To be successful in their job, by necessity, VCs are friendly and personable. So friendly that it is easy to be lulled into thinking you are forging a real friendship and that they can step outside their fiduciary selves and provide good unbiased advice to a startup founder who needs good unbiased advice a lot. But it is vital the startup founder keep in mind that the VC has a job to do and they are driven first and foremost by that job even in the advice they provide.

Enabling a child who is physically disabled to participate in a sport they love is the quickest way to restore their damaged self-esteem. For a child who has either lost a leg or who was born without one, running may be the key to such restoration. Since insurance only covers what is required for ambulation, it is up to the parents or other private sources to provide the adaptive equipment necessary for a child to have an opportunity to run.

Something is very wrong with our approach to cybersecurity. We are not winning the war. The bad guys keep getting through with more and worse attacks every year. Why is this happening? For one thing, the war is asymmetric. Their malware takes just a small amount of code, but our defense systems have grown to be millions of lines of code. Additionally, since the processors in use today are simple, they can’t tell if they are under attack. And to exacerbate that, all software code is buggy, providing an open door to sophisticated attackers.

Shikhar Ghosh says 7.5 out of 10 venture-backed startups fail. Why do so many startups fail? It’s because they run out of money, but why do they run out of money? My experience of founding and running nine startups over the course of 35 years guided me to five things that every startup founder needs to focus on and get right, right away.

Osteosarcoma is rare, yet it’s the most common form of bone cancer among children. It is an aggressive cancer, and removal of the diseased bone must be done quickly. The most common location for osteosarcoma is in the knee, and the surgical options for treatment of such an instance include limb salvage, where the diseased bone is replaced with a metal implant, a replacement bone from a cadaver, a transplanted live bone from a donor or a rotationplasty.

There is an unrealistic fear that AI represents a threat to humanity because of the scare created in 1991 by SkyNet in the movie Terminator 2. But there is a real and present danger for AI and us from cyberattacks. As the National Institute of Standards and Technology puts it, “These technologies are also vulnerable to attacks that can cause spectacular failures with dire consequences.”

A tech startup—where tech is short for deep (or hard or tough) technology—is one that is solving a big problem for a (hopefully) big market with a solution based on either hardware, software or both, whose technology involves challenges to build and is probably patentable. Many investors specifically favor deep tech because they can clear out a defensible market space unique to them. Examples of deep tech investors include MIT’s The Engine and Hyperplane in Boston. It’s a category that is growing: Investment in deep tech startups is rising 20% a year and reached $18 billion in 2018.

I have been an above-knee amputee for over 50 years. For the first 30 years, my prosthesis was balsa wood with a simple mechanical knee. I fell a lot, could only walk at one fixed speed, would sweat through a shirt going from car to plane, walked downstairs or the ramp to the plane in abject fear of falling and had the classic limping gait of an amputee. I knew nothing else and certainly did not imagine all of those things would be solved through the application of microprocessor technology.

Cybersecurity discussions, whether in blogs, conferences, forums or elsewhere, tend to focus on concepts like anomaly detection, use of AI in cyber defense, security hygiene, phishing or ransomware. The cybersecurity technology known as compartmentalization has never come up when I have been within earshot.

Lots of entrepreneurs go through very tough times, and people marvel at the grit that makes them able to withstand that. In my case, my entrepreneurial grit came from being disabled and a cancer survivor at the age of 16.

Out of the U.S. population of 332 million, 2.1 million are amputees. Of those, 65% are leg amputees. My focus in this article is leg amputees. The traditional prosthetic legs I grew up with were purely mechanical and required the knee to be perfectly straight as the heel comes forward and begins to press down on the ground in front of you to lock. But if the heel comes down on an extension cord, a crack in the sidewalk or a child’s marble, the knee is not straight when pressure is put on it, so it does not lock and it collapses rapidly and you fall.

To make progress, we as a society are going to have to address cybersecurity in hardware. But it is possible to write better software, and for that, we need to train students and employees in the most modern programming languages, such as Rust, which do a better job of avoiding common bugs.

CNN CONTRIBUTING AUTHOR:
Waking up to realize you suddenly have no leg or legs is as horrible an experience as one can have, and one that will, sadly, be faced by a number of people injured in the bombing of the Boston Marathon. It happened to me when I was 16 after a bone cancer diagnosis and amputation (the cancer later spread to my lung and caused a lung to be removed as well).