good idea and for a small business to scale successfully to an empire. As we look ahead to 2013, all eyes are on upcoming trends which will fuel innovation, job creation and economic growth worldwide.

As Dell’s first Entrepreneur in Residence, I constantly have an ear to the ground of the entrepreneur community. In the past year, I was lucky enough to speak with thousands of entrepreneurs, and from those conversations, I predict that the following trends will shape the world of entrepreneurialism in 2013.

Alternative financing strategies for entrepreneurs

Traditional financial institutions have never been stricter with their financing constraints, often using metrics that are incongruous to the current business landscape. Most businesses are still bootstrapping, but are encouraged by alternative funding options as more borrowers and lenders are getting creative.

Crowdfunding (i.e. Kickstarter), peer-to-peer lending sites, investor associations, angel investors, and revenue-based financing are just a few examples of innovative funding tools increasingly available to business leaders. To a large degree, these are supplanting the traditional big venture capital round for young companies.

The trend of big companies investing in small businesses also plays a role in providing capital to entrepreneurs whose businesses may grow to become long-term partners or customers. One example of this is the $100 million Dell Innovators Credit Fund, launched last June, which offers financing for technology products and solutions to newly venture-backed startups.  Another is Google Ventures, which works with portfolio companies full-time on design, recruiting, marketing, and engineering.

The introduction of scalable technology

With the explosion of big data (predicted to increase 43 percent over the next 10 years), and accelerated adoption of the cloud, more and more companies will look to technology as a strategic advantage to scaling successfully. As budgets remain tight, business owners will increasingly look to outside tech vendors to serve as advisors and will expect them to provide IT services and tailored recommendations to meet their specific business needs.

Entrepreneurs have the same IT concerns and priorities as large corporations, but are often working on a much tighter budget. In order to address top priorities they need to be agile and have the flexibility to scale up and down depending on customer demand. This enables smaller businesses to solve for short term needs while simultaneously keeping an eye on long term challenges. Scalability enables companies to expand resource capabilities while remaining flexible to adapt future challenges – without paying for more than what is needed.

Solutions to the human capital problem

Entrepreneurs struggle with accessing good talent. In particular, we’ve heard from entrepreneurs who say they have jobs available, but there are not enough people with the specific skillsets to fill those jobs, whether they are a sales role or even operating manufacturing equipment. A lot can be gained by understanding how to maximize current and potential human capital within a business and extended entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Online and in-person networking opportunities have never been so valuable for matching potential employees to openings. Training will also be a key factor in ensuring that our future workforce has the skills to compete in the job market, and those who are still facing unemployment will need to look towards training solutions to get the proper skills for today’s jobs.

The problem is a challenging one, and we expect that technology will be a vital piece in bridging this gap between employers, training and the workforce. Now more than ever, we will see an influx of groups that cultivate a vibrant community of entrepreneurs who connect with one another for new sources of financial and human capital, knowledge and markets.

Entrepreneurs will get even younger

Blogging, launching apps, publishing magazines and creating social networks, kids like Adora Svitak (15) and Robert Nay, 16 have all created empires before they hit college. It is not uncommon these days for entrepreneurs to be in their teens or early twenties, and they seem to be getting younger each year. What others may view as blind idealism is a key to success for teenage and college-aged entrepreneurs.

Youngsters seem to be good at focusing an intense amount of energy on their vision without getting lost amidst the normal problems faced when setting up an enterprise. This allows them to push on until they are satisfied with the outcome. Much of this may have to do with the fact that they typically have less outside pressures that older adults face, such as marriage, children, mortgages, or maybe even a job!

Generally younger entrepreneurs have also embraced innovative technology far better than their senior counterparts. This new generation of entrepreneurs is taking advantage of social networks, penetrating the Web to push their ideas, products and services to a large, targeted audience. This also boosts their ability to quickly adapt to needs of their target market, unlike more traditional businesspeople who may not know the latest market trends in real-time.

In light of this growing trend, many larger organizations have begun providing students with opportunities to learn about the multi-faceted risks and opportunities involved with launching, running and growing a business. We see this in the form of youth leadership programs, scholarships and sweepstakes, which are becoming more prevalent each year.

Young people have shown that they too have what it takes to establish a business empire in any industry, in any part of the world.

The rise of social entrepreneurship

The concept of doing well by doing good has caught fire in a time where economic, social and environmental sustainability are more meaningful than ever.  Strong focus on positive social and environmental impact has spurred contests, scholarships and even best business practices to be centered around the concept of giving to a global community.

It has become apparent that social innovators will need to dedicate themselves to solving the world’s most pressing problems with their transformative ideas. No pressure or anything!

Ingrid Vanderveldt is an entrepreneur and investor whose work is focused on providing tools, technology and resources to empower entrepreneurs around the globe. She is the Entrepreneur in Residence for Dell and owner of IngridVanderveldt LLC, as well as VH2 Energy Investments.

