One of the challenges of raising capital is being in tune with both private and public market dynamics. If the public markets are frothy and money is easy, then private capital is probably cheap and equity is easily raised. If you've just had the worst recession since the Great Depression, then the climate is obviously different. Credit is tight, lending standards are onerous, and investors have the upper hand. For investors willing to shoulder risk, they require very favorable terms. Those who are more risk averse may only want to purchase notes and invest in debt that is secured. After all, they can earn strong rates of return and stay relatively liquid with security.

As I've mentioned in previous posts, you've got to give something to get something. If you sell equity in your company then you are essentially borrowing money and in return paying with equity in your company. If you sell debt in your company then you are essentially borrowing money and in return paying with interest.

Sometimes entrepreneurs are out of touch with markets and it shows. Other times they just don't realize that in order to raise capital you must demonstrate to an investor that you will do everything you can to ensure success and that investors receive a return.

Every entrepreneur I meet claims that he/she is 100% confident in the success of his company and that it will not fail. One easy way to determine whether an entrepreneur is committed to his enterprise is to offer debt that is personally secured by the entrepreneur. If you are so sure that this startup capital will generate returns, are you willing to secure it with personal assets?

The best answer you can receive from an entrepreneur is - "Yes. But I want you to know that I have already put all of my assets into the company and have nothing left." This is the entrepreneur that will do whatever it takes.

When the answer you receive is "No", then the obvious response is "How can you be so confident in your company and expect to return capital to investors if you are not willing to take a secured loan?"

Granted, this scenario is more appropriate for a cash-flowing startup that is looking for expansion capital than for an early stage venture. But the point is that debt is more expensive than equity - how bad do you want capital? Would you rather keep spinning your wheels with your current capital structure or pay for capital to accelerate the development of your business?

When Preetam Mukherjee started Marcellus.tv in March 2007, his company was one of the very few players in the professional online video hosting space. He believed he was building a killer product that would become a blockbuster and would compete handily with the one established player in the space, Brightcove. To ensure that he wouldn’t tip off any potential competitors, he went into “stealth mode”.  Secrecy was the key to success. He would not even tell his close friends what he was building until his product was complete (after all, who can you trust these days?). Then he would send Mike Arrington an email, get a TechCrunch feature and watch fame and fortune beat a path to his door.

But as happens to nearly all secretive startups like Marcellus, the blockbuster never materialized, and the attention never came. When Marcellus did come out of stealth in September 2008, there were many online video platforms available, most of which had better features than Marcellus. Preetam got his TechCrunch mention and experienced a huge spike in traffic for a few days. But when the dust settled, he found himself back in obscurity. Moreover, it was like having a really bad hangover—his product didn’t entirely meet customer needs and no one seemed to care.

As I’ll tell you later, Preetam’s story does have a happier ending, but that’s not how it is for most startups. That’s the problem with stealth. Startup guru, Eric Reis says one or two of every 10 companies he meets have what he calls a “stealth-disease”. They are too afraid to show something imperfect to the world or are afraid that a competitor will steal their idea. And they think that when they launch their product will make front-page news and grant them blockbuster success. Wasn’t it Ralph Waldo Emerson who wrote, “Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door”?

Well, Emerson was wrong. The harsh reality is that even if you did build a better mousetrap, no one would find you. To be known, you have to have a great story and tell it to the right people. And to build a great product, you need to get all the feedback you can from potential customers, marketing experts, venture capitalists, lawyers and accountants.

When you’re starting up, you usually have a great idea and think you know what your customers need. But your customers don’t even know what they need—they know what they don’t like and think they know what they want—but they don’t know what they need. Customers will ultimately buy only those things they really need – no matter how good your product or sales pitch.

Learning what a customer needs is an iterative process.  You try something, get feedback.  Both you and your customer learn more and you try again. You keep doing this until you have something which is so compelling that the customer will pay money to have it—that’s when you know you have a killer product. But you can’t get feedback if you’re in stealth. You only have yourself to talk to.

