As our business grew, I started neglecting my family and friends--and no advice seemed to help bring balance. That is, until I read this passage.

Is attaining balance really possible in an entrepreneurial environment? Over the past six years I have struggled to achieve some semblance of balance when it comes to managing both my business with my personal life. I have read several books, and sought counseling from wise sages. None have been able to provide me with a sound strategy to achieve some semblance of balance in my life.

This got me thinking, is balance in a start-up entrepreneurial environment really possible?

The reason why I bring this up is because one of my good friends from childhood has cancer. I went to see him a few months ago and he had just finished chemotherapy, and was recovering. Prior to that meeting, I hadn't seen him for about a year.

As I spoke with my friend and reflected on how short life is, I began to think about that factors that caused me to not contact him in the last year. What it came down to was myself becoming so immersed in the success of my business that I completely lost touch with him. This got me thinking: With all of the technology we have today to simplify, streamline, and generally make our lives easier, why I can’t achieve some semblance of balance in my life?

First let's consider: what precisely do I mean by balance? In my case, it's managing the growth and success of my business alongside my relationships with my wife, kids, family, and friends.

With a good deal of self-reflection I can honestly say that I am not successful in achieving balance. I always feel like I should or could be doing more with my business, my family, and my health. Is this just the plight of the entrepreneur, to constantly become so focused on something such that you lose sight and interest in all other things. This can't be it.

After researching the subject and looking at strategies ranging the gamut from dedicating specific times out the month to family, friends, and health, to performing yoga three times a week, the best advice I read came from a book of fiction, Suzanne's Diary to Nicholas, by James Patterson.

Imagine life is a game in which you are juggling five balls. The balls are called work, family, health, friends, and integrity. And you're keeping all of them in the air. But one day you finally come to understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. The other four balls—family, health, friends, integrity—are made of glass. I you drop one of these, it will be irrevocably scuffed, nicked, perhaps even shattered. And once you truly understand the lesson of the five balls, you will have the beginnings of balance in your life.

That's outstanding advice. Most entrepreneurs are deeply passionate about their work and vision for their companies. The reason why we work so hard is to be able to share it with our loved ones. If we do not take the time to cherish those relationships then all of this hard work will be for naught. As you focus on growing your business and the everyday challenges that come along with that goal keep in mind the phrase above.

For my foodies and wine lovers thinking about how to better balance career and personal life, try one of the most well balanced red wines I've ever had in my life, the Lions Drift Pinotage. It's clear, bright ruby red color encourages reflection while its full body and long finish, that includes hints of blueberry pie sprinkled with cinnamon, inspires enjoyment and a sense of balance.

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A five-time entrepreneur makes the case for launching a company in Silicon Beach. He's not the only fan.

Los Angeles is the capital of small business in the United States, according to Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Ramon Villaraigosa, at a reception earlier this month for Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Finalists. L.A., dubbed "Silicon Beach," has become a breeding ground for successful Internet and advertising companies. I have a theory about why.

I moved to L.A. (from Chicago) 13 years ago, in the midst of the dot-com boom, to build an online advertising company, L90/adMonitor. In addition to warm weather and beautiful beaches, I found a very creative, innovative talent pool of agile thinkers. I think it was behavior bred from Hollywood, an industry that's highly competitive and constantly innovating. We had a great ride with the company. And we didn't raise venture capital money until our IPO.

A huge contributor to the company's success was the wealth of creative and innovative talent in L.A. While during the dot-com boom there was a lot of competition for talent and people tended to job hop, I didn't find that to be the case in L.A. The loyalty and consistency of the team created a culture that was hard to beat.

For my next start-up, I tried Northern California. I started StrongMail Systems, an enterprise software company with very different engineering, sales, and marketing talent needs. Enterprise software requires longer-cycle, hard-core engineering rather than dot-com development, which is more creative, and has quicker cycles. After raising money from Sequoia Capital, I decided to move the company to Silicon Valley, to be closer to the resources and partners we needed. But I found a very different, and less conducive culture in Silicon Valley. One that was filled with a lot of talent, but also was highly-competitive, less loyal, and focused almost exclusively on technology. Everywhere I'd go, restaurants, bars, coffee shops, I heard people talking about starting new companies or technologies. It was quite the bubble.

For my fifth start-up, I chose L.A. After hiring a management team and CEO to run StrongMail, I moved back to L.A. to start the Rubicon Project, an advertising technology company. My vision was a perfect mix of Silicon Valley technology and Silicon Beach creative advertising thinking. Why'd I pick L.A.? First, I learned that because of Hollywood, Madison Avenue has spoken the same language as those in L.A. for many years. The industry, by contrast, doesn't speak C++, Java, or SOA.