Ingrid created and oversees the $100M Dell Innovators Credit Fund for Entrepreneurs and The Dell Center for Entrepreneurs. She is also the co-founder of The Billionaire Girls Club and is a Dell Women’s Entrepreneur Network Member.

Ingrid is the 2012 Alumna of the Year for The Savannah College of Art & Design where she earned a Masters in Architecture. She also holds an MBA in entrepreneurship from The University of Texas at Austin. Follow her at @ontheroadwithiv.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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In Silicon Valley, we’re so often mired in jargon that we forget to ask the most basic questions about how venture capital works.

Christine Herron, director at Intel Capital and a venture advisor at 500Startups and StartX (a Stanford-affiliated nonprofit accelerator), addressed an intimate audience of investors and entrepreneurs this afternoon at Startup Monthly’s Smart Money conference.

She answered questions like: ” What are capital calls?” “Where does money come from?” “How does  a venture capital fund work?” She also offered her personal perspective on investing — bear in mind that there may be some discrepancies among investors.

There is no shame in brushing up on the basics. Herron’s ultimate advice for entrepreneurs: “Never be ashamed to ask questions.”

Venture capital: How does money go in?

Venture capitalists receive 99 percent of total funding from limited partners: endowments, public venture funds, hedge funds, pension funds, and so on. Only one percent is invested by the general partners (for tax reasons and to ensure that limited partners feel that there is some “skin in the game”).

For this reason, general partners who haven’t made their millions yet will have small funds. In some cases, a star junior partner that is brought on will be given a loan by the firm.

It’s most important to understand that venture capitalists are answerable to their limited partners, and they will set expectations at the beginning of each fund cycle.

What is a capital call?

Also known as a “draw down,” this is a legal right of a firm to demand a portion of the money promised to it by its investors. In rough economic times, it is more difficult for some investors to come up with the cash they promised to invest in venture capital funds. Read more about the repercussions of limited partners’ defaulting here. 

How is the profit shared?

Venture capital is repaid to limited partners before any profit is shared. Typically, 80 percent will go to the limited partners; 20 percent of the profit goes to the general partners. An individual venture capitalist’s share of the total general partner profit is called “carried interest.” New funds might offer a better split, while the most established firms might take a larger slice of the pie.

Tips for entrepreneurs

• Get to know the firm: According to Herron, entrepreneurs should follow the firm on Twitter and read their blogs. Investors like Andreessen Horowitz’ Ben Horowitz and Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson are prolific bloggers.
• Ask the right questions: Entrepreneurs need to know if the firm has not made an investment in over six months. They may be having difficulties  raising their next fund — specifically ask, “when did you close your last fund?” It’s also worth asking about their average investment size, the number of boards a partner currently serves on, and how their process works. “Your job is to optimize low number of VC coffees with high dollar raises,” said Herron.
• Which partners work well together?: “An entrepreneur-friendly VC would always share who else would be good,” said Herron. “They are looking ahead and saying who else should be at that board table making the company successful.”
• Pick your angel investors wisely: Choose angel investors with a vast network that can bring in venture capitalists to join them in the round.
• Demonstrate your passion for the idea: VCs want rainbows and unicorns. “I get so excited that you’re trying to change the world,” Herron joked.

Fund cycles and staying in business

Most venture capital funds have a fixed life of 10 years, and the investing cycle for most funds is about three to five years — it’s a model that was pioneered by Silicon Valley firms in the 1980s.

After raising a fund, venture capital firms will spend three or four years seeding new companies, and then they will trickle down and stop. Around that time (the three or four-year mark in the fund cycle), they’ll begin looking to raise the next fund. “Firms need to always be in the market writing checks,” Herron explained. Venture capitalists should have the second fund teed up and ready to go once they’re no longer able to allocate from their current fund.

Got an innovative, albeit risky, idea? Early in the fund’s cycle, venture capitalists are far more prone to making gut calls. By the third year, they will be more conservative with deals in order to hedge the risk.

What if the market sucks? If it’s a down market, venture capitalists might sit and flood the market at a later date. Firms can stop making new investments; they simply won’t start the clock. It doesn’t start until they make a capital call. “By the fourth year, they start to get itchy,” said Herron. “For this reason, during the height of the recession I would often advise startups to hold on until 2010.”

Common mistakes entrepreneurs will make:

• Term sheets are non-binding! Herron makes an important distinction between two types of due diligence: Some venture capitalists will give you a term sheet and will do due diligence (call your customers and your references, for instance) to back up a decision that’s already been made. Other investors will present a term sheet, perform due diligence, and change their mind. It’s important to know if there is diligence happening after the term-sheet, and whether there will likely be significant changes.
• Be clear on expectations: Find out if there will be a partner on your board. Will they spend one-on-one time with you?
• NEVER shop between partners! Here’s how the process should work: The entrepreneur will meet with an associate or partner. If they think it’s exciting, the entrepreneurs may be invited to talk to a few people. If all goes well, they will be invited to a partner meeting and pitch everyone.