Most entrepreneurs say they are in stealth because they are worried about competitors stealing their ideas. This can be a risk if you have such a simple idea that just by hearing it, someone can replicate it. If this is the case, then you do have a lot to worry about. But even in this case, what will ultimately make the difference between success and failure isn’t your idea but your ability to execute and dominate your market very fast. You need a superb management team including top notch marketing and sales staff, great industry connections, and deep-pocked investors. You aren’t going to get any of these things by staying locked up in your basement.

If you’re competing with the big guys and are worried about them stealing your ideas, it’s the same story—it boils down to execution. As Eric Reis says, “If a startup can’t innovate faster than a much larger competitor, stealth isn’t going to make the difference —they’re toast”.  It may also be that fear of big companies is overblown: those who have worked for one know that it’s incredibly hard to get a manager at a big company to do something new, even if your goal is to give your ideas away.

What about the big PR moment? This is also not so simple. To get beyond a TechCrunch launch feature, you need to build a relationship with journalists and analysts. They need to speak to your customers and learn what they think of you. They want to see detailed market analysis and to gain a deep understanding of why this market is important. Beyond press mentions, PR is about relationships. If you want to get quoted, you need to be an easy source—be accessible, willing to give information on background, and don’t expect to be quoted.

There is no linear ROI in PR, which can be hard for techies to understand. It’s all about relationships and patience. Once you are mentioned in one publication, then it becomes much easier to leverage that into other coverage because you have a stamp of approval. But make no mistake, PR is a never ending process. One TechCrunch article may be a good beginning but it is never sufficient to ensure the success of a company. So all that time you spend in stealth not talking to journalists is time your competition has to build a strong relationship with the media while you sit around admiring yourself in the mirror.

In a few rare instances, stealth may make some sense. Celebrity involvement is one example pointed out to me by Mike Butorin, founder of Projec.to and Song.ly. If Ashton Kutcher is launching a company, then operating in public may actually distract the engineers from their jobs to the point that nothing gets done due to the media circus that ensues. Another good reason to be in stealth is if a company is built around a technology or idea that it hopes to patent but has not yet filed. In that case, stealth protects the intellectual property and the future of the company by raising high barriers to entry in the future. But these types of examples represent the tiny minority of startups. Most startups use ideas that others have had and will live or die based on how well they execute on those ideas.

So how did things turn out for Marcellus.tv and Preetam? They managed to recover from stealth-disease but only barely. After launch, Marcellus.tv spent a year in a closed beta, performing rapid-fire iteration based on regular feedback from early customers. Marcellus launched out of beta as a white-label video hosting and streaming service in August 2009 and was one of many in the space. But the company managed to keep prices at rock-bottom levels through smart usage of cloud computing. The sales team worked the phones and existing customers both to get feedback and leads. Word spread and the customer base grew. They expect to be profitable early next year. The company never developed a PR juggernaut but having loyal customers willing to recommend the service to others has thus far overcome that weak spot. Preetam’s parting shot to me was quite clear. “To hell with stealth,” he wrote in an email. Words to live—or die—by.

Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.

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The one skill which entrepreneurs need is something they don’t teach in business school—selling.  Yes, I know that “selling” conjures up negative images of used-car salesmen peddling clunkers. But the ability to persuade people to believe in you is a necessity. That’s because sales is not just about selling things for money. Selling is about life. Convincing the perfect soulmate to go out on a date is a sales job. Enticing your children to eat their vegetables is a sales job. Negotiating a raise with your boss is a sales job. And, yes, selling your company to Google is definitely a sales job. A sales job in that you are listening to others, finding out what they want or need, and giving it to them in a form that they appreciate. And guess who the best salespeople in tech companies are? Your developers.

Let me explain why I believe this.

I started my career as a geek. I ended up as Chief Technology Officer of Seer Technologies, a software startup which we grew from zero to $120 million in revenue and took public in a short five years. And then I became CEO of my own very successful startup called Relativity Technologies (until I burnt myself out and needed to shift gears).  A number of skills helped me through this ascent. I learned a lot about motivating and managing people who were sometimes smarter than me, about understanding markets and communicating effectively, and also a few really boring things like accounting, finance and law. But if I had not learned how to sell then my company would never have made it past three guys in a room with a phone and some laptops.

