January 17, 2013 | peHUB

We need to retain brain capital in the U.S. as the foreign nationals who exit our universities with graduate degrees are currently not allowed to stay. Entrepreneurs return home and end up competing with American companies – removing potential jobs that should be kept in the U.S. Foreign Harvard graduates who partner with peer entrepreneurs are 21% more likely to see their startups exit versus 15% of graduates without a graduate school partner.

January 17, 2013 | New York Times

Zhang Xiaoping’s mother dropped out of school after sixth grade. Her father, one of 10 children, never attended. But Ms. Zhang, 20, is part of a new generation of Chinese taking advantage of a national effort to produce college graduates in numbers the world has never seen before. China is making a $250 billion-a-year investment in what economists call human capital. Just as the United States helped build a white-collar middle class in the late 1940s and early 1950s by using the G.I. Bill to help educate millions of World War II veterans,

January 16, 2013 | Washington Post

In the years ahead, Steve Case expects there to be much more dice rolling in Las Vegas. Not by gamblers in the casinos, but by outside investors betting on the city’s start-ups. “Some of the things that are happening in Las Vegas... are remarkable,” said Case, chief executive of Washington-based Revolution LLC and chairman of Startup America .

January 18, 2013 | Reuters

It's not why VCs reach for Sinatra's "It was a very good year." Venture capitalists invested $6.4 billion in start-up companies in the fourth quarter, continuing a substantial slowdown in spending. $6.4 billion was spent across 968 deals in quarter 4, representing a 13 percent decline in dollar terms over the prior-year period. For the full year, investments fell 10 percent to $26.52 billion. Seed-stage companies -- those at the very earliest stages of development -- saw a slight rise in investments for the quarter. But overall it recorded a 38 percent drop for the year, the lowest since 2003.