In gold-rush times, here’s how VC trends affect you

• Expect higher venture capital valuations.
• There will be more copy-cat ideas that turn into acquires,  and as a result, the bar for writing a check is a little lower.
• The minimum funding amount per investment will typically grow.

Whether or not the market is going down, according to Herron, venture capital money still has to be invested. But be cognizant of the state of the industry — you’ll need to step up your game in shrinking funding markets.

Any basic startup or venture capital questions you’d like to have answered? Let us know! 

Top image courtesy of Jesse Martinez

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

At 12 years old, Nick D’Aloisio began his career as a mobile programmer when he downloaded the Apple Developer Kit. By 15, one of his hacks, an app known as “Trimit,” caught the eye of an investor in Asia offering to fund “the company’s” next project.

What company? D’Aloisio, a school boy from South London, admitted to this venture capitalist that it was merely an after-school creation.

A whizz at the programming language C, D’Aloisio had created the app to test his skills in machine-learning technology, a branch of artificial intelligence that yields trends and patterns in a mass of data, and makes smarter predictions over time.

Summly’s founder demoes the app in San Francisco

Less than a year later, the “Internet boy wonder,” as he was dubbed by the European tech media after an appearance at Le Web’s conference, had developed a keen interest in web summarization technology. It’s a simple enough problem, but the execution is tricky. How do we take a meaty piece of content and whittle it down to its bare bones?

Today, D’Aloisio is ready to take his iPhone app public. Summly, available to download for free, reduces full-blown articles into snippets, making it easier to skim the news on a mobile device.

From ESPN to VentureBeat, the app includes almost all of the major news outlets. You lightly tap the screen to browse news, and if a summarized story piques your interest, you can share it with your friends via SMS, email, Twitter, or Facebook, or click a link the bottom of the screen to access the original, full-length story.

The founder told me he hit on the idea for the novel way to scan the news while studying for his History “GCSE” (an exam that all British school kids sit before their junior year). He quickly became frustrated by thousands of web search results that were slow to load and sometimes impossible to access on mobile.

“There has to be a way to summarize this information into bite-size,” he said. Trimit, the app he developed, summarized content into 140, 500 or 1,000 character summaries. With a little finessing, he moved on to Summly, which can automatically break down full pages of text into bullet-points. 

Most summarization experts have yet to apply their knowledge to a mainstream market. In a highly strategic move, D’Aloisio is applying the technology to the news, since, as he said, “No one had figured out how to perfect the news-reading experience on mobile.” In many cases, it’s relatively simple: Most journalists still write in the Associated Press (AP) style, so the first paragraph contains the crux of the news.

It’s not nearly as straight-forward as cropping the first few sentences, however. In the background, the technology works by scraping content, pulling out the most important bits, categorizing each story by topic, and displaying the news in a highly visual way. The summarized stories fit comfortably on your screen (tailored to both the iPhone 4 and 5).

At a coffee shop in San Francisco, D’Aloisio led me through a demo of the app: It’s a highly intuitive with the algorithm working to recommend news stories to you based on your pre-existing set of interests. As you shift location (from the UK to the U.S., for instance), the stories will change as well.

In person, D’Aloisio is wise beyond his years. It’s hard to believe this media-savvy, sharp-talking business executive is a teenager taking a leave of absence from school. He is both a high-school student and an employer. No longer a solo coder, he now has a team of seven people working for him. In addition, half a dozen researchers at SRI, the non-profit technology research institute based in Silicon Valley, are working with D’Aloisio to perfect the algorithm.

Some major technical hurdles  remain: Magazine-style features are tougher to summarize, and are often thrown out by the algorithm. The team is currently working on auto-translation (notoriously problematic and obvious to anyone who has ever used Google Translate, BabelFish and the like), and they have plans to integrate French and Spanish into the app. If they get it right, it could be a neat language-learning tool.

The team will also butt heads with Pulse, Flipboard, and a host of other beautifully-designed news-reading apps, especially since it is in the process of designing an interface for tablet devices. To succeed, it will need to win over voracious news consumers who routinely use web-based aggregators like Google Reader. The competition for these users is heating up: Circa is experimenting with ways to re-frame the news on mobile, and NewsBlur, a Y Combinator alum, recently launched its iPad app.

Summly is backed by several investors, including Horizons Ventures, Ashton Kutcher, Betaworks, Brian Chesky, Hosain Rahman, Joanna Shields, Josh Kushner, Mark Pincus, Matt Mullenweg, Stephen Fry, Troy Carter, Yoko Ono and many more.

Top image: Wired UK

At FailCon, the annual conference in San Francisco, not only is it okay to f*** up, it’s a badge of honor. The bigger the failure, the better.