I didn’t believe this in my youth. I thought coding was the exact opposite of selling. I always associated “sales” with hustling and sleazy ways to convince customers to spend money on things they didn’t need. And you had to work fast to get that check before the dupes backed away.

One day I was promoted to project manager. After thrashing through a few uncomfortable meetings, I quickly understood that running a good project required a form of selling to my peers and managers. I also realized that perhaps sales was not so simple. In fact, convincing my staff that the ideas I had made sense was far more difficult than writing clean code. And persuading management to supply sufficient staff and funding to implement my ideas was harder still.

Being a successful project manager meant learning to listen closely to what others thought, to make them feel included, and to give them what they wanted and needed to succeed. It meant constant communication that was honest yet finely nuanced. It was hard work but ultimately very rewarding. I could listen and focus on helping others to achieve their goals and at the same time advance myself quite easily. When I was able to focus on a global view of helping my company succeed, I found it much easier to avoid destructive departmental politics. I rose up the ranks to become a vice-president of technology at one of the world’s five largest investment banks.

Then I got the chance to become CTO of a startup which would market technology which my team had built. Selling became an even more important skill. We all were living on borrowed time and the only thing that would give us more time was sales to put money into company coffers. We had a truly amazing product, much better than that of our competitors. But the stark reality was that unless we could really sell well, our competitors had a big advantage. They were a known quantity. They were not going out of business tomorrow. They played golf, went out for beers, and had lunch with our competitors.

My guru and mentor was my boss, Gene Bedell. One of the first things Gene did when we launched our company was to put everyone through a sales training boot camp. Gene had run billion-dollar businesses and reached the executive levels in investment banking. He had even convinced IBM to seed our company, a software spinoff from Credit Suisse First Boston. At first my technology team protested at being taught to learn about qualifying prospects and closing sales rather than the latest version-tracking software tools.

Within months, we were closing multimillion dollar sales with blue-chip customers across the globe. We did this with only two experienced sales reps and part-time sales support from our development staff. That’s because developers with sales training are incredibly valuable as a part of the sales process. They have two essential ingredients that make people persuasive—credibility and trustworthiness (for the most part).  So while a prospect may not really believe a salesperson, for example, when he says a system is reliable, they’re far more likely to believe a developer they respect.  This is a very powerful ingredient in the sales process, and one we used regularly.  We would compete with some of the largest software companies in the world—and win the sale almost every time. As CTO, I also took it upon myself to sell strategic partners. My biggest catch was a deal with IBM-Japan worth $8.6 million.

With a culture that put customer support and sales above everything else, we grew  into a profitable $120-million-a-year revenue machine. Our developers formed long-term bonds and friendships with our customers. They would go to great pains to understand customer requirements and build products that would sell. More often than not, new development projects would be funded directly by customers. Whenever there was a customer-service problem, our top engineers would voluntarily work around the clock and fly all over the globe to personally provide support.

So, how do you learn sales? It’s easy. There are literally hundreds of books on selling. The methods vary, but in essence all of them teach you about the basics of understanding customer needs and honing your message. There are also hundreds of “selling seminars” conducted all over the world. Be wary of any which teach you to sell things a customer doesn’t want. It is one thing to persuade someone to buy something which they need, it is another thing to con people. My personal favorite book (and I am a little biased here) is one by Gene Bedell himself, titled Three Steps to Yes: The Gentle Art of Getting Your Way.

By the way, I’m not the only guy saying this kind of stuff. The high priests of the Lean Startup Methodology, like Dave McClure, Brad Feld, and Eric Ries, all advocate a “get to sales ASAP” approach. “Recovering venture capitalist” Healy Jones blogged about how he was shortchanged with his Wharton MBA. Yet a quick conversation at any networking event in the Valley yields a simple observation that most technology workers don’t think that selling is part of their job description. The smartest technology entrepreneurs realize that everyone in the company is in sales and the sooner they embrace that reality, the easier it will be for that startup to grow and prosper. Coder, biz dev, PR, QA—nope. You’re all in sales. It’s all about selling for survival.

Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.

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© myuibe BusinessWeek had a piece earlier this month on the alternative energy market in China and how attractive it is at the moment for startup enterprises. As Chinese cities have become increasingly polluted, the government has laid out ambitious plans to lessen dependence on fossil fuels. By 2020, Beijing aims to have 15% of the nation's electricity come from wind, solar, or other renewable sources. Adrian Ho sees that as a tantalizing opportunity for startups like his China Water & Energy, which builds and operates ...

When pitching to VC’s, entrepreneurs hype the heck out of their ideas, years of experience and management teams. But I’ve never heard of anyone touting their luck or connection to God. After reading the posts on TechCrunch, one could easily get the impression that God doesn’t play much of role in Silicon Valley. But ask any successful entrepreneur in private what made them successful, and you might just hear a different story. In a research project my team just completed, the majority of 549 company founders told us that their most important success factor, after “experience” and “management team”, was “good fortune”.  Many respondents wrote in comments stressing the extreme importance of faith and God.

You didn’t think that successful entrepreneurs were this pious did you? Neither did I. After all, what did God have to do with Google aside from Jeff Jarvis stealing his book title from fans of Jesus and their much copied meme? Did God build the Internet? Did he build the microchip?  I’ve never been religious myself and have always believed that with hard work and determination, you can surmount just about any obstacles. But I also learned the hard way that you can do everything right and fail. Sometimes you do just about everything wrong and make it big. My belief: success is 51% luck and 49% execution. You need to execute with precision, but a little luck goes a long way. It is always good to have God on your side. So it was interesting and illuminating (pun intended) to see what other entrepreneurs thought about this.

To collect and collate precisely that type data, I and several colleagues (with the support of the Kauffman Foundation) researched the backgrounds, motivation and success factors of company founders in several high growth industries including aerospace and defense, computer and electronics, health care, and services. Our earlier paper titled Anatomy of an Entrepreneur revealed that these founders typically came from middle-class backgrounds, have parents who are less educated than they are, and tend to be married with children when they launch their first company. Most had always wanted to start their own companies. They were driven by a desire to build wealth, commercialize business idea they had and to stop working for others.

For a new paper, titled Making of a Successful Entrepreneur, we analyzed the factors which made these company founders successful. Nearly all (96%) said that prior work experience was an important factor in their success and 58% ranked this as extremely important. The vast majority (88%) said that previous success and failures were important. But lessons from failures were judged as extremely important by more respondents than lessons from success. That’s right, those that had experienced failure valued it more highly than their successes.

Management teams were ranked as important by 82%. The next highest ranked factor was good fortune, with 73% ranking this as important, and 22% ranking this as extremely important. When asked what other factors played a role in their success, many who responded stressed the extreme importance of faith and God. It wasn’t just those with names from one religion who said this. Rather, it seems that Christians, Jews, Hindus and Muslims alike share the same beliefs. Yes, these people were on a Mission from God – or, at the very least, they strongly felt that their faith fed the entrepreneurial drive and the intangibles required to succeed in the brutal endeavor of making something from nothing, of birthing a company.

Another surprising bit of wisdom we got from these entrepreneurs was this. The Lord may be their co-pilot but their most trusted banker was the same guy they saw in the mirror every morning. Anyone who follows TechCrunch probably assumes that the vast majority of successful technology startups receive some sort of outside capital and that, in fact, the outside capital plays a key role in allowing these startups to get off the ground. But our sample of entrepreneurs told us that personal savings was the primary source of funding.

And this was not by a small margin. Roughly 70% of our respondents used personal savings to fund their first businesses. Even the serial entrepreneurs who probably could have tapped venture capital preferred to keep control of their own funding sources by bootstrapping. In second, third or fourth startups, over half of all entrepreneurs relied on personal savings to underwrite their launch.

