What makes entrepreneurs different, and where do they come from? Are they born or taught? Are they unusually mobile in their careers? Does geography play a role? Do mentors and relationships matter?Numerous studies explore these questions by surveying hundreds of entrepreneurs. At LinkedIn, we take a different approach, on a different scale. By sifting through more than 120 million public profiles, we can analyze tens of thousands of startup founders’ [1]profiles – and find common threads linking their careers.Our infographic above shows the top over-represented business sch...

When Google Inc. co-founder Larry Page announced that he would take over as chief executive earlier this year, he promised that he would shake up the Internet search giant to speed up decision making. Instead, much of the shaking up has happened to the new CEO.Challenges have piled up for Mr. Page since he assumed his post in April. They include a broad U.S. antitrust probe of the company's practices; the settlement of a long-running criminal investigation into Google's advertising business; and shifting industry forces that led him to make a deal to buy mobile-device maker...

Justin Kan and Emmett Shear watched their first startup, an online calendar called Kiko, implode when Google decided to do the same thing in 2006. They sold Kiko's scraps on eBay for $258,000 and wondered what to do with their lives. So the pair did the only thing they could think of: They went to see Paul Graham at his house in Cambridge, Mass., near Harvard Square. Graham sat them down and helped bang out a plan to create Justin.tv, now the Web's biggest portal for live video, with 31 million users a month and staked with $7.2 million of venture capital.Justin.tv is hardly the first, nor the...

I have a probably unusual habit: I'm applying for jobs as programmer at least once a year. It 's not that I don't have a job, or that I don't like what I do, but since I am self employed and running my own company I have the feeling that I am coming out of touch of what the current job market is like, and so I started to apply for jobs at different companies once in a while. Just to keep in mind how this is like and for the fun of it.I think this is also a good training should I need to be employed again in the near future: As 'CEO' of your own company, you tend to become a bit arrogant and te...

Peter Thiel says the United States no longer cares much about science or technology(Credit: Declan McCullagh/CNET)ASPEN, Colo.--One of the Internet's most influential investors and entrepreneurs is offering a dire prediction: the pace of technological change is stagnating.Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and early investor in Facebook, warned that--despite spectacular advances in computer-related fields over the last few decades--technological progress overall is actually "stalled out.""There's been insane progress in computers, Internet, and all things related to it," Thiel told a conferen...

1. However much money you think you'll need to start a business, you should take that number and double itI thought I had strategically planned every penny when I first started, but I had no idea that there would be so many unanticipated costs. Since we have a home office, I use temporary commercial office space and conference solutions for meetings and demonstrations. We always like to buy lunch for our clients, and we like them to lunch well.By the time everything is factored in, depending on how many people will be at lunch, you could be looking at a cool grand just as a baseline. Being a g...

95% of the information on the web is written language. It is only logical to say that a web designer should get good training in the main discipline of shaping written information, in other words: Typography.Information design is typographyBack in 1969, Emil Ruder, a famous Swiss typographer, wrote on behalf of his contemporary print materials what we could easily say about our contemporary websites:Today we are inundated with such an immense flood of printed matter that the value of the individual work has depreciated, for our harassed contemporaries simply cannot take everything that is prin...

As I write this, I’m sitting in a cafe. Around me, there are five people on laptops — four of them are MacBooks. Four other people are using tablets — all four are iPads. Welcome to the Post-PC world.That phrase was one of the first things that jumped to my mind today when I heard the news that HP was not only killing off their TouchPad and Pre webOS-based products, but also trying to spin-off their PC business. The largest PC business in the world, mind you.And HP’s statements during their earnings call today only further reaffirmed...