Slava Rubin, the CEO of Indiegogo, the crowdfunding website that just closed its latest round of funding, has neither a desk nor a computer.

And he doesn't want them.

Rubin says that as CEO he doesn't want to be spending his time sitting down at a laptop; he wants to  be talking with customers and his team. 

"I call it my 9-to-9 ritual," Rubin told Business Insider. "All I do is interact with people from 9 in the morning until 9 at night. Sometimes that's on the phone, but I prefer it not to be. All the things that require a 'real computer' — like modeling, Excel, presentations, and all kinds of bigger stuff — I do early in the morning or late at night because at that time I can't hang out with my coworkers, talk to customers, or do recruiting interviews."

By staying connected with people either face-to-face or on the phone instead of through a screen, Rubin gets a frank, well-rounded understanding of everything that's going on inside the company, and what needs focusing on or changing.

Whether he's on the phone or physically chatting with someone, he also likes to hold meetings while walking.

"I think sitting is the smoking of our generation," he adds. "You can really get a lot of walking done on a half-hour call."

Although Rubin's schedule doesn't allow for a ton of sleep — he generally gets up at 8 and stays up until 1 or 2 to get done all the things he does need a computer for — his self-imposed schedule makes him productive.

"We get ideas for how to tweak the site from talking to people who fundraise on it all the time," he says.  

Indiegogo just raised funding from a group of well-known techies including Virgin's Sir Richard Branson, Google X's Megan Smith, PayPal cofounder Max Levchin, and Maynard Webb, eBay's former COO.

SEE ALSO: After going on a Twitter tirade, former PayPal exec Rakesh Agrawal tells us he's sorry for an experiment gone awry

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There's a set system of success most of us ascribe to growing up: Go to school, get good grades, work really hard, get swooped up by a company and get taken care of for the rest of your life.

But here's a newsflash: It's over. Companies are doing more with fewer people, we've got layoffs worldwide, the economy still isn't as great as it could be and even if it were, we're not going back to the way things were before the Great Recession.

Ladies and gentlemen, we're in a new world of work.

This only furthers the thing many of us have always known — you can't get rich working for someone else. Here's why:

Time is more valuable than money.

At the end of the day, it's not all about money. Money comes in and out of our lives. If we spend it, we can always get it back somehow.

Time, on the other hand, is a one-time deal. We never get it back. When you're working for someone else, your time is being decided for you. Your salary is also dependent on time. If you're done with your work at 2 p.m., you can't leave because it will affect your pay. Or, if you're on salary, you may find yourself working way more than 40 hours.

This leaves you with very little leverage to live your life or make tons of cash, because the power is in the company's hands. They decide when you work. They decide what you work on. They approve your vacation time. They decide whether or not you get a pay raise.

When you work for yourself, however, there is no red tape. You can just increase your rates when you need a pay raise. You decide when you work, and you can decide who you work with.

It's not all about saving for a rainy day.

Regardless of whether you work for yourself or someone else, are you putting your money to the best use?

Saving a portion of your paycheck is great, and we should always have some money put away in the bank. You know what's better, though? Investing.

According to Bankrate.com, the highest return you'll see on your money is 1.05% from a GE Capital Retail Bank CD. The minimum deposit on that is $25,000. Don't have that lying around? Then you're looking at less than 1%.

Here's the math. To make an extra $100 a week off of interest, you would need a) $100,000 in the bank and b) a 5% interest rate (good luck finding that). Essentially, the bank is making more money off you than you are off them.

The moral of the story is that investing will give you a greater return than just putting away a percentage of your paycheck. You can invest in your own business, paper assets, property, network marketing and so much more. The possibilities are endless and the bar of entry is lower than ever, thanks to things like the Internet.

There are countless resources to get you started, including books, blogs and interviews from Ramit Sethi, Robert Kayasaki, Warren Buffet, and the list goes on.

Working for someone else = building someone else's assets.

Assets are what build wealth. These are the things that put money in your pocket every month. Assets include your own business, investments, passive income, intellectual property you sell, etc.

Is a paycheck an asset? No. Here's why: Your money is going out the door on expenses while you build someone else's asset — their company.

If you had your own company, you'd still have expenses, but the ability to grow your company to the point that it keeps making more income will outweigh those expenses. Like I mentioned earlier, if you're working for someone else, the glass ceiling is decided for you.

You can also sell your company later if you choose. You can't sell your job.

At the end of the day…

If you're looking for the kind of freedom GenY is craving, you may need to move away from the typical success formula. The good news is that it's easier than ever to build your own assets thanks to the Internet. Countless Millennials have invested in side hustles and turned them into full-blown businesses.

Are you going to be one of them?

SEE ALSO: 6 Strategies Billionaire Jim Koch Used To Build Sam Adams

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Funding for payments companies hit a peak of $492 million in the first quarter of 2014, according to data from TechCrunch.

That's up 109% from the previous quarter and 347% from the same quarter in the prior year, BI Intelligence finds.

There were 59 funding deals, which means that it was the fourth highest-number of deals since the beginning of 2009, when the data set begins. 

While a good deal of the payment funding went to Stripe and mPowa — 32% — BI Intelligence believes the number of deals shows just how excited investors are about the payments space right now.

