Intel’s Layoffs: What Will Happen to the Older Workers?

Intel is about to layoff 12,000 people. This is a company with an enormous amount of intellectual horsepower within its folds. Many with very serious intellectual merit will be out.

The semiconductor industry has shrunk, and there aren’t many employers who can absorb that many highly qualified people.

Last summer, Intel had a layoff, although significantly smaller. Intel has a lot of employees in Oregon, and the cuts impacted that state dramatically. Mike Rogoway (@rogoway) at the Oregon Live did some investigative journalism that highlighted the fact that older employees were let go more easily:

Proportionately, employees in their 50s were three times more likely to lose their jobs than workers in their 30s, according to a document obtained by The Oregonian/OregonLive that tallies every Intel employee in the United States. The company was nearly five times more likely to lay off workers in their 60s than those in their 30s.

“Looking at the impact, in this case only, it clearly has disproportionately affected older workers,” said Portland employment attorney Matthew C. Ellis. But he said that’s not necessarily illegal, nor is it unusual. >>>

1Mby1M Deal Radar 2015: LevelEleven, Detroit, Michigan

LevelEleven is a sales performance management platform. The main value proposition of LevelEleven is its unique platform that includes personalized performance scorecards for managers and salespeople, alert systems to tell a team when a key metric or team member is falling behind, and a contest engine to quickly get behavior back on track. Named by Salesforce as one of the “Top 8 Apps to Help Your Sales Soar,” it is the most deeply integrated platform within Salesforce.com, which is used by more than 100,000 sales organizations around the world. >>>

1Mby1M Deal Radar 2015: Pwnie Express, Boston, MA

About 90% of workers in the United States use their personal smartphones for work purposes without knowing the potential security threats they bring to the enterprise and themselves. According to the Identity Theft Resource Center, there were 783 data breaches in 2014, a 27.5% increase over the same period the previous year. As wireless and Bring Your Own Device become even more prevalent, detecting rogue and unauthorized devices within the enterprise will become a necessary part of an organization’s information security system. Pwnie Express is focused on this fast-growing, emerging problem. >>>

How to Transform a Region’s Economy

Can the success of only a few startups revitalize an entire region? And, if it can, what can local governments do to foster such game changing entrepreneurship?

Yes. Here is the example of Greg Gianforte.

On this recording he discusses what the success of his company RightNow did for Montana, where there was no technology entrepreneurship to speak of.

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Why Do I Keep Getting NO From Investors?

If you want funding, you need to start with a business that is fundable.  Ask any serious advisor or investor and you will get an absolute truth: 99% of the ideas as they come are NOT fundable.

From here you have only three choices. One is not so smart. The other two are just fine.

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Delaware Economic Development Office (DEDO) Partners With 1M/1M

The One Million by One Million (1M/1M) global virtual accelerator is proud to announce a partnership with the Delaware Economic Development Office (DEDO), State of Delaware, Executive Department. 1M/1M aims to nurture a million entrepreneurs to reach a million dollars each in annual revenue and beyond, thereby creating a trillion dollars in global GDP and ten million jobs. The Delaware Economic Development Office is likewise interested in providing wider resources and deeper support to entrepreneurs in Delaware.

“Our partnership with 1M/1M fills a critical gap in our entrepreneurial ecosystem,” says Ken Anderson, Director of Entrepreneurial and Small Business Support for DEDO. “We were attracted to their innovative approach for offering accelerated education, strategy consulting, mentoring, coaching and peer networking, and totally impressed with their long term experience and creditability in that marketplace. To be able to provide this extraordinary support on a totally virtual, global platform was extraordinary and would scale development opportunities for so many serious Delaware entrepreneurs. 1M/1M is not your traditional incubator/accelerator either from a business building or service delivery standpoint. We are hoping to be able to expand the number of Delaware companies participating in this partnership in the very near future.”
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How to Recruit Credible Advisors for your Startup

We get this question a lot. There is a chicken and an egg problem buried in it that you need to learn to navigate. In this post, I’d like to walk you through a strategy that we believe will work.

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State of the Entrepreneurship Union: The Disease Has Become an Epidemic

I have always been bullish about the spread of entrepreneurship as a global phenomenon. My organization has worked diligently towards propagating the lessons learned from successful entrepreneurs to those coming after, on a global scale. It has been thrilling to watch the world adopt entrepreneurship as a key tool for economic development.

One of my worries have always been that the Silicon Valley disease of equating entrepreneurship with venture capital financing will also spread, corrupting and misleading inexperienced entrepreneurs around the world.

Well, I am very sorry to report that the disease has, indeed, spread.

In fact, it is now an epidemic.

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