In addition, it turns out, venture capitalists are more active in L.A. than ever before. Venture capitalists often tell me they spend one-third of their time in L.A. As a result, the area (also including Orange County) is the fourth largest recipient of venture capital in the U.S. after Silicon Valley, New England, and New York; it had nearly $2 billion invested in 2011, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association.

No wonder. There have been a lot of hugely-successful exits in L.A.: Overture's $1.7billion sale to Yahoo!; MySpace for $580 million to News Corporation; Business.com to R.H. Donnelly for $345 million; Shopzilla to E.W. Scripps for $525 million; and LowerMyBills.com to Experian for $330 million. Now, IPO rumors surround eHarmony. These companies created an entrepreneurial ecosystem of talent and capital.

And many of these companies survived the dot-com bust. I believe it's because, like Chicago, my hometown, there wasn't initially easy access to venture capital in L.A. and entrepreneurs had no choice but to build profitable business models from the start. That discipline is still ingrained in L.A.'s entrepreneurial culture. It's about businesses that work, not businesses that venture capitalists will buy into.

Last, but not least, are the people in L.A., the ones I noticed when I first got here. I'm a strong believer that team and culture are what make the difference between a good company and a great one. The talent pool in L.A. is deep, creative, agile, well-balanced, and loyal. Oh, and I am writing this at the beach in January…

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As part of Facebook's IPO filing, founder Mark Zuckerberg praised the concept of the "hackathon." Could something similar benefit your company, even if you're not in tech?

Welcome to 2012, a time in which hacking is praised in S-1 filings. Facebook, you may have, just maybe, heard, is going public. The IPO has set off a flurry of interest among investors and the media. Meanwhile, the company's youthful founder took the occasion to pen a letter about the fundamental mission behind his multi-billion dollar brain child. "The Hacker Way," he writes is central to how Facebook does business:

The word "hacker" has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done…. The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it—often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.

Hackers try to build the best services over the long term by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once.

How does Facebook put this hacker ethos into practice and instill these ideals in its employees? Hackathons, says Zuckerburg. "To encourage this approach, every few months we have a hackathon, where everyone builds prototypes for new ideas they have. At the end, the whole team gets together and looks at everything that has been built. Many of our most successful products came out of hackathons, including Timeline, chat, video, our mobile development framework and some of our most important infrastructure like the HipHop compiler."

A hackathon is an intriguing idea to drive talent towards risk taking, experimentation and, dare I type it, even fun. But can it work in firms that lack hackers, meaning those in older school industries that produce physical goods or analog services rather than code? Sure, says writer and entrepreneur Glen Stansberry in an American Express OPEN Forum post recently, explaining that a "hack day" might be a great idea for your business as well for several reasons:

• It's exciting and morale boosting. "The event itself was far more exciting than I thought it would be," says Stansberry of his company's hack day.
• It teaches the skill of shipping. "Shipping–as defined by Seth Godin–is defeating resistance and delivering a product, even if the product isn't perfect."
• Having a hack day project "out there" gives you something to start improving. "When our Hack Day was done, we had something that was, in all honesty, pretty terrible," Stansberry admits. "But that's not the important part. The important part was the psychological boost of knowing that it was out there, and it's driven us to improve it daily."

If you think you need to be in the tech biz to reap these same benefits, think again. Nearly all business have a problem or project that you team could tackle for a hack day, according to Stansberry:

Most likely there's a new idea, or some aspect of your business that needs some serious work. A hack day is a perfect opportunity to tackle it. The important thing is that you take a day to make a minimum viable product and release it. So the question for you is this: what can you do to improve your business in a day? What can you build or re-work in a day that will allow your team to feel the success of shipping?

Could borrowing the concept of Facebook's "hackathon" benefit your business?

In the race to get Internet TV shows and movies into the living room, Boxee co-founder Idan Cohen notices unanticipated advantages of being the (much) smaller player.

Private jets? $200 million paintings? Zuckerberg's salary? Here are few things the financial analysts won't be talking about this morning.

By now, you've probably seen all the (impressive) basics about Facebook's S-1 filing. The company made $3.7 billion in 2011, saw yearly revenue growth of 88 percent, has 845 million users (about 12 percent of the world's population), blah, blah, blah.

But upon closer inspection, the S-1 reveals some pretty insane facts about the company. Here's what people are actually going to be talking about on the social network's road to IPO:

• Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sanderberg, the company's COO, are allowed to use company money to fly in private jets. Perks abound for family members too: "On certain occasions, Mr. Zuckerberg may be accompanied by family members or others when using private aircraft."

• Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, is possibly the only person in financial services whose reputation was actually enhanced by the financial crisis of 2008. Now the JPMorgan side of the business, never a tech powerhouse, has snagged the number two slot co-managing the Facebook IPO.