BI Intelligence is a subscription research service, covering the mobile, social, payments, e-commerce, and video industries. For full access, sign up for a free trial.

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SmartThings, the company that lets you control household objects like lights and door locks over the internet, is making a bigger push to bring hardware companies and developers to its platform.

Today, the company announced several product manufacturers have formally joined the SmartThings ecosystem. There's also a new iPhone app launching later tonight that'll make it easier to control all the connected stuff in your home.

It's best to think of SmartThings as a platform to connect all the stuff in your home rather than a one-off product. To get started, you need to buy the SmartThings hub, a small gadget that looks kind of like a router and talks to web-connected devices designed to work with SmartThings. You then control everything using the SmartThings app or website. Starter kits begin at $199. 

There are already a bunch of SmartThings-compatible devices, and the company announced today formal partnerships with some app and hardware makers like the fitness tracker UP24 from Jawbone, lighting control company Leviton, and Life360, an app that helps you track family members.

The company also announced a formal app review process so developers can create new actions for SmartThings devices and publish them through the SmartThings app. It'll sort of be like the App Store on your iPhone, but for real objects in your home.

The SmartThings system is a lot different than Nest, which Google bought for $3.2 billion and is perhaps the buzziest company in the connected home space. Nest makes its own connected devices like thermostats and smoke detectors, and it only allows third parties limited access to its platform.

SmartThings' strategy is to allow any company that wants to build smart devices onto the platform and share the revenue. Today's announcement gives us a glimpse at how it plans to convince more manufacturers and app developers to get on board.

SmartThings hasn't said how many users it has, but it did tout a bunch of stats about its current customers along with today's announcement. The company says SmartThings users open the app an average of four times per day and now have an average of 10 connected devices in their homes, up from five a year ago.

SmartThings has raised over $15 million so far, which includes a $12.5 million round last fall.

SEE ALSO: How to turn your home into a smart home for just $300

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One of our earliest team members, who left to start his own company, sent us an email recently. I'll paraphrase here, but the gist of it was that despite his being one of the first people to join the team at Ampush, nothing could have prepared him for starting his own company from the ground up.

I'm not surprised. Startup founders are often portrayed as "living the dream": Young, bright, usually C-level executives of their companies, working on "cool stuff;" running "The Show." It must seem like an incredibly attractive career option. You don't have to work up the corporate ladder at BigCo, or even be employed by the startup itself.

But reality looks a little different. While there are great articles that give advice for working at a startup and that outline the startup social contract, very few give an open and honest view of what it's actually like to be a founder/startup executive. (Though Quora offers some solid opinions.)

I thought I'd share my own view. Below is a list of 10 things a startup founder often thinks, but will rarely admit out loud:

1. "I don't know the answer."

The entrepreneurial process is by definition one of making it up as we go. It's important for startup founders and even employees to accept that we don't (and won't) know the answer often. Instead, we have to focus on how to get answers, either by experimenting on our own or by cultivating a strong network — and then relying on this network for advice.

2. "Our company is going under."

Whether or not it's true, this is a thought that probably flashes through every founder's head. Because founders know their business so intimately, they can point blindfolded to the three potential things in the market that would run their business into the ground. Founders who succeed are the ones with the personality and drive to do whatever it takes to keep their company alive.

3. "I'm doing more work than you know."

Whatever work you see a founder doing, they're actually doing five times as much behind the scenes. Until a company is several hundred people strong, all the other jobs that have to get done go to the founders. This includes but is not limited to: a potential acquisition; a threatened lawsuit; settling a dispute between two VPs; and any other task we can't delegate, but have to complete.

4. "I sometimes wish I had a boss."

Decision fatigue is real and when we are the ultimate authorities, most decisions trickle up to us. Founders can't look up one level and get the answer. Our decision is there for every client, employee, and partner to analyze, criticize and doubt.

5. "I do take it personally."

We try not to, but we do. Whether you're an employee who chose to work at our startup, a partner or a client — if you're unhappy, it makes us unhappy. We started our company because we believed there was a better way. If someone at any level of the company is unhappy, we take it personally and want to do everything we can to fix it. Really.

6. "I hate office politics."

Founders generally prefer to concentrate on designing and building products or developing a pitch for a big client. What we don't enjoy is breaking up arguments, dealing with he says/she says scenarios or negotiating someone's job title. We just want to lead and continue to make the company successful.

7. "I miss the early days."

The workplace dynamic changes very fast when a company goes from five to 15 to 50. Admittedly, we find ourselves nostalgic for the days of familial camaraderie, knowing everyone's story, and being able to move quickly. At the same time, we as founders are ambitious and want the company to grow — but we try our best to maintain that intimate feeling as we scale.

8. "I'm struggling with work-life balance. A lot."

Yes, we have this issue in spades. While we do live for our company, we also know it can kill us. We don't go to the gym enough, we eat horribly, and we don't spend enough time with loved ones. Entrepreneurship can be a very selfish thing. We need to learn to manage our time better and to unplug to make entrepreneurship more sustainable.

9. "I sometimes question the sacrifice I made."

This one is a big taboo. How can we ask other people to work crazy hours to build this company when we ourselves ask the question, "Is it worth it?" But founders are humans too. When we are working 100-hour weeks, investing all our money, and sometimes hitting walls, we will question what we are doing in the first place.

