FundingPost held its biggest “NYC Venture Capital and Angel Showcase last week at Midtown’s Credit Suisse HQ.  The organizers called it a “Reverse Venture Fair” where startup founders went directly to a VC versus having to wait for the VC to come to them. About 70% of all the companies there were based in NY.

Each fund had its own table setup for the sole purpose of discovering new companies.  Golden Seeds, an angel network of investors, was particularly interesting in that it only invests in female- run organizations that actually have a female co-founder or a female in a C-level role.  The fund has over 42 companies and has invested over $34M since 2005. “I will tell you that every time I go to the FundingPost conference, it’s inspiring,” said Rob Delman of ARC Angel, a NY technology VC fund and Golden Seeds investor. “It shows that there are so many entrepreneurs that are still alive and well in New York.”

This morning Lord Young and I chaired a panel discussion at Downing Street which brought together angels and entrepreneurs, as well as their representatives and professional advisers, to share views about issues affecting the sector.

The UK government places huge emphasis on business angels. We’ve brought in some generous tax breaks, including:

-increasing the rate of income tax relief for the Enterprise Investment Scheme to 30 percent -doubling the investor limits to £1 million per year from this April -bringing in the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme, providing 50 per cent rate of income tax relief for individuals who invest in qualifying companies

Gus Sentementes' recent article noted that Lookingglass Cyber Solutions, one of our region's technology companies, had received $5 million in venture capital from sources on both coasts ("To find investors: Go west, young startup — but come back," Feb. 12). This is no small feat, since less than 1 percent of all companies receive this type of funding.

Venture capital requires a perfect combination of strong management, a compelling product, a large market and little real competition — and, as Lookingglass CEO Derek Gabbard noted, good timing and luck.

The reasons 99 percent of companies aren't attractive for venture capital have less to do with where they are located and more to do with the realities of their business models.

On a recent morning, Rick Heitzmann has a plane to catch, eight investments to oversee and a list of urgent issues to resolve.

Between 7:30 and 9, and as he heads to JFK for a flight to San Francisco, the managing director of FirstMark Capital has been on his iPhone for conversations with other investors and executives of companies under his wing. One of the companies in his portfolio needs a marketing vice president; another is about to raise more money; a third is looking for a buyer. He's tossing around ideas and delivering advice, encouragement and tough love gained from his own days as an entrepreneur.

Mr. Heitzmann is one of a new breed of venture capitalists: More than financiers, they are mentors, rabbis and consiglieres, all wrapped up in one. Compared with the venture capitalists who bankrolled companies like Digital Equipment and Intel and connected with management mostly at quarterly board meetings, the second boom's VCs are practically married to their investees, networking, strategizing and helping them make hiring and firing decisions.

Confronted with slack economies and urgent about economic renewal, cities and regions in the United States and abroad are creating diverse new redevelopment zones to build on the strengths of anchor institutions (universities, medical complexes, and corporate headquarters) through a combination of urban design strategies, innovation and entrepreneurship initiatives, and business incubators.

In Providence, Rhode Island, the idea of an “innovation district” is the basis of its own regeneration effort with the relocation of Brown University’s Warren Alpert Medical School to an emerging 360-acre Knowledge District in the city’s relatively drab Jewelry District.  Here, a fusion of industry cluster, pro-entrepreneurship, and place-making strategies is working to build an urban innovation economy one firm and one block at a time.

"Relatively few people should start companies," Reid Hoffman says bluntly. And he should know. As a co-founder of popular social networking website LinkedIn and an influential Silicon Valley angel investor, he has engineered several startup success stories — and now he has distilled his business wisdom into a book, The Start-up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career.

"It's not everyone going and starting a company," he tells Morning Edition's Steve Inskeep. "It's everyone approaching their lives with questions like: How do I invest in myself? How do I become more capable at what I'm doing?" Hoffman says his book offers an answer to a question he once saw on a billboard in Silicon Valley. It read, "A million people in the world can do your job. What makes you so special?"