Venture

Venture

In today's rapidly evolving business landscape, the need for innovation and entrepreneurial spirit has never been more critical. As we prepare the next generation of business leaders, fostering entrepreneurial passion among students is essential. Entrepreneurial passion not only drives individuals to pursue new ventures but also enhances their resilience and creativity, vital traits for success in any field. This article explores effective strategies for educators and institutions to cultivate entrepreneurial passion in business students, drawing insights from recent research on the subject.

Business growth is valuable, but too often entrepreneurs treat it as a final destination. In reality, expansion is just one part of a long-term success plan, unfolding through many smaller milestones along the journey of building a business. Here are three ways you can expertly use expansion to build on success, along with examples of companies that have handled expansion as a positive part of the success process.

For Missouri-based community bank OMB Bank, finding the right fintech partner used to be a slow, manual process. Executive Vice President and Chief of Staff Jessica Sims recalls working from static PDFs of the bank's preferences, followed by endless back-and-forth emails whenever a fintech expressed interest. The process worked, but painfully slowly, and promising opportunities often slipped through the cracks.

Integrating security and asset data from over 200 connectors, the platform unifies business context and AI-based intelligence into a single pane, offering visibility and enabling risk prioritization and reduction. Nucleus relies on automation to enhance customers' vulnerability management programs. It correlates flaws with real-world threat data from multiple sources, normalizes it, maps assets to specific teams, and uses workflows for faster remediation. According to Nucleus, its vendor-agnostic approach covers exposure across tools, users, environments, and business units, unifies context, and enables coordinated action.

Last November, OpenAI investor Brad Gerstner pressed Sam Altman on a podcast about how a company with $13 billion in revenue could commit to $1.4 trillion in spending. Altman bristled. "If you want to sell your shares, I'll find you a buyer," he said. "Enough." Three months later, OpenAI is aiming to raise $100 billion in its latest funding round - a sign that, even amid mounting questions, Altman can find buyers.

"I've been looking for a blow-off in equities for over three years now - followed by the worst crash since 1929," Mark Spitznagel, the founder and chief investor of Universa Investments, told Business Insider in a recent email.

Molly O'Shea is a name-dropper. There's good reason for that. I count 29 big names in tech mentioned over our hourlong call. She told me about recently moderating a panel with Kalshi cofounders Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara. Ken Griffin took the stage after her. O'Shea breezily referenced talking about the state of new media with the TBPN bros in Peter Thiel's house.

However, many YouTubers have reduced their reliance on ad revenue and brand deals. There are several reasons for this shift. First, ad revenue can be unpredictable. With YouTube continually updating its policies, some creators find it challenging to secure ads for their videos, which can negatively impact their earnings. They've also realized that income from these streams can vanish unexpectedly.

When Obvious Ventures launched 12 years ago with a focus on "world positive" companies, the idea was a contrarian bet: that startups tackling climate, health, and economic resilience could deliver big returns, not just feel-good impact. Founded by Twitter cofounder Ev Williams and others, the firm backed companies like Beyond Meat, the AI drug discovery company Recursion Pharmaceuticals, and Diamond Foundry, which makes sustainable lab-grown diamonds.

True innovation lives where deep technical insight meets ignored, convention-bound assumptions. There's a kind of arbitrage in innovation that's easy to miss because it doesn't look like arbitrage at all. It lives in the gap between what physics allows and what institutions assume is possible. The reason it persists is that exploiting it requires developing genuine expertise in domains where most have neither the background nor the patience.

Beast Industries, owned by YouTuber Jimmy "MrBeast" Donaldson, announced on Monday that it has acquired Step, a banking app designed for teens and young adults. The move comes a couple of months after Donaldson announced plans to start a new YouTube channel centered on personal finance and investing. His main channel has 466 million subscribers and has long been one of the most popular on YouTube, frequently featuring videos where Donaldson gives away huge sums of money.