The conference was filled to the rafters with bright-eyed young entrepreneurs. However, a few representatives from household-name companies were also attending. Corporations like Microsoft and SAP are increasingly investing in their innovation and design teams in an effort to be more like a startup. And they got some good advice on how to act like a startup from Bennett Blank, Intuit‘s innovation lead

Bennett is a vocal advocate of “lean startup” principles. The lean startup method, is characterized by rapid product cycles, “pivots”, and an emphasis on customer feedback. It’s most popular with startups, but if you work at a large company, here are Blank’s tips to cultivate a “lean” approach:

• Embrace the “mechanical turk”: This refers to software that works on the front-end, but behind the scenes, people are manually filling the order. It’s a great way to test a product before bringing it to market. For instance, when testing a new product in India to help agricultural laborers compare pricing, they literally had Intuit employees manually source the information and send it back. There proved to be a real need, so the engineering team developed a way to automate the process.
• Offer employees dedicated “unstructured” time: In a policy borrowed from Google, Intuit’s engineers can devote 10 percent of their time to their own projects.
• Host an idea jam: “It’s a program we have across Intuit that is part hackathon, part lean startup incubator,” said Blank. “Essentially, it’s a 48 hour competition to pitch and develop an idea.”
• Get comfortable with failure: Blank opened up about his own failure at Intuit (see video below). If your idea doesn’t prove to be a hit with customers, don’t take it personally. “It’s not that your work was a failure,” said Blank. “As long as you’re learning and gaining insights from that process.”

In the spirit of Failcon, Blank told me about his most epic disaster at Intuit. Curious? Check out the video.

This is a guest post by mental health entrepreneur, Sarah Seegal 

While most of her friends were deliberating about their college major, Jessica Mah was leading a company, managing finances, and laying off staff to keep her startup afloat.

By the time she was 21, the trilingual Y-Combinator alumna had already graduated from college and raised $1.1 million from angel investors like Steve Blank and Jawed Karim. Her company, InDinero, had been profiled by the Wall Street Journal and VentureBeat.

But InDinero, a website for small businesses to manage their finances, which Jess had founded with Andy Su in their UC Berkeley college dorm room, was in trouble.

“From around September to December of 2011, we went quiet and were really struggling,” said Mah. “We realized our users didn’t convert well into revenue.” Although the company tracked over $2 billion in customer transactions, according to Mah, they assumed that free users could be monetized at a later stage. When that assumption proved to be false, the entire business model collapsed, and the founders could no longer afford to maintain a full staff.

“I guess you just lose hope,” said Mah. But she found the strength to put the company back together. “At first, the goal was to survive. We wanted to return the money that had been invested in us and keep our reputations intact,” she added.

During this low point in her professional career, she needed to take a step back and keep things in perspective. “If we had had better emotional support, we could have fixed our problems faster. It was a lot,” she said. Mah has a firm head on their shoulders, but not all young entrepreneurs are equipped to make such tough decisions.

At 21 years old, would you have been able to fire half a dozen people, keep a company afloat, and investors at bay?

The tragic suicide of Ilya Zhitomirskiy, the 22-year old co founder of Diaspora, a non-profit, user-owned, distributed social network (it recently petered out), and Dan Haubert, the 25-year old YC Alum and co-founder of TicketStumbler, provide clear examples of the devastating pressure that young entrepreneurs face.

“Perspective is very important”, says Michael Groat, a practicing psychiatrist at Baylor College of Medicine, “particularly for young entrepreneurs.” Groat runs the only inpatient psychiatric treatment program for high-achieving professionals who are experiencing difficulty managing their careers and relationships because of a psychiatric disorder, addiction, demands or stress.

In many ways, Mah is a textbook example of failing well. Once it became clear that her company was struggling, she handled the immediate needs of the business, picked up new hobbies, and travelled to find perspective. The young prodigy who had started her first business at the age of 12, had to remember that there was more to her than the value of InDinero.

Dr. Groat told me that young entrepreneurs — highly achievement-oriented people — are often not so lucky. “They find themselves on a road where their life becomes very focused on one thing,” he said.

“When this thing collapses, people can be very vulnerable to collapsing along with it,” he said.

How can investors and incubators support young founders?

Some programs, such as the Thiel Fellowship, are leading the way in supporting young entrepreneurs.

Each year, the foundation awards $100,000 to about 20 fellows to drop out of college to start companies. All of these fellows are under-20, and many leave their friends and family to pursue entrepreneurship. Unlike traditional college students, the fellows often live alone and pursue their projects independently.

“Ilya’s (Zhitomirskiy) death was really scary for us,” say Danielle Strachman, Program Director of the Thiel Fellowship. “For anyone working on anything, entrepreneurship can be pretty lonely and we’ve developed a number of support structures for our fellows.”