My academic colleagues don’t like to hear this, but company founders didn’t rank university education as highly as other factors. Yes, 70 percent said their university education was important and Ivy-League graduates valued this more, with 86 percent indicating this was important. But only 20 percent of all entrepreneurs and 18 percent of Ivy-League graduates ranked university education as extremely important, however.  And the alum networks which are supposed to be really valuable for business contacts, weren’t ranked that highly. Only 19% of the entrepreneurs believed that university or alumni networks were important for their business. Even the Ivy grads didn’t think that their legendary networks were so important: only 29% ranked their legendary networks ranked these as important, and of these only 10.5% said these were extremely or very important.

Hardly any of the company founders ranked state or local government assistance as important. But those from the Midwest and Southwest put a slightly higher premium on this assistance than others, with 19 percent and 15 percent, respectively, ranking it as important. Entrepreneurs from New England put the lowest premium on it, with only 1 percent ranking it as important, followed by the West and South, both with 4 percent.  That seems logical, since high-growth startup mechanisms are most developed and the communities to support them most mature in the West and Northeast.

All told, even a skeptic like me was extremely surprised at how much these entrepreneurs valued things that no amount of money could buy – thriftiness (personal savings), faith (belief in the supreme being and oneself), and self-selected networks (friends and weak social ties). The moral of all this, I guess, is luck may be critical but self is essential to the successful startup.

Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.

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When Americans think of the Indian technology sector, they still perceive a nation of call center workers and low-level computer programmers administering databases and updating websites. But while the West was sleeping, Indian IT morphed into a giant R&D machine. Indian companies that started out doing call center and low-level IT work have climbed the value chain to become outsourced providers of critical R&D in sophisticated areas such as semiconductor design, aerospace, automotive, network equipment and medical devices.

This is happening as multi-nationals set up their own R&D operations in India and partner with local shops. Both the Palm Pre smart phone and the Amazon Kindle, two of the hottest consumer electronics devices on the market, have key components designed in India. Intel designed its six-core Xeon processor in India. IBM has over 100,000 employees in India. A large number of these are building Big Blue’s most sophisticated software products. Cisco is developing cutting edge networking technologies for futuristic “intelligent cities” in Bangalore. Adobe, Cadence, Oracle, Microsoft and most of the large software companies are developing mainstream products in India.

Equally important are the arrival of Indian multi-nationals who are tackling global markets, such as Tata with its dirt cheap Nano car that the company is now positioning for a European market entry and Reva, which recently announced it was planning to build an electric car factory in New York state to address the U.S. market for electric vehicles.

What has been missing to date in India, however, is early stage venture activity and the type of grass-roots entrepreneurism that is the hallmark of American capitalism and Silicon Valley. In that respect China is way ahead of India with many startups taking advantage of huge government incentives and reeling in talented native Chinese returnees to serve as CEOs and CTOs. Note that Kaifu Lee, formerly Google’s top guy in China, was able to launch a $100 million startup incubator focusing entirely on the mobile sector — and he was flooded with business plans within days of opening his doors in the Middle Kingdom.

On my recent trip to India I started to see new signs of life in tech entrepreneurship.  Many of the startups that Sarah Lacy and I met were really smart and hungry. Some were even doing things better than their Silicon Valley counterparts. Not all of these startups are developing breakthrough technologies but many of them are solving problems that U.S. companies have thus far failed to solve and doing it with fewer resources.

One of the most interesting companies I met is in the mundane business of developing offset printer ink. Their ink is made from vegetable oil and is entirely bio-degradable. The offset printing industry consumes 1 million tons of petroleum products and emits 500,000 tons of volatile organic compounds every year. An IIT-Delhi incubated startup called EnNatura developed a printing ink which emits no volatile compounds and is washable. And the overall cost of their solution will be significantly less than all present compounds when produced at scale. I can see a company like this growing into a billion dollar global business.

Another interesting company was LiveMedia. This is an out-of-home advertising company that has 4,500 screens in 2,200 destinations with a total reach of 50 million people. Of course, you can find exactly these sorts of TV screens in thousands of places across the U.S. Unfortunately, it has been very hard to make real money selling advertising on these networks. LiveMedia appears to have cracked that by creating specialized content that is more engaging and interactive than a box droning CNN or the Disney Channel. LiveMedia content includes games, quizzes, horoscopes, a few short animations, and other content that is both cheap to produce and easy to play along with or understand. LiveMedia has also perfected context-relevant advertising spots keyed to the crowds at the screen location.