10. "I'm not living the dream, I'm living in a dream."

As our company gets traction and starts to scale, sometimes it doesn't feel quite "real." It's exciting but also surreal! This explains why we may have unrealistic expectations or why we don't always appreciate the gravity of our words or decisions for the rest of the company. Oftentimes what we're working on does not feel like a reality — it still feels like a dream.

SEE ALSO: 12 Pieces Of Valuable Life Advice From The Greatest Commencement Speeches Of All Time

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There is a gender gap in tech. But which investors are doing their part to help change the ratio and fund more female founders?

Business Insider researched active portfolios for 26 early-to-mid-stage venture capital funds in Silicon Valley that have made at least a dozen investments. We then found the number of startups in the portfolios that had at least one female founder and calculated the percent of the total portfolio that included female-founded companies, based on publicly available information, such as Crunchbase and the firms' websites. We then reached out to the firms to confirm numbers. Angel investors, incubators, and accelerators were not included.

Here are the results. For more details on the percentage break downs, and to see which female founders are represented, read on >>

*Forerunner Ventures has since been added to this data. It has more women in its active portfolio than Felicis with 33.3%.

Female-founded startups in Founder's Fund's active portfolio: 4%

Firm partners: Peter Thiel, Ken Howery, Luke Nosek, Brian Singerman, Lauren Gross, Geoff Lewis, Scott Nolan

Total active startups in portfolio: ~ 100

Total investments in active, female-founded startups: 4

Female founders in portfolio: Kegan Schouwenburg (Sols), Ramona Pierson (Declara), Elli Kaplan (Neurotrack), Leah Busque (TaskRabbit)

Percent of female-founded startups in active portfolio: 4%

Female-founded startups in Redpoint Ventures' active portfolio: 6.4%

Firm partners: Allen Beasley, Jeff Brody, Satish Dharmaraj, Tom Dyal, Tim Haley, Brad Jones, Pueo Keffer, Chris Moore, Lars Pedersen, Scott Raney, Ryan Sarver, Tomasz Tunguz, John Walecka, Geoff Yang, David Yuan

Total active startups in portfolio: 78

Total investments in active, female-founded startups: 5

Female founders in portfolio: Adora Cheung (Homejoy), Linda Avey (Curious.com), Caterina Fake (Findery), Holly Liu (Kabam), Lisa Riolo (Impact Radius)

Percent of female-founded startups in active portfolio: 6.4%

Female-founded startups in New Enterprise Associates' active portfolio: 7.16%

Menlo Park team: Forest Baskett, Krishna ‘Kittu’ Kolluri, Scott Sandell, Peter Sonsini, Ravi Viswanathan, Rohini Chakravarthy, Carmen Chang, Patrick Chung, Robert Garland, Paul Hsiao, Mohamad Makhzoumi, Jake Nunn, Jon Sakoda, Paul Walker, Chetan Puttagunta, Frank Torti, Rick Yang, Josh Makower, Brooke Seawell, Aaron Jacobson, Christine Guo, Sheel Tyle

Total active startups in portfolio: 265

Total investments in active, female-founded startups: 19

Female founders in portfolio: Anne Wojcicki and Linda Avey (23andMe), Alison Di Spaltro (42Floors), Dr. Marcie Black (Bandgap Engineering), Michelle Zatlyn (CloudFlare), Daphne Koller (Coursera),Jessica Greenwalt (CrowdMed), Vicki Cheung (Duolingo), Crystal Hutter (Edmodo), Alexis Maybank and Alexandra Wilkis Wilson (Gilt Groupe), Trae Vassallo (Good Technology), Clara Shih (Hearsay Social), Adi Tatarko (Houzz), Alexis Ringwald (Learnup), Lauren Santo Domingo (Moda Operandi), Elizabeth Stoner (Rhythm Pharmaceuticals), Halle Tecco (Rock Health), Heidi Zak (Thirdlove), Himani Amoli (Wedding Party), Leah Jones (Zumper)

Percent of female-founded startups in active portfolio: 7.16%

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Europe needs to sort out its fragmented telecoms market and regulatory imbalances if it is to spur a new generation of technology start-ups and create its own version of America's Silicon Valley.

The European Union has set aside 80 billion euros ($109 billion) to fund cutting edge research and innovation over the next six years, underscoring its ambition in these fields.

And last week it launched the Startup Europe Partnership (SEP), a platform designed to match hot start-ups with funding from bigger companies, including telecoms giants such as Orange and Telefonica.

For Neelie Kroes, Europe's commissioner for telecoms and digital affairs, it is an essential step to boost competition and ensure Europe is not left behind in the global tech race.

"If Europe wants to challenge Silicon Valley as a place that generates digital business, our start-ups need to learn how to 'scale'," Kroes said as she launched the SEP website.

"They need to get better at growing: breaking through national and language barriers so they mature into global champions that last."

But Europe faces huge challenges to emulate the success of Silicon Valley, a region south of San Francisco set up in the 1960s that has produced some of the most iconic firms of the past four decades, including Apple, Cisco and Google.