While suicide may represent the extreme end of a continuum, the fundamental challenge of coping successfully with the ups and downs of bringing startups into the world, is significant. The Thiel fellowship uses its network of older fellows, advisors, mentors and staff to ensure the fellow stay grounded.

Don’t underestimate the value of a good mentor

When the news of Zhitomirskiy’s death hit the headlines, she reminded the Thiel Fellows about the importance of staying in constant contact with their mentor and the program’s staff. She resent all of the fellows the emergency contacts numbers. Strachman acknowledges that her fellows are on “a path to something big”, but they’re still young and run the risk of burning out.

According to Dr. Groat, mentors can play a powerful role. “Mentors can show us that it’s okay to be exhausted, take time out for vacation and be open about our struggles,” he said. In addition, young entrepreneurs often need help knowing their limits: how to scale back when they are exhausted, speaking up for themselves, and asking for advice when needed.

For the Thiel fellows, regular retreats, quarterly check-ins, tolerance for mistakes and an emphasis on the big picture, are an essential part of the experience. Strachman is very clear with the program’s participants that if they ever need anything from a ride out of a questionable neighborhood at 2 o’clock in the morning to a referral to a psychologist, the foundation is there for them.

Have options! There is more to life than your startup.

Investors, it’s not enough to just write a check to a young entrepreneur. Providing emotional support will make a positive impact on their achievements — both professional and personal. Don’t encourage talented young programmers and designers to have a singular focus. Aside from running their companies, the most grounded founders I interviewed had a project or interest that they’re equally passionate about.

This is essential for those that choose to forgo a college education. At the age of 18, Kristina Varshavskaya dropped out of high school to work at her sister’s company, Wanelo, a social store for international goods.

“I think that I put myself in a situation where if I fail, I fail harder because I don’t have the cushion of a high school degree,” she said.

Wanelo has grown quickly since she joined full time last fall. “Right now, we have a team of ten, [we] have raised $2 million, and have an office and a product that people actually use,” said Varshavskaya. “But I have total uncertainty in my life.”

Despite these early successes, there is a good chance that the company won’t succeed. “If Wanelo fails, I would be without a high school degree and a year behind if I wanted to go back [to college]” she said.

My advice to Varshavaskaya and others like her would be to have a backup plan. Most startups fail, so dropping out of high school or college is a huge risk. As the Huffington Post reported, only one of the five fellows from last year’s class is currently taking home an income.

If things don’t go as planned, I fear that young founders won’t be able to draw a distinction between personal failure and the failure of their company. To stay emotionally healthy, surround yourself with mentors, develop a keen hobby or interest, and think long and hard before dropping out of school. As these entrepreneurs are proving, you don’t have to choose one or the other.

If you or someone you know is feeling anxious or depressed, you can call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline 24 hours a day at 1-800-273-TALK (8255) or you can chat with a counselor online.

Sarah Seegal works at One Medical, a San Francisco-based primary care practice that is focused on the patient experience. One Medical has offices in San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Washington DC and Boston. Prior to this, she was one of the first non-technical hires at Breakthrough, a tele-pyschiatry startup in Silicon Valley. She has worked as a behavioral coach and counselor at Green Haven Correctional Facility and Harvard’s McLean Hospital. Seegal is the founder of The Listening Center, a peer counseling service at Vassar College. Follow her on Twitter at @sseegal

Top image via Shutterstock 

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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I recently had the opportunity to attend VC in the OC at the Hyatt Regency in Huntington Beach. This one-day event featured a mix of  panels and keynote speakers, culminating with an interesting concept that is gaining popularity in the startup community: VC Speed Dating.

The concept is pretty self-explanatory. A number of venture capitalists in attendance sit at tables lining the room, while the entrepreneurs line up behind the VC they’d like to speak with. At this particular event, each entrepreneur had less than three minutes to pitch the VC and answer any quick questions before moving on to the next person.

VC Speed Dating provides a great opportunity to receive some face time with multiple potential investors in a short period of time. It is fun, but can also be stressful, so here are some tips to help you maximize your experience:

Do your homework

The conference will most likely provide a list of the VCs attending the session. Before the session, take the time to research each firm and the VC representing it. Make sure you fit their investment criteria. If a firm only invests in healthcare and you’re a digital media company, don’t waste their time.

Review their portfolio for companies in your sector. If you find that they have invested in a company where there could be synergy with your starup, bring it up. You may even compare yourself to a company in which the firm had a great exit, but make sure you do not compare yourself to a company that crashed and burned — and DO NOT say you are the next Instagram for your industry (you would be surprised at how often this happens).

Finally, look for common ground between the VC and yourself that can help make you memorable. Review their LinkedIn and other online profiles to see where they went to college or graduate school, and see what other companies they have worked with. Read their tweets and their blog to find out their favorite sports team, a recent travel destination, or any other area where you may be able to relate.