LiveMedia is in the process of building out a partnership with Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs India that would give the network even more interactive capabilities. Bell Labs has developed a content management and routing system, dubbed Mango, that makes it much easier and efficient to deliver high-bandwidth, high-quality video and interactive content over existing networks. In the developing world, everyone wants a TiVO-like capability to share, store and manage content. But existing GPRS or EDGE-based cell networks are not up to snuff. And the broadband infrastructure still lags behind that of the most developed telecom networks in places like Japan, Korea and Scandanavia.  A product like Mango is tailor-made for VC investment to get it out of the lab and into a spin-off company.

This is partly why so many U.S. venture capital shops have opened up branches in India. In fact, the two lead investors in LiveMedia are both U.S. venture capitalists including the respected Valley firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. But India lags in home-grown venture capital activity. As I have previously discussed, VCs follow the innovation. So the lack of native VC in India is notable in that it implies a critical mass of activity remains lacking, as well.

For example, in the first nine months of 2008, total early stage VC investments in India totaled $678 million, according to the Global India Venture Capital Association. In the U.S. over that same period early stage investments tallied $5.2 billion according to the U.S. National Venture Capital Association – and that number is not entirely reflective of the real situation. The economic downturn hit the U.S. much harder than the Subcontinent and VC activity in the U.S. fell faster and harder. Regardless, a 10-fold difference between early stage venture activity clearly illustrates the capital is not there yet.

So when will there be enough innovative startups to support an explosion in venture capital? I’d argue, sooner than you realize. During my week in India I spoke to close to 100 startups. A few of them had products or prototypes that would easily compete in Silicon Valley. Some of the leading lights of the legacy Indian IT giants are also moving quickly into VC. Infosys founder Narayan Murthy recently sold millions of dollars of shares in the company in order to launch a venture capital fund targeting investments in India.

The dynamics of entrepreneurship are the same in India as in America. Company founders usually come from the ranks of experienced business executives and are middle-aged. They get tired of working for others and want to make an impact and build wealth before they get too old. Given that there are now hundreds of thousands of R&D workers in India who are gaining valuable experience and are getting old, it is simply a matter of time before they begin to hatch their entrepreneurial plans. After all, their colleagues who migrated to the U.S. now start nearly one in six of Silicon Valley’s tech firms.

I’ll bet that in 5 years, if you stacked up a TechCrunch 50 of Indian start ups versus a comparable number of U.S. startups, it would be a pretty even match. That’s pretty amazing considering the relatively short length of time that the Indian startup scene has existed. And it’s a good lesson for America that the barriers to starting a company are lower than ever before—and some ambitious engineer in India will eat your lunch if you don’t get your prototype built and perfected ASAP.

Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.

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Presented some slides on building teams to a room-full of very keen and enthusiastic audience at the TiE Institute session last week at London Business School on “Leading High Performance Teams“.. I tremendously enjoyed Adam’s slides and his exercises…Will share my own slides on this post later…

I’m in India this weekend with fellow TechCrunch/BusinessWeek writer Sarah Lacy. After we’re done with the elephant rides in Jaipur, we’re going to be meeting local tech startups. Then we head back to New Delhi to meet more aspiring entrepreneurs. Sarah is writing a book on how startup culture has gone global and I’m researching how R&D has globalized. It never ceases to amaze me how you can find brilliant entrepreneurs everywhere—whether in the middle of the Thar Desert in Rajasthan or Santiago Chile (where local entrepreneurs showed me life-sized holographic images projected through some hardware connected to their laptops, and software which can help monitor the operational efficiencies of department stores in California). The promise of these early ventures is always amazing and their enthusiasm infectious. Which brings me to Global Entrepreneurship Week. And Snoop Dogg.