Among these are the EU's fragmented telecoms sector, with competing providers in almost every country, and a technology infrastructure that is far from integrated.

What's more, the regulatory landscape varies from state to state and the rollout of new technology such as 4G has been slow, several tech entrepreneurs attending the SEP launch noted.

"The United States and South Korea in terms of data usage are far, far ahead of Europe, due to our technological infrastructure and also the non-existence of the single market in telecoms," said Kaya Taner, chief executive of Applift, a marketing platform for mobile games.

MORE CHALLENGES

Another area of concern is the EU's strict data protection laws, which are set to be beefed up even further. Because they are implemented by separate national authorities and personal data is often defined differently across countries, small businesses may struggle to comply with multiple regimes.

As Mark Silverstein, head of product, tech, intellectual property and policy at music streaming service Spotify, said: "consistency in regulation makes life a lot easier."

That is a common complaint from some EU leaders too, including Jyrki Katainen, the prime minister of Finland, a country that has enjoyed a boom in start-ups, including the ubiquitous "Angry Birds" game created by Rovio.

Complying with 28 different regulatory regimes - one for each EU country - imposes hefty fixed costs on start-ups which may eat up a significant part of their budgets, a study by the Conference Board business research association has found.

Despite the obstacles, Kroes is determined national barriers can be broken down and that jobs and investment will rapidly be created by harmonizing rules across the continent.

To that effect she has put forward a legislative package for an overhaul of the European telecoms sector which was passed by the European Parliament in April and is now waiting for approval from member states.

Key provisions included in the package are making the sale of mobile licenses more uniform across Europe, phasing out mobile phone roaming fees by 2016, and barring telecoms operators from prioritizing some internet traffic over others.

The European Commission estimates the app economy in Europe alone could add an extra 1 million jobs and contribute 63 billion euros to the continent's economy by 2018, up from the 17.5 billion euros in 2013.

And yet, challenges remain. A study by SEP of European start-ups that have received more than $1 million in funding noted that many of them tended to transfer their headquarters from Europe to the United States, hardly a positive sign.

Market fragmentation is not only a problem in terms of the costs associated with additional red tape, but also because it makes access to finance much harder. Start-ups complain that support schemes are complicated and have onerous reporting requirements, thereby limiting their ability to expand.

Indeed, the lack of adequate financing was cited as the top obstacle to innovation for businesses in a survey for the EU executive released on Tuesday.

What is more, providers of early "seed" capital often urge European entrepreneurs to move to the United States where access to further funding is easier and the returns greater, making a successful "exit" from the original investment more likely.

    "There are not the number of exits you see in the United States," said Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, founder of The Next Web, an online technology publication, referring to every investor's desire to make a return on the initial investment.

"Why would you invest if there are no exits?"

($1 = 0.7325 Euros)

(Editing by Luke Baker and Mark Potter)

SEE ALSO: 13 Outrageous Homes For Sale In Silicon Valley's Wealthiest Enclave

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Just how skewed is the male-to-female ratio in tech?

Business Insider reviewed the active portfolios of 27 early to mid-stage VC firms in Silicon Valley and 15 in New York based on publicly-available data. We sifted through thousands of startups in their portfolios to find ones that had been founded or co-founded by women.   

We only found one investor whose portfolio contains mostly female-founded or co-founded startups. That investor is Charlie O'Donnell of Brooklyn Bridge Ventures. Women-created companies make up 61% of his portfolio.

Forerunner Ventures, which is comprised of all female investors, followed Brooklyn Bridge Ventures. Its portfolio is 33.3% women; the VC firm average was 14.1%.

O'Donnell created his seed stage fund in 2012 after he departed First Round Capital. He has backed 13 startups, including Orchard (co-founded by Angela Ceresnie), Editorially (co-founded by Mandy Brown) and Windowfarms ( founded by Britta Riley).

O'Donnell says the gender issue in tech isn't because VCs are choosing to invest in men over women. Instead, he thinks fewer women pitch VCs than men.

"The main driver of the skew towards men getting venture capital, statistically, is that far more men are pitching,"O'Donnell wrote on his blog "Of course, you can take into consideration all sorts of things like encouragement, perception — like what would you think your chances were if you see that a firm has never funded a female — but the fact remains that once you actually pitch, your chances don't appear to be any worse than when guys pitch."

A lot of studies show that fewer women found tech companies than men, which isn't something VCs can help either. While results widely vary, one 2012 study published by Women Who Tech claimed that only 5% of tech startups are owned by women.

O'Donnell says he doesn't seek out female founders. Instead, he says his tendency to invest in experienced, first-time founders who build thoughtful teams has inadvertently made his portfolio diverse.

"I couldn't really care less what gender you are as long as you've got the ability to make my investors a big return," he writes.

Here's the chart [click to enlarge]:

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How much do startup founders pay themselves? And how much should they pay themselves if they raise money from investors?

Career research company 80,000 Hours estimates that founders going through the Y Combinator accelerator program pay themselves about $50,000. If they go on to raise more money, that salary can double. If the startup flops, $50,000 could be the highest salary a founder makes.

