Working at a startup should be a labor of love. The hours can be long and the pay can be modest, but for many people, the culture can’t be beat.

Most startup founders are incredibly passionate and dedicated – and these qualities permeate the entire organization. In fact, startup companies often engender an entrepreneurial culture that lives long after the early days, inspiring employees to spin out and create entirely new companies with what they have learned.

A key challenge for startup executives, though, is filling their staff with competent, motivated employees that share their vision and passion – and not people who want to punch in at nine and punch out at five, with a two-hour lunch in-between.

Contrary to popular belief, youth isn’t a critical factor in the process. For a team to operate at maximum efficiency, there has to be a constructive mix of different experiences, complementary skill-sets, industry relationships, ages and personality types. Every new hire brings a balance of skills, traits, experience and relationships. Finding the right balance (or compromise) is the key, and this needs to be done in the context of both the specific job and the broader organization. (more…)

In the aftermath of the economic meltdown, investment firms are under a more intense level of scrutiny than ever. And the private equity and venture capital sectors are working to efficiently transition out of a deep and widespread crisis through onerous legal and regulatory constraints.

Navigating a labyrinth of SEC laws that date back over 70 years, while pushing venture capital and private equity into the 21st Century requires the flexibility of a yogi, creativity of an artist and attention to detail of a corporate finance attorney.  The combination of talents demanded by firms that will reshape the future of our industry is not unlike the unification of talents that enables portfolio companies to become tomorrow’s game-changers.

As the financial industry attempts to adapt to all this change, it’s worth looking at the future of the investment and how it can be used to optimize existing technologies. Along the way, can it also break down the barriers to solving the world’s most critical issues? (more…)

Banks and governments in these five shaky economies owe each other many billions of euros — converted here to dollars — and have even larger debts to Britain, France and Germany. Arrow widths are proportional to debt amounts.

I am back from San Fran from 2 days, just to discover that more than 1 in 3 of San Francisco’s nearly 27,000 city workers earned $100,000 or more last year – a number that has been growing steadily for the past decade. And if you take out all the beggers it probably brings the avarage to 1 in 1…

The number of city workers paid at least $100,000 in base salary totaled 6,449 last year. When such extras as overtime are included, the number jumped to 9,487 workers, nearly eight times the number from a decade ago. And that calculation doesn’t include the cost of often-generous city benefits such as health care and pensions. (more…)

U.S.-Chinese relations have become tenser in recent months, with the United States threatening to impose tariffs unless China agrees to revalue its currency and, ideally, allow it to become convertible like the yen or euro. China now follows Japan and Germany as one of the three major economies after the United States. Unlike the other two, it controls its currency’s value, allowing it to decrease the price of its exports and giving it an advantage not only over other exporters to the United States but also over domestic American manufacturers. The same is true in other regions that receive Chinese exports, such as Europe.

What Washington considered tolerable in a small developing economy is intolerable in one of the top five economies. The demand that Beijing raise the value of the yuan, however, poses dramatic challenges for the Chinese, as the ability to control their currency helps drive their exports. The issue is why China insists on controlling its currency, something embedded in the nature of the Chinese economy. A collision with the United States now seems inevitable. It is therefore important to understand the forces driving China, and it is time for STRATFOR to review its analysis of China. (more…)

“In the animal kingdom, as well as in humans, sometimes a single sound can trigger automatic behavior. For example, when a mother turkey hears a certain chirp from her chicks, she becomes a very conscientious mother turkey. But if she doesn’t hear exactly that chirping sound, she will ignore or even kill her young. But here’s where it gets interesting, especially for anyone who wants to evoke automatic and favorable responses in humans.

Listen to these two amazing experiments, described in the wonderful book, The Psychology of Influence, by Dr. Robert B. Cialdini. The first involved mother turkeys, the second, humans. Let’s look at the first . . . . “For a mother turkey, a polecat is a natural enemy whose approach is to be greeted with squawking, pecking, clawing rage. Indeed, the experimenters found that even a stuffed model of a polecat, when drawn by a string toward a mother turkey, received an immediate and furious attack. ” (more…)

A decade ago, on March 10, 2000, it seemed almost difficult to find someone skeptical about the dazzling future of dot-com stocks.

An undeniably prescient strategist at Warburg Dillon Read, now part of UBS, told the New York Times that “I don’t see the end in sight.” The Los Angeles Times quoted a Banc of America Securities analyst as saying that, before “too long,” the Nasdaq index would double.

It was exactly 10 years ago that the Nasdaq index reached its all-time peak of 5,048.62, and the tech-heavy index has never come close to recovering. It closed Tuesday at 2,340.68, 54 percent below its dot-com bubble high on March 10, 2000.

If you consider the devaluation of the U.S. dollar during that period caused by the Federal Reserve, the Nasdaq has dropped from an inflation-adjusted high of 6,352–an even more vertiginous plunge of 63.15 percent.

Read more on C|net…