Nail your elevator pitch

If you’re lucky enough to have two and a half minutes, like I was, be prepared to lay out all the most important parts of your venture in the first minute. VCs want to know the problem you’re solving for your customer, your competitive advantage, how you make money, any traction that you’ve gained in the marketplace and what you’re looking for (resources, capital, etc.), among other things. Be sure to give just enough information to make them want to hear more.

Be prepared for questions

The goal with your elevator pitch is to make the VC intrigued enough to want to learn more. They will most likely ask you questions during and after your pitch, so it’s imperative that you’re prepared. Before the pitch session, come up with a list of questions that you would expect a VC to ask and figure out your answers. If you present your pitch right, you will be able to lead the VC into asking questions about key points you touched upon.

Some popular topics that are likely to come up are barriers to entry, prototypes, burn rate and competition in the market.

Check out the competition

While waiting in line, listen to the pitches in front of you, gauge the facial reactions of the VC, and analyze the opportunity that the entrepreneur before you is presenting. Use your findings to strengthen your pitch, avoid mistakes, and appeal to the VC’s interests.

Always follow up

Once the session is over, politely ask for a business card and leave yours on the table as well. Write down any specific notes on the VC’s business card, which you will be able to touch upon in a later email or phone call. If there is a networking or cocktail reception following the session, stay for a bit, as there may be an opportunity to make a second contact.

Be sure to follow up with an email the next day, even if your venture wasn’t a fit — you never know what ventures you may have in the future. In your email, remind the VC who you are and what your startup is, thank them for their time and attach any information they may have requested. They are sure to be inundated with emails following the event, so don’t expect a prompt reply. If you have not received a reply after a few days, politely follow up with another email.

Never be rude or pushy, as the VC community is a small one — a single bad review from one VC may damage your chances of working with others.

Kevin Tighe II currently resides in Los Angeles where he serves as the Chief Marketing Officer at Verifico, the leading marketplace for consumers to securely connect and conduct transactions with verified independent financial professionals. He is also the co-founder of Inflite and is invested in a number of other tech/entertainment-related startups.

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

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

Allow for change and spontaneity

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

Caitlin McCabe, @caitlinmc, Real Bullets Branding

Be hands off

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

Lisa Nicole Bell, @LisaNicoleBell, Inspired Life Media Group

Budget for innovation

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

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

Flat organization

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

Nathan Lustig, @nathanlustig, Entrustet

Expose yourself

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

Doreen Bloch, @DoreenBloch, Poshly Inc.

Keep time for actually working

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

Thursday Bram, @thursdayb, Hyper Modern Consulting

Empower your employees

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

Vanessa Nornberg, @VanessaNornberg, Metal Mafia

Open workflow

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

John Hall, @JohnHallCOMO, Digital Talent Agents

Opportunities knock softly

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

Nancy T. Nguyen, @sweettsalon, Sweet T

Allow failure

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

Brent Beshore, @BrentBeshore, AdVentures

Rally a vision

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

Christopher Kelly, @ThoughtsOnBiz, Sentry Centers

Hire the right people

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

Lucas Sommer, @audimated, Audimated

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

I heart my boss art via ShutterStock

Outsource, outsource, outsource

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

Kelly Azevedo, @krazevedo, She’s Got Systems

Focus on one thing at a time

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

Steph Auteri, @stephauteri, Word Nerd Pro

Take on what’s time-sensitive

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

Stephanie Kaplan, @stephaniekaplan, Her Campus Media

Figure out your prime time

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

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

Get an outside perspective

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

Elizabeth Saunders, @RealLifeE, Real Life E

Go into bunker mode

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

Anthony Saladino, @cabinetkings, Kitchen Cabinet Kings

Don’t dwell

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

Nick Friedman, @NickFriedman1, College Hunks Hauling Junk

Not everything is a priority

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

Ben Rubenstein, @yodle, Yodle

Break out the rankings

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

Allie Siarto, @allieo, Loudpixel

Define roles and divide work

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

David Gardner, @david_gardner, ColorJar

There’s a tool for that

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

Aaron Schwartz, @ModifyWatches, Modify Watches

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

Overworked man image via ShutterStock

Before signing up for your local startup accelerator or incubator, there are a few things you should keep in mind. Is your pitch perfected? Does it matter which group you join? Is there a right or wrong time to sign up? We asked these fifteen entrepreneurs for their nuggets of advice on navigating the world of startup accelerators.

Do your research to find the right fit

You should do your homework on any accelerator you’re considering. What do they offer? What are some of their success stories? What happens to companies that don’t succeed? How often do their teams get funded? Depending on the accelerator you join, you’ll get very different answers to those questions. Make sure to not only talk to the accelerator but also past companies, both successful and not.