"During the Y Combinator program, they use only a one-off seed investment from Y Combinator of US$120,000 to pay living and business expenses," 8,000 Hours' Ryan Carey writes. The investment is expected to cover everything, including a small salary for the founder. "If they go on to receive angel investment [they] can pay themselves about $50,000 per year. With venture capital funding, this tends to increase to about US$100,000 per year."

The most successful Y Combinator founders can make much, much more. Carey estimates that the founding teams of Dropbox and Airbnb are worth $6 billion combined, for example.

Carey's salary estimates for early-stage startups up with a Quora post on a similar topic. A founder who raised $500,000 used the Q&A site to ask, "Is a $100K salary too much for an angel/VC-backed startup co-founder?"

Foundry Group's Brad Feld thought a six-figure salary was too high for an early entrepreneur. Another person agreed, stating that while $100,000 is below what an engineer should make, it's "certainly above market for a seed-funded startup." 

"Salary should be sufficient to not create hardship — no sense in losing productivity because you can barely eat," this person concluded.

The general consensus seemed to be that a $50-$75,000 salary was reasonable. "$50K/year is plenty. Some families live on that," says VC Sean Owen.

David Rose agrees. "In my experience, that fact pattern (a pair of founders, $500K seed round) would typically see them each taking $50-$75K, at least until they either start generating revenue, or raise a larger round."

When you're profitable, you can start paying yourself a more impressive salary.

"An adviser once told me to keep the total annual figure (including taxes) under $100k per year until you're profitable, and VCs have seemed to accept this," another says.

Here's the most voted up response by Michael Wolfe, a four-time entrepreneur:

Read Quote of Michael Wolfe's answer to Is a $100k salary too much for an angel/VC-backed startup co-founder? on Quora.

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When startups raise large rounds of financing from investors, it’s often praised in the press. And in Silicon Valley, founders are often encouraged to raise as much money as possible. But a new study shows that most startups shouldn’t strive to raise gobs of cash, and they can actually exit for more money if they take less funding.

Exitround, a startup that matches early stage companies with potential acquirers, analyzed the sales of 200 startups. It worked with startup accelerator programs Y Combinator, Techstars and SoftTech VC to compile the data and only looked at companies with sale prices under $100 million. Exitround says 88% of all startups are sold for less than that price. The study has been 

The study found that startups with the most lucrative exits raised either $2-3 million or $5-10 million. They also tend to be about four years old.

From the study:

In Exitround’s analysis, companies that raised $5 million to $10 million actually generated larger average exits than those that raised $10 million to $50 million. And those companies that raised $3 million to $5 million had a lower average exit price than those that raised $2 million to $3 million.

Here’s a chart that supports the data. 

SEE ALSO: Why It's Better To Sell A Startup For $20 Million Instead Of $200 Million

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As a senior at MIT back in 2008, Krishna Gupta realized that there was a gap in the venture capital world.

There were all these students coming up with great ideas for companies, but there were few places for them to look to for support. VC firms were growing and less interested in investing in the smaller, early-stage companies.

Gupta decided that he was going to fill that gap himself with Romulus Capital.

"Venture capital firms are getting larger, so as a result it didn’t make sense for them to really be spending time at the seed stage, they really were becoming more of betting firms versus business builders," Gupta told Business Insider in an interview.

Gupta took on that role of "business builder", and six years later his firm is about to close a $50 million second fund.

Along with cofounder Neil Chheda, Gupta originally created Romulus Capital to help foster entrepreneurship from the MIT-Harvard ecosystem. The firm has now evolved into an established early-stage VC.

The Cambridge-based firm focuses on early-stage companies within the technology and science sector. And while it started out funding Cambridge-area projects, it has expanded a bit to more of the east coast, with 30% of its deals taking place in New York City. 

So far, Romulus has invested in 20 companies, including E la Carte (a digital point-of-sale system for restaurants), Ginger.io (a health data provider), Fitocracy (an exercise app), Dashbid (a video ad platform), and Bombfell (a monthly clothing subscription service). One of its investments, Crocodoc, has been acquired by Box for an undisclosed amount of money.

With the new round of funding coming in, Romulus Capital has already started investing the money in its current portfolio and plans to add 20-25 more companies. The goal is to close the funding by the end of the summer, with Gupta optimistic that it will close in the next two to three weeks.

While he is still in his twenties, Gupta has had some experience working for McKinsey — he had a brief six-month stint trying out the life of a consultant — and he has also conducted physical chemistry research at the University of Chicago and the Weizmann Institute in Israel. And he studied Materials Science and Engineering and Management Science at MIT. All of this led to useful background for Romulus.

But more than background, Gupta's scrappiness and youth have led Romulus to where it is.

"I'm able to put myself in [founders'] shoes and vice versa," Gupta said. "They see on the other side of the table someone who thinks and feels like them, is a startup also, and is a member of the team. I'm often cc-ed on emails internally. No other investor really plays that role. I think age is an asset."

Romulus prides itself on being hands-on, even helping some of its companies find clients and partners. Late last year, Gupta helped E la Carte secure a deal with Applebee's that will deploy its tablet cash register system nationwide.

The firm really espouses the idea that you need to have a certain attitude to be successful both in startups and in venture.