• "Facebook was built to accomplish a social mission." Just as Google, upon its IPO, enunciated its goal as "Don't be evil," Facebook also claims a higher mission. Wall Street doesn't. This can lead to problems.

• Mark Zuckerberg still has 57 percent of the voting rights of his company.

• The float. Facebook is only selling 5 percent of the company. Most start-ups would be scared to do that, for fear they'd be caught in a short-squeeze. But the Facebook offering is so big that Zuckerberg can't be worried. The choice of underwriters shows Facebook also isn't terribly worried about impressing institutional shareholders.

• So many people wanted to read Facebook's offering documents that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission website crashed.

• The company is embroiled in tons of lawsuits. "We are involved in numerous class action lawsuits...and, if resolved adversely, could harm our business," notes the S-1.

• The company has nearly $4 billion in cash...just sitting in the bank.

• The graffiti artist David Choe, who took stock in place of cash for painting murals on the Facebook office walls six years ago, is expected to be "worth upward of $200 million when Facebook stock trades publicly."

• There were more than 100 billion friend connections on Facebook as of December 31, 2011.

• Sheryl Sandberg, with 1,899,986 shares of Facebook common stock, and 39,321,041 options, will be worth nearly $2 billion, making her one of the wealthiest women in the world. Some said Facebook was cheating her by not offering her a board seat. Ha.

• Zynga, the social gaming company, accounted for 12 percent of Facebook's annual revenues in 2011.

• In 2013, Zuckerberg will take a $1 annual salary.

• The IPO could make magnate-slash-investor Peter Thiel (also know as a Seasteading advocate and artificial-intelligence aficionado who last year paid 20 students to drop out of college and start companies) about $2 billion (based on an initial $500,000 investment).

• Yuri Milner, the Russian billionaire, owns roughly a 7 percent stake in the company.

• Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, who is now an angel investor, owns 7.6 percent of the company, putting his net worth around $6.7 billion.

• Bono, the U2 frontman, paid $120 million for company stocks in 2010 to own about 1.5 percent of the company. After the company goes public, he could see his investment rise to over $1 billion.

• The lock-up. After an IPO, company insiders are generally prohibited from selling shares for 180 days. So they can't just dump their shares into the IPO. Facebook insiders are looking to get liquid much faster—their lock-up lasts only 90 days. Thank SecondMarket for that.

• Zuckerberg gets his own security detail—or whatever a "Comprehensive Security Program" to "Protect Mark Zuckerberg" means.

• Mr. Zuckerberg's father, a dentist living in New York, was given two million shares of stock "in satisfaction of funds provided for our initial working capital."

• Zuckerberg has retained the right to choose his successor after his death.

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A new white paper asserts that if you want to build a company, an advanced degree in a subject like engineering beats an MBA any day.

So you want to start a company. You've finished your undergraduate degree and you're peering into the haze of your future. Would it be better to continue on to an MBA or do an advanced degree in a nerdy pursuit like engineering or mathematics? Sure, tech skills are hugely in demand and there are a few high-profile nerd success stories, but how often do pencil-necked geeks really succeed in business? Aren't polished, suited and suave MBA-types more common at the top?

Not according to a recent white paper from Identified, tellingly entitled "Revenge of the Nerds." The company, which analyzes Facebook profiles, combed through its database, culling information on the profiles of CEOs and founders to see what path they took to entrepreneurial success. The result: Three times as many had advanced degrees in engineering than had an MBA. When it came to company leaders with only an undergrad education, the number with degrees in business and engineering was about evenly split.

The company also found that the age of founders is falling. In 2008 the average was 36. This year is was 33. And while 90 percent of the profiles analyzed were for U.S.-based entrepreneurs, that doesn't mean the founders and CEOs were originally from the U.S. The Institute of Technology Bombay, Canada's University of Waterloo and China's Tsinghua University joined perennial American favorites Stanford, MIT, UC Berkeley, CalTech, and Carnegie Mellon among the most common training grounds of top engineers.

So why are nerds triumphing these days? Identified speculates that the boy king of Facebook may deserve some credit:

Perhaps the widely chronicled nerd-inspiring story of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg–the fact is that more engineers are striking out on their own to launch new endeavors, particularly in the IT, social and mobile industries. According to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, 2011 saw "an across-the-board increase in the rate of entrepreneurial activity has not been seen in the U.S. in the last ten years," and "the majority of entrepreneurs were motivated by improvement-driven opportunities to start new ventures."

Increasing doubts about both the value of MBAs and their creativity-destroying side effects may also be partly to blame, as could the increasingly technical nature of many of the fastest growing business sectors. But whatever the cause or causes, the nerd-ward shift in business is significant, according Brendan Wallace, co-founder of Identified. While MBAs used to employ engineers, now engineers more often hire MBAs.