Jason Evanish (@Evanish), Greenhorn Connect

Don’t be a perfectionist and accept the guidance

I think these groups are really important to early-stage startup attempts — the mentorship, community, and exposure they offer far outweigh any equity you might share with them in return. Don’t get caught up in trying to build something perfect; focus your efforts on customer development and proving your assumptions, so they can help you move that learning into a solid first product.

Derek Shanahan (@dshanahan ), Foodtree

Accomplish something on your own first

After having a detailed discussion with TechStars graduate and Contently.com co-founder Shane Snow, my takeaway was to have built an impressive resume of personal accomplishments to show you’re capable of actually building a real business. Incubators and accelerators want to train entrepreneurs, but they need to make sure you’re coachable and have actual potential to become a real star.

Danny Wong (@blanklabel), Blank Label Group

Be prepared to immerse yourself and go all in

You need to dedicate your time into this — it’s an endeavor that requires focus 24/7. Also, look at the opportunity as a time to find the right co-founder, strategic partners, and to be honest and upfront with the organizers about what you need. The more you give, the more you get!

Ash Kumra (@AshKumra ), DesiYou

Prove that you are committed

Demonstrate commitment and focus on results; incubators and accelerators invest in people and teams more than markets. It’s important to have a disruptive idea, but the drive and capabilities of the team are much more correlated to success than the size of the market or details of the business plan. They want to see a smart, dedicated team that is passionate about executing.

John Harthorne (@jharthorne), MassChallenge

Don’t settle for any incubator, find the best

If you are thinking of applying to an incubator or accelerator, be sure to find the best. Even if you have to give up a larger portion of your company, it will be worth it for the amount of growth it will help you with in comparison to a lesser organization. Also, look for synergy and people whom you work well with — you want to feel welcomed into your new home.

Louis Lautman (@louislautman), Young Entrepreneur Society

Make sure your goals match up

All incubators and accelerators are not created equal. Some incubators focus on landing funding, others focus more on helping you build a revenue-generating firm. Make sure your goals align with that of your program.

Doreen Bloch (@DoreenBloch), Poshly Inc.

Reach out to alums

Before applying to an accelerator program, I would talk to alums of the program to make sure they had a good experience. It also might help if you could get some time to validate your idea for a business before jumping into one of these programs. Make sure the “proof of concept” even makes sense.

Patrick Curtis (@WallStreetOasis ), WallStreetOasis.com

Perfect your pitch

Many incubators are looking for the entrepreneur to make some type of pitch, so it’s important to practice, practice, practice. The more excited that you can make them about your concept, the higher likelihood that you will get accepted to the accelerator.

Lawrence Watkins (@lawrencewatkins), Great Black Speakers

Paint a picture of success

When creating your pitch, keep in mind that you want to convince the judges that your startup is truly going places. It’s going to be so successful that they will want to attach their name to get behind it. Show them that you’re going to be successful no matter what, so it’s in their best interest to have you affiliated with their program.

Stephanie Kaplan (@stephaniekaplan), Her Campus Media

Tell a great story

Remember, people are investing in you more than your idea. Businesses are fluid in the startup stage. Which means your personality and background is what really counts. While pedigree or experience matter, your curiosity, obsession and commitment matter more. Character trumps credentials. What’s the riddle you’re trying to solve? How have you overcome failure? Make them believe in you.

Michael Margolis (@getstoried), Get Storied

Master the art of explaining your idea clearly

Good entrepreneurs know a lot about their business and their market. But can you communicate this expertise in a way that resonates with decision-makers in the incubator and accelerator programs? Start by reading “The Art of the Start” by Guy Kawasaki and learn the “business of business communication” in the startup phase.

Kent Healy (@Kent_Healy), The Uncommon Life

Timing is everything

Think about what you aim to get out of the incubator or accelerator program in mind. People tend to assume that these are great kickstarters, and they can be, but it all depends on timing. Joining one at the wrong stage of your cycle can be feedback overload, or slow your growth in other ways. Sometimes you need to collect input and test your idea, and sometimes you just need to build.

Caroline Ghosn (@carolineghosn ), The Levo League

Don’t join on your first venture

Entrepreneurs are going to make mistakes and get things wrong more often than not. I suggest getting as much accomplished in the real world before applying for incubation. The more you can do before you need the help, the better your terms will be and the more serious they will take your application.

Lucas Sommer (@audimated), Audimated

There’s life after an accelerator

These are great opportunities, but your business must happen with or without them. It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement and the aspiration of being accepted to a “prestigious program” — after all, it’s validation that you’re on to something! But if things don’t work out, the show must go on. Your goal is to create a company, so don’t lose sight of the bigger picture.

Tony Navarro (@hoostony ), Streamcal

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

Image via tobimcfly/Flickr

Silicon Valley is built on simple myths. One of the most pervasive is that all winning startups are founded straight out of school by 20 year olds from Stanford or Harvard. The reality is these are the exceptions, not the rule.

A student called me recently and said he had to meet  - “I’m having a career crisis,” was how he described it. I invited him to make the drive down to my ranch.