"The most successful entrepreneurs understand how to get by on less because building a big company, you can never predict the hurdles you’re going to face. You’re going to hear a lot of 'no's," Gupta said. "How do you break down the doors, be they how do I get my app featured in Apple or how do I get Applebee's to give me a nationwide contract, etc. So people who are scrappy, who think outside the box, who are rule breakers by DNA, it just makes a lot more sense."

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Carlos Taborda, CEO of cloud app hosting platform Webbynode, recently detailed the fatal mistakes he made that prevented one of his startups from succeeding.

Taborda wasn't inexperienced when he set out to build his own company.

He had already co-founded Webbynode and worked for multiple Fortune 500 companies.

The 28-year-old developer and entrepreneur considered himself an industry veteran in 2010 when he set out to build his next business, which is why he was confident the idea would work. 

Taborda and his business partner then set out to create StackFu, a platform for sharing server configurations that was supposed to be as big as Github, the community for sharing software code.

But the project never gained traction, and here's why, according to Taborda:

His business revolved around a product that he found useful rather than thinking about whether or not it would appeal to a mass audience. Taborda notes that one of his biggest mistakes was creating a product that solves his own problem rather than looking for a solution to a larger issue. "It was pushed by me wanting to have this problem sorted out for ME, selfishly thinking everyone out there would also want this problem solved," he wrote.

His product didn't solve a burning problem that was really urgent. That's not to say StackFu went totally unused. But since you can use other open source tools on the web to solve the same problem, StackFu never became widely popular. "This is an area that I have become passionate about," Taborda wrote. "Understanding whether your product or service has the perceived business value it should. If not, then it's just another unimportant tool to have."

He didn't solicit feedback from his target audience before persuing the idea. Taborda describes how going heads-down on a project without running a concept by your potential user base can be detrimental. Going with your gut can lead you down a rabbit hole that's difficult to climb out of. "We should have put our ear to the ground, spoken to our target audience, and gotten to know them deeply way before a single line of code was written," he wrote. 

He had too many great technicians and not enough management expertise. When building StackFu, Taborda said had an excellent tech team that some would "give an arm and a leg for." But having talented technicians wasn't enough to make StackFu a hit. "You have a fully loaded canon, and it's very hard to manage," he wrote. Taborda notes that if he had a weaker technical team, he may have done more work ahead of time. "Having so much gun power pushes you to take rash actions and avoid doing the boring working of validating your ideas, market, etc." he wrote. 

SEE ALSO: How To Manage Your Time Wisely When Running A Startup

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It's common for people to post profile pictures of themselves that don't accurately represent how they look in real life.

Now, an app called Looksery wants to help people achieve the same false sense of attractiveness in video chats.

Looksery launched on crowdfunding site Kickstarter today and offers six face filters — like Instagram filters but for people — during video chats. The effect is a thinner face, brighter eyes, smoother skin, or alternatively, a zombie-fication of your face. It give users a chatting head that sort of looks like themselves but with some flattering or playful instant photoshopping.

The app hasn't launched yet, and it's raised a tiny amount of cash so far. But here are some examples of what its patent-pending technology could do to your face, from the Kickstarter page (via TechCrunch).

Here's a normal face, before Looksery has worked its magic....

Here's a filter added to it. You can blend in backgrounds with Looksery, not just improve your level of attractiveness.Here's an already attractive girl...Made arguably more attractive with a filter that makes her skin glow and turns her eyes bright green.Here's a normal-looking guy...Who looks more cat-like with an eye-enhancing Looksery filter.Here's a general before-after photo with the Looksery app...Here's a face-thinning filter Looksery offers (before and after).

You can also turn yourself into a zombie or skeleton on the app.

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When Theresa Preston-Werner, wife of GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner, issued a public apology over the scandal that caused her husband to resign, she hinted that he was already working on something new.

This might be that something:  Code starter.org, a non-profit that wants to give free computers to kid programmers. For every $250 raised through donations, it will send a child an Acer Chromebook laptop, pre-loaded with a bunch of programming languages.

Codestarter.org is actually Theresa's existing non-profit startup, previously named Omakase. Omakase is a TechStars New York 2014 company that initially had a much bigger mission. It wanted to crowdsource charitable contributions by pooling donations and sending them to a different charity each month.

One of the charities it supported was CoderDojo NYC, an organization that teaches kids to code. Omakase raised enough to donate 20 Acer Chromebooks and decided that this was such a big hit, it would focus the entire company on that task, Theresa explained in the company's blog post.

Since the company shifted its focus, the startup has already raised enough cash to cover another 108 laptops, Theresa said.

According to the old Omakase website, Tom was always involved as a strategic advisor. But at Codestarter.org, he's listed as a co-founder, too. His wife is still the CEO.

Theresa and Omakase were embroiled in the controversy that ultimately led Tom to resign from his CEO role at GitHub.

A few months ago, GitHub employee Julie Ann Horvath publicly quit the company and accused the Preston-Werners of harassment. An internal GitHub investigation found no evidence that Tom Preston-Werner harassed anybody, but did find he'd made "mistakes and errors of judgment."

Last month, Theresa wrote a public apology indicating those mistakes had to do with making some GitHub employees feeling "pressured by Tom and me to work pro-bono for my nonprofit."

