Why Startups Need to Control Their Own Destinies [Video]

Silicon Valley is finally starting to have a real impact on the health care industry, and Practice Fusion, an Electronic Medical Records (EMR) company, is leading the way. In addition to replacing paper charts, its free, web-based product helps doctors with everything from appointment scheduling to prescription management. With major VC backing and vocal support from investors like Peter Thiel, the managing partner at Founders Fund and former CEO of PayPal, the company is positioned to scale quickly and dominate the digital health care revolution.

This Kickstarter for Startups Will Trade Equity for Funding

Kickstarter may have provided millions of dollars in seed funding for startups such as Pebble Technology, but the company — which has raised more than $200 million for 22,000 products — has no intention of becoming a crowdfunding hub in the literal investment sense.

“We’re not gearing up for the equity wave if it comes,” Kickstarter co-founder Perry Chen said in a recent interview with GigaOm. “The real disruption is doing it without equity.”

The Really Big Guide Of Small Business Success Tips

In business, size does matter, especially if that size is small. Independent businesses with fewer than 500 employees represent 99.7% of all employer firms, according to the SBA’s Office of Advocacy. They employ about half of all private sector employees, which make up about 43% of the country’s private payroll. And more than half are based out of an owner’s home. Incidentally, don’t knock the domicile as a business incubator. After all, that’s where Apple, Hershey’s, Mary Kay Cosmetics, and Ford started.

9 Qualities of Remarkable Entrepreneurs

Good entrepreneurs make money. Great entrepreneurs make serious money.
But remarkable entrepreneurs do more than make money. They are the few who possess qualities that don't appear on balance sheets but do make a significant impact on the lives of their employees, industries, and communities.

Here are nine qualities of remarkable entrepreneurs:

Why Entrepreneurs Should Never Wait to Follow Their Dreams [VIDEO]

Alexa Von Tobel is CEO and founder of LearnVest, which she describes as “Daily Candy meets personal finance.” She started her company with a 75-page business plan that won a contest, and has since raised $24.5 million in funding for this female-focused finance startup. Von Tobel has become the specialist of personal finance of this generation. She regularly appears on such talk shows as Nate Berkus, Rachael Ray and Gayle King to comment on all things personal savings and spendings. In this interview, she breaks down her formula for a happy financial life, “the LearnVest method,” and explains why LearnVest’s success was only possible because she followed her dreams without hesitation.

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This video originally from Mashable

Want to Raise More Funds? Go Out and Tell Your Story—to Everyone!

Don't Overlook the Low-Hanging Fruit
When it comes to getting the word out about their organizations, the first things many nonprofits think of are marketing and advertising campaigns—followed by endless meetings on how they're going to raise the funds to pay for them.

They seldom stop to look at the low-hanging fruit just aching to be picked, namely word-of-mouth opportunities to tell their organization's narrative to those closest to them in their homes, neighborhoods, and communities.

But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself.

Message It—How to Make the Most of Your Facebook Timeline Page [Part 2]

Your Facebook cover photo is prime real estate, so it better be good.
Photographs have incredible power in their ability to draw us, almost sub-consciously, into stories. And it seems that digesting visual content, rather than the narrative content we’re more used to, allows us to engage a bit more freely and fully than usual.

The new Facebook template invites brands like your organization’s to place a large “cover photo” at the top of the page, up to a size of 851 x 315 pixels. That’s about 70% of the screen on my huge iMac screen, which means it could cover up to 80% of the vertical space of the average laptop. That doesn’t leave much space to view other elements on the page, so you have to make it rich and ultimately engaging.