As the story unfolded, it turned out that he just turned 30 and realized that he hadn’t founded a company yet. “Everyone now starts a company out of school. All my classmates who were interested in entrepreneurship have started their own companies. I’ve just been working my way up the ladder.”

He explained that he had a set of progressively better jobs at companies that were in the “build” phase. These ex-startups had found a repeatable business model and were putting the processes in place to grow into a large company. They had hired operating executives and were starting to scale.

“Well what’s wrong with what you’ve been doing?” I asked.

“Oh, I’ve learned a ton,” he replied. “If I had started a company out of school I would have made all kind of stupid mistakes.”

Ok I wondered, the problem is what? “So how have your friends done?”

“Hmm” he said,  ”A few did ok, but most of them cratered their startups. For the amount of money they made most of them would have been better off working at Walmart.”

I told him he wasn’t alone. Early in my career I apprenticed at companies that had recently been startups, hadn’t yet gone public and were still innovative. My career was a slow 20-year progression from training instructor to product marketing manager to VP of Marketing. It wasn’t until my 7th startup that I was a CEO in a startup I co-founded (and its failure left a crater so deep it had it’s own Iridium layer.)

Perhaps the most important part of this non-meteoric career trajectory was the mentoring I received. I managed to work for, with, and around people who were truly skilled at what they did. Some of them consciously taught and shared their skills. For others I tried my best to suck out every bit of what they knew and emulate the best of their skills. (At times the learning was painful, but it was never forgotten.)

While the Silicon Valley myth is that all winning startups are founded straight out of school it’s just not true.

In raw numbers, most engineers and MBA’s aren’t founding companies. They’re going to work for others who have – Facebook, Google, Zynga, Four Square, Twitter, etc. While the jobs at these companies are still incredibly challenging, and passion and innovation may still pervade their company cultures, the startup risk (“will we run out of money before we find our customers?”) is gone. As great as these companies may be, they are no longer startups. (A startup is a temporary organization searching for a repeatable and scalable business model.)

But employees in these ex-startups are getting the best hands-on education for entrepreneurship there is – as apprentices.

As we sat there, I offered that his career was proceeding just fine. Someday, he’ll hear a calling, pull his head out of his computer, look around and say, “I can do this myself.”

And the cycle of creative destruction will begin anew.

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Ask people what makes entrepreneurs successful and you’ll hear a familiar list of adjectives: Agile, tenacious, resilient, opportunistic, etc.

What you don’t hear is that often they didn’t know any better.

I was just rereading Jessica Livingston’s book Founders at Work, and a common thread through the stories reminded me that there is a type of technology innovation that occurs in startups when a founder/team simply doesn’t know what they’re attempting is impossible.

Steve Wozniak at Apple building the Apple II floppy disk controller without ever seeing one. The original Fairchild Semiconductor team of Moore and Hoerni racing to build the first silicon diffused PNP and NPN transistors and ending up with Planar transistors and integrated circuits. The list of “I just did it without knowing it was impossible” appears time and again as a common thread in stories about technology innovation.

I got to see this first hand, when I was lucky enough to be present as an incredibly small team designed and built the Zilog and MIPS microprocessors.  And at Ardent I watched an equally minuscule company tackle building a supercomputer. At E.piphany, I saw it again – only this time it was a data warehouse that was constructed.

Almost all these innovations were built by people in their 20s with a few of the old-timers in their 30s. (One of the common themes was the physical effort to get these projects completed – entrepreneurs staying up for days to finish a project and/or sleeping at work until it shipped.) I flew more red-eyes than I can remember, and also had days where I just slept in the office with the engineers.

It’s not that older entrepreneurs can’t start or build innovative companies – of course they can.

Older entrepreneurs just work smarter and strategically. (Though my hypothesis is that funding from risk capital sources – angels and VC’s- don’t follow a normal distribution curve for older founders.)

And if they’re really strategic older founders hire engineers in their 20s and 30s who don’t know what they’ve been asked to do is impossible (exactly the strategy of my partner Ben at E.piphany.)

However, as I’ve gotten older I’ve noticed that it’s not just that stamina that changes for entrepreneurs. One of the traps of age is growing to accept the common wisdom of what’s possible and not.

Accumulated experience can at times become an obstacle in thinking creatively. Knowing that “it can’t be done” because you can recount each of the failed attempts in the last 20 years to solve the problem can be a boat anchor on insight and imagination. This not only effects individuals, but happens to companies as they age.

When you’re young anything seems possible.

And at times it is.

In this hour-long audio podcast, you’ll hear from Hearsay Labs Steve Garrity and Clara Shih, Increo Solutions’ Kimber Lockhart and Jeff Seibert, unwrap’s Josh Reeves and Apture’s Tristan Harris.

http://ecorner.stanford.edu/swf/player-ec.swf