Joe Gebbia is a co-founder of Airbnb, which matches travelers with a variety of rooms for rent worldwide (think everything from a spare pullout sofa to a castle). The company has listings in 184 countries and has booked more than a million nights. TechCrunch recently reported that the company was in the process of closing a $100 million round of venture capital funding.

This article discusses some a fundamental difference between the world of CEOs leading big public businesses and those who lead small private businesses. The latter assumes a lot more risk than the former. We have seen how in recent years some top CEOs got involved in scandals driven by greed and other baser instincts and got their companies in the red, they were fired but with millions of dollars worth severance packages.

Stephen Greer who became an entrepreneur at 24 when he was just out of college offers his take on the popular and ongoing debate about whether entrepreneurs need MBA. His answer combines yes and no but it’s not a diplomatically put together argument. It has been well-thought out and coming from hard earned experience.

John Warrillow is a writer, speaker and angel investor in a number of start-up companies. In this article he recounts how he realized that was wasting his time selling the wrong product. The breakthrough occurred at an executive education campus at MIT in a session by Stephen Watkins himself an entrepreneur who had sold his business around that time. Watkins told the class of entrepreneurs that they added the most value to their business in designing and starting it.

Randy Komisar is an entrepreneur and veteran Silicon Valley venture capitalist. He has launched many technology startups in the last 25 years. He is also a founding director of TiVo, co-founder of Claris Corporation, CEO of Crystal Dynamics, CEO of LucasArts Entertainment, virtual CEO to a range of other companies, a senior counsel at Apple Computer and author of two books. In this interview he provides us with his insights on leadership and management.

Source: Fast Company

Does the name AdMob sound familiar to you? If yes, you might just remember having seen it in your mobile phone apps. The company which was started only four years back was recently bought over by Google for $750 million in stocks and the other company which was also in the race for AdMob but lost was none other than Apple. The man at the center of all this is Omar Hamoui a soft spoken who was a student at Wharton when he developed a mobile social networking website which did not find any takers, he got the idea for AdMob in the process of marketing it.

Flying back from San Diego, I sat next to a very engaging entrepreneur, Raymond Mendoza. Thirteen years ago he founded Short Circuit Car Audio Repair, a small business that fixes car stereos on behalf of car dealership service departments. He’s got 1200 dealership customers and a staff of audio electronics experts who work right here in San Jose (rather than the Philippines, his home country, but that’s a different story on the downsides of offshoring).