The controversy was shocking because Tom Preston-Werner and GitHub (with its super hip San Francisco offices) is a highly admired Valley company and a great success story. GitHub offers a service that helps open source developers manage their projects. It's used by everyone, from the hobby programmer to the White House.

In 2012, after years of being profitable without any VC cash, GitHub raised $100 million from Andreessen Horowitz — the largest investment from the legendary VC firm.

Tom Preston-Werner's involvement with Codestarter.org may or may not be his next full-time project, but it should certainly make a lot of kids very happy.

SEE ALSO: The 20 Most Valuable Enterprise Tech Companies In The World

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Human resources executive Allison Hopkins is leaving stealth payment startup Clinkle, Re/Code’s Jason Del Rey reports. We've confirmed that yesterday was Hopkins' last day at the startup.

Hopkins was recruited by former Clinkle COO Barry McCarthy to the startup late last year; they worked together at Netflix. McCarthy left Clinkle in February and a number of other Clinkle employees have either left or been let go over the past six months.

Clinkle was founded by a young Stanford graduate, Lucas Duplan. It hopes to compete with products like Venmo and Square once it launches.

The company declined to comment on Hopkins' departure.

SEE ALSO: How Clinkle's kid founder got $30 million, and then blew everything up

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Uber has raised $1.2 billion at a $17 billion pre-money valuation, the company announced today.

All together, investors value Uber at $18.2 billion.

The investment comes mostly from mutual funds. Fidelity put in the most, $425 million. 

This round of funding has been rumored for weeks. Early reports had Uber's valuation tipped at anywhere between $10 billion and $17 billion.

Here's the full announcement from Uber:

We have some exciting news to share this morning. We have just closed a financing round with some of the leading investors in the world, raising $1.2B of primary capital at a $17B pre-money valuation. The total raise will be about $1.4B with a second close of strategic investors soon. We are thrilled to have top tier institutional investors, mutual funds, private equity and venture capital partners joining us.

It’s remarkable that it was only four years ago this week Uber started operations in SF, connecting residents with the safest, most reliable way to get around the city. Today, we are operating in 128 cities in 37 countries around the world with hundreds of thousands of transportation providers and millions of consumers connecting to our platform.

Uber is changing the fabric of these cities. At our current rate, Uber is responsible for directly creating 20,000 new jobs per month and powering billions in economic impact in cities around the world – while also improving the environment, reducing DUI rates and fueling urban economic development.

With our growth and expansion, the company has evolved from being a scrappy Silicon Valley tech startup to being a way of life for millions of people in cities around the world. This “Uber” way of life is really a reflection of our mission to turn ground transportation into a seamless service and to enable a transportation alternative in cities that makes car ownership a thing of the past.

Four years in, we are just at the beginning of the Uber story.  We are working hard to improve what we do every day and are focused on making our great potential a reality. We appreciate the confidence that investors, riders and partner drivers have shown in us and we intend to deliver.

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A logo can make or break it for a startup. It's the first thing that catches your eye in the App Store, on Twitter, and on a website.

When you're just getting off the ground, you need a logo that quickly and creatively portrays what your company does. There's this perfect balance between simple and artistic that will avoid being too corny while demonstrating a meaningful message.

In app download stores logos are crucial for helping new users figure out who you are and what your app does.

The year is still young, but these particular startups have impressed us with their logos, showing a flair for the art.

ClaimAir's paper airplane works on two levels: The app is about streamlining airline paperwork.

ClaimAir guides you through the process of getting compensated for flight troubles. You explain the inconveniences you experienced on a flight, and then the app will help you determine your claims and get compensation.

TizU turns your text message into a ticking bomb.

TizU is trying to put a new, fun spin on the messaging app trend. The idea is that you send a message, but delay it until a certain date so the receiver can see that there is a message for them, but can't read it yet.

Just in Case's logo consists mostly of negative space.

This unique startup secures your personal information so that if you suddenly pass away your family can access it. Just in Case wants to create your digital legacy.

On May 18, Dan Shipper graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. He didn't stick around to celebrate with friends like most college seniors do.

Instead, he hopped on a flight to Boston to finish negotiating the sale of his startup, Firefly. After two months of talks, Firefly was acquired by Pegasystems. The price wasn't disclosed, but since Shipper's startup was profitable and generating six figures you can assume the payout was nice.

Firefly enables customer-service reps to share their screens with customers and co-browse without requiring them to download any software. Its 6,000-plus customers pay either $25 to $99 per customer-service rep or a fixed monthly rate if it's a large organization. The team will be moving to New York to continue working on Firefly under the Pegasus brand.

There are a lot of unusual things about the Firefly team. First, there are only two people who work for the startup, 23-year-old Shipper and his even younger co-founder, Justin Meltzer. The pair largely bootstrapped Firefly, taking only $20,000 in financing from First Round Capital's Dorm Room Fund.

Second, both Shipper and Meltzer built Firefly while attending UPenn, and neither had to drop out of school to make it successful. Meltzer obtained his degree one year ahead of Shipper, who says he was held back in kindergarten.

"I couldn't color between the lines," he joked.

While the startup was profitable, Shipper and Meltzer paid themselves only a small salary of less than $30,000. When you're in college and have limited expenses, that low salary can go a long way.