You are probably asking yourself, what the heck does the controversial and highly successful rapper have to do with entrepreneurship? Snoop has graciously agreed to serve on a Nov. 16 mentoring panel that features high-powered entrepreneurs handing out sage advice on how they launched and grew their businesses and brands. No doubt, Snoop has built one of the most durable brands in the notoriously volatile world of hip-hop. In fact, I’d wager that Snoop could give some solid lessons to some of the top decision makers and brand masters on a global basis. The panel is but one of a huge slate of events arranged by the Kauffman Foundation (full disclosure — they have underwritten some of my research) for Global Entrepreneurship Week.

Those events span the globe, running in 85 countries and hundreds of venues all with a singular goal—to spur innovative thinkers to do innovative things. The emphasis of many of the events, not surprisingly, is technology. The events are designed to teach, inspire, and foster collaboration among entrepreneurs (many of whom may not even know they are entrepreneurs yet). Aside from getting some sage advice from the original Snoop, the week is also chock full of opportunities for entrepreneurs of every type. Got a great idea to join the clean tech revolution? During Global Entrepreneurship Week in San Francisco, the Clean Tech Open Ideas Competition finals will be held. In this competition, thousands of people submitted early-stage clean technology ideas and it helps turn them into successful companies. Ideas can cover anything that fosters a healthy natural environment, from big-think solar breakthroughs to power-management software for buildings or hotels. Just like the TechCrunch50, this bakeoff will let people with big ideas present in front of a high-powered panel of experts and vie for startup-funding and other assistance.

While a lot of the events are in the U.S., the spread beyond our shores is notable and accelerating. Take “Speednetwork the Globe”. This is a series of networking events where entrepreneurs of all backgrounds can meet with potential collaborators, mentors and investors in five-minute increments. More than 500 speednetworking events in 31 countries happened in 2008, connecting approximately 25,000 people. Likely even more will be scheduled this year and this is a model for how to get geeks and suits—the two key components of a tech startup—together and brainstorming.

A quick look through the list showed me that pretty much anywhere I go I can find some event worth hitting. On November 18 in Chile (which I wrote about previously as being a rising comer in the tech world) the government-backed Foro Innovacion (Innovation Forum) will hold an all day business plan ideathon competition, focused on technology industries. In Tokyo, on November 14 the Honda Foundation is sponsoring a seminar addressing the needs and challenges of social entrepreneurs in Asia.

That last event I put in for a reason. Enterpreneurship, I strongly believe, is not just about making money. In much of the world, entrepreneurship is about giving people control over their own fate, lifting them out of poverty, and improving the world. Even here, in the U.S., entrepreneurship is an incredible social resource. All meaningful job growth over the past few decades has come from start-ups and entrepreneurial businesses that are small in size but powerful in impact. The latest economic crisis and wave after wave of resulting layoffs has clearly illustrated there is no safety in working for a big company, or having the right kind of degree, or even being a productive employee.

This is the core of entrepreneurship, the ability to lift yourself up by your own bootstraps, no matter the circumstances, and create a business and a way to support yourself, your family and your community. Most of you reading this either are entrepreneurs or have entrepreneurial aspirations. I’m saying, that’s great. You are what has made this country an amazing place, and these types of motivations are what has lifted tens of millions of people out of poverty around the world. So pay attention to Global Entrepreneurship week, mark it on your calendar, and attend an event if you can. Next time around, organize an event in your area. And never forget why you are doing what you do.

Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.

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Christian Chabot has a timely – and sobering reminder on IPO Dashboards re. how long it takes for a start-up to achieve meaningful revenues at scale (Hat Tip: Guy Kawasaki). As he says: …growth conversations between VCs and management teams often cause angst. One of the reasons is that people from both groups tend to have unsubstantiated [...]

© Adam Jones, Ph.D. Small Business Trends had an interesting post last month on how the American work force is under untilized.In a recent article on MarketingProfs, Gallup research of 300,000 businesses indicated that 75-80% of employees are achieving much less and feeling far less enthusiastic about their work than they could be. If all your employees were “fully engaged,” …. your profits would jump 40%. Eric Brody, Healthy ConversationsAnd as the author points out, every business could use 40% more productivity. Right? Zane Safrit outlines ...