Just in time to create a new Super Bowl ad, Crypto.com founder Kris Marszalek has made the priciest domain purchase in history, buying AI.com for $70 million, according to the Financial Times. The deal, paid entirely in cryptocurrency to an unknown seller, shatters previous records. (Broker Larry Fischer, who facilitated the sale, is presumably celebrating his good fortune.)

Giannis Antetokounmpo of the Milwaukee Bucks announced Friday that he has joined prediction market Kalshi as a shareholder, making him the first NBA player to invest directly in the company. "The internet is full of opinions. I decided it was time to make some of my own," said the two-time NBA MVP in a social media post. "Today, I'm joining Kalshi as a shareholder. We all on Kalshi now."

Donnovan Andrews has spent his career in industries where the rules keep shifting - from the early days of digital to today's algorithm-shaped media landscape. His latest move sits right in the middle of that change. He's building Aivanta, an AI-powered holding company designed to acquire businesses with strong foundations and help them scale by embedding AI into how they operate.

Michael Ovitz, the cofounder of powerhouse Los Angeles talent agency Creative Artists Agency and a prolific tech investor, effusively praised Jeffrey Epstein and made arrangements to meet him at his New York home and off the coast of St. Barts, newly released files reveal. The disgraced financier invited Ovitz to his private Caribbean island in 2012 and said he knew Ovitz "well" in emails to a Microsoft executive and his publicist, Peggy Siegal.

The AI investing boom (or perhaps bubble) is something Silicon Valley has seen many times before: a gold rush of VC money thrown at the Big New Thing. But one aspect of it is completely unique to these times: startups rocketing from $0 to as much as $100 million in annual recurring revenue, sometimes in a matter of months. Word on the street is that many a VC won't even look at a startup that's not on the ARR superhighway, aiming for $100 million in ARR before their Series A funding round.

The Twaice EIB financing is aimed at accelerating growth as electrification drives expansion across battery energy storage systems and electric mobility markets. The company develops analytics software based on real-time and historical battery data, enabling operators to anticipate degradation, optimise performance and extend asset lifetime across large and growing fleets. Back in 2022, the German company raised 30 million dollars in additional Series B financing led by global investment firm Coatue.

Companies enter new markets with momentum. Press coverage looks promising. Campaigns launch on schedule. Local teams are hired. Early dashboards suggest traction. Then progress slows. Customer interest plateaus. Partnerships take longer than expected. Internally, the conversation almost always turns to execution. Messaging must not be clear enough. The market probably needs more education. What I have learned is that this conclusion is usually wrong. What looks like market resistance is more often a signal that the brand is communicating from the wrong position.

Some of the significant partnerships emerging today are less about bolt-on capabilities and more about re-architecting how financial services show up inside everyday workflows, be it taxes, shopping, or rent. They are being designed to be invisible to the end user, yet foundational to how money moves, decisions are made, and trust is established.

Startup Lunar Energy is the latest example. The six-year-old company, which builds battery packs for homeowners in California, Georgia, and Washington, said Wednesday it has completed two large funding rounds. The startup shared it raised a previously unannounced $130 million Series C and a $102 million Series D. The Series C was led by Activate Capital, while the Series D was led by B Capital and Prelude Ventures.

XAI told workers the company won't be changing its name anytime soon, even after it announced SpaceX had acquired the company on Monday. In a Q&A sent to employees on Monday, the company said xAI's mission remains "unchanged" and that its price-to-share valuation will remain the same. Workers will soon learn more about how the acquisition will impact their equity, according to the Q&A.

Demand for lithium is fueling a modern-day gold rush. The industries that define our modern world, like artifiial intelligence (AI), robotics, EVs, and energy, all depend on lithium, which is used to make batteries and other energy storage systems. Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella believes that the AI race will be won based on energy costs, not on who has the best models.That's why lithium demand is projected to grow a staggering 5X by 2040.