"We pay ourselves a little bit of a salary but most of it goes toward expenses," Shipper told Business Insider before the acquisition. "Lawyer bills when you run a company like ours can get high. It's not like all of this is profit. We are pretty frugal with our money." The pair said they weren't spending their salaries treating themselves or friends to rounds of drinks. "Maybe when we get to seven figures in revenue we'll do that," Shipper said.

Shipper and Meltzer say they haven't told their friends about their successful exit yet. "They'll probably read about it on Facebook today," Meltzer said.

But they have told their parents. "My dad said, 'If you have to get a real job out of college, this is the way to do it,'" said Shipper.

SEE ALSO: A Q&A with Shipper and Meltzer about how they built Firefly while still in college

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No matter how great your passion and vision, a few bad habits can drive a promising business into the ground.

Clay Clark, CEO of small-business resource Thrive15, has consulted with entrepreneurs for years, and after hundreds of clients and his own experiences, he's noticed several recurring traits of business owners who fail.

"It's usually two or three traits that cause us to blow up," Clark tells Business Insider.

In his book, "Thrive: How to Take Control of Your Destiny and Move Beyond Surviving... Now!", he lists 15 of the most common traits of entrepreneurs who end up failing. We've summarized them below.

1. They make excuses.

Clark says the most common excuse he hears from clients who failed to achieve a goal is that they ran out of time. It makes him furious. As career guru Seth Godin points out, "I didn't have time" actually means a task "wasn't a high priority, fun, distracting, profitable, or urgent enough to make it to the top of the list."

2. They blame others or outside forces.

"Entrepreneurs who blame the economy, the way they were raised, the weather, the customer, their employees, the acting president, the opposite political party — anything other than themselves — for their situation will never be successful," Clark says.

3. They are dishonest.

Cheating employees on their paychecks or lying to customers are obvious examples of dangerous dishonesty, but Clark also points out that falsely praising employees instead of giving candid criticism can be just as bad.

4. They are lazy.

"Show me an entrepreneur who sleeps in, shows up late, doesn't read, and doesn't like hard work, and I'll show you a failing entrepreneur," Clark writes.

5. They are convinced they know it all.

Self-confidence is a necessary trait for someone setting out to start a business, but the ego needs limits. Clark says that failing business owners are often too proud to admit they don't know something about running their company.

6. They hesitate to make decisions.

It's necessary to gather as much information as possible before making an important decision, but spending too much time mulling it over slows everything down and wastes money. Gen. George S. Patton once said: "A good plan executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week."

7. They have not defined a clear direction for the company.

"No one in their right mind wants to follow an entrepreneur who can't clearly articulate where they are going, yet most of the entrepreneurs I meet cannot clearly tell me their business goals for the current year," Clark says. To attract the best employees, an entrepreneur needs to have a tangible vision for the company.

8. They refuse to delegate.

Misguided or egotistical entrepreneurs feel the need to micromanage every aspect of their business, but no one is good at everything, and leaders should be focused on their company's biggest, most important issues, not fine tuning their corporate website's homepage.

9. They are involved in a niche that is not scalable.

Clark once owned and ran an entertainment company that provided service only on nights and weekends. This meant that most of the time, his employees were not working and his equipment sat in a warehouse. He says it's necessary to envision how a company can grow as more resources and talent become available.

10. They are unable to handle confrontation.

"Employees actually stole from me," Clark says, and though he was aware of their embezzlement, he was afraid to confront them. When employees sense a weakness in their leader, they will often exploit it, he says.

11. They are not organized.

Running a business comes with a never-ending stream of responsibilities, and successful entrepreneurs are constantly arranging their busy lives with a system that works for them, be it a to-do list or app.

12. They serve a niche that cannot possibly be profitable.

Clark remembers diving into a client's numbers and determining that she needed to sell 1,300 of her products each week to be profitable, but her maximum production capacity was 500 products per week. He says some business owners fail to do the math and push on despite any chance at making money.

13. They provide a terrible service or product.

Clark once helped a client promote his business to the point where its offices began getting calls constantly. But the business fell through because the receptionist was not only poorly trained but sometimes missing from her desk, and he kept his clients waiting for at least one hour for their appointments even if they were on time.

14. They are bad marketers.

"If you really do believe that your company offers your customers value by solving their problems, then you should want to scream your solutions from the mountaintops," Clark says. Use your company's growing size to establish personal relationships in person and on social media, and don't ever be afraid of being "too pushy."

15. They ignore metrics.

It is necessary to break your complex business plan into easy-to-follow checklists and management metrics that can be checked on a daily and weekly business. "Whatever you focus on expands," Clark says.

SEE ALSO: 7 Habits Of Exceptionally Resilient People

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As we enter the golden age of design in startups, highly talented user-interface and product designers are becoming ever more important.

Some companies leading the charge are Apple, Pinterest, Square, and Airbnb. What those companies have in common is that design is at the core of their businesses.

But which school is best suited to get you the design job you want?

That's where you come in. We want your help in figuring out which schools help you in the one thing that really matters: your future career.

Please take a few minutes to answer the questions below.  In a few weeks, we'll reveal the new definitive list of the World's Best Design Schools.

Keep in mind the list is not comprehensive — if there's a college missing, add it below!

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