"It will be interesting to see what kind of implications this will have on the business world and the economy overall," he says.

What ramifications is the rise of the nerds having on business culture and structure? Has "revenge of the nerds" hit your company?

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Harvard Business School professor Robert S. Kaplan explains his questions for effective leadership, and identifying the impact you want to make.

When on-boarding new hires, we follow these three guidelines to get our employees behind our (epic) mission, and understand our quirky culture.

As it's done at a lot of start-ups, at LevelUp we normally condone the "figure it out" approach to learning. After all, some things are better learned through experience. (Like, why you shouldn't eat the yogurts from the back of the refrigerator.) But there are other things we think are really important for everyone to be taught right off the bat. So, this year we decided to organize an intensive training program, called LevelUp University, for our largest-ever group of new hires—37 people joined our 80-person company.

A lot of time went into figuring out exactly what we should teach these 37 newbies during their two weeks of training at LevelUp HQ. After eliminating topics like Scooter Tricks 101 and IdeaPaint Art For Beginners (important—but we just did not have enough time), we finally settled on three big things that were crucial for them to know about our company. When we thought about it some more, we realized these three things should be taught by any start-up looking to build a culture of employees that are extremely driven and passionate about what they've chosen to do.

1. Why Our Mission Is Epic.
We expect everyone at LevelUp to give 110 percent. Why? Because we're building something epic, and the recipe for epicness doesn't call for weak-sauce. But in order for new employees to make it through the hard work at LevelUp, or at any start-up for that matter, they have to be genuinely psyched about what they're helping build. So, to get all our new hires pumped about what we're building, we give them a good ol' history lesson. (No, not the WAH-wa-Wah kind of lesson you're thinking of.) We tell the story of where our company started, the ups and the downs that followed, and the overall amazing success that we've accomplished, thanks to all of our awesome employees to-date. In order for new team members to join and be instantly energized about building the next big thing, they need to have a good understanding of where we've been...and get the institutional knowledge of what we've discovered over time.

2. How to Sell, Even if You're Not a Salesperson.
During LevelUp University, everyone learns how to sell, regardless of what position they're hired for. After letting new employees practice their pitches to each other, we send them off to local merchants, challenging them to pitch full-time employees that we've stationed at each merchant. The biggest reason we think everyone should get the experience of an outside sales rep is because it gives people a chance to learn LevelUp's value proposition. We think it's incredibly important for everyone at the company to be able to reiterate the benefits of LevelUp, whether they're chatting with a merchant, a LevelUp user, or even just friends and family.

3. Why We Play With Nerf Guns.
Like I explained in my previous post, company culture is a huge part of why we're able to make good things happen at our company. Though it may seem random that we use scooters as our main form of transportation and have hired several engineers that admittedly listen to Bieber, there's a method to our madness...we don't know what it is yet, but we're sure there is one. We think it's important for new employees to understand why we work so hard to maintain a moderately crazy, hardworking, yet extraordinarily fun company culture. We ask everyone to read "Delivering Happiness," which is a great book on how a fun company culture can lead to success, and we get together to have a team chat about how our culture is driven by the people sitting in the room. Getting new hires on the same page allows us run like a well oiled machine, plus helps them avoid confusion when they get hit with a Nerf dart for the first time.

The three things above make the most sense for us to teach new employees, and we think would make a lot of sense for your start-up to teach, too. Did we leave anything out? What do you cover during new employee training that's crucial to your company's success?

A pair of experts on start-up life challenge the conventional notion that other career paths are far safer than starting your own business.

To be an entrepreneur you need to be bold, the usual thinking goes. Most new businesses fail and even if your venture succeeds, starting it will demand bucket loads of time and determination, so if you're not a confident, resolute risk taker the start-up path isn't for you…right?

When many aspiring business owners confess their entrepreneurial dreams to their loved ones they hear some version of this conventional opinion of entrepreneurship as a career option. "Can't you choose something that's a safer bet," say parents across America. "We're only thinking of your best interest."

Your elders' career conservatism may come from a loving place, but there are at least two experts who feel their opinions, however popular and well intentioned, are misguided. Writing on the HBR Blog Network, Bruce Gibney and Ken Howery, two partners at Founders Fund, argue that this thinking fails to take into account both how risky once "safe" career paths have come and also the outsize possible benefits of the entrepreneurism as an alternative:

Entrepreneurship is not riskier than working at a big bank or law firm, a fact vividly underscored by the de facto nationalization of the banking sector and mass layoffs of the last few years. An especially pungent comparison exists between the classically "safe" job of lawyering versus starting a new enterprise. What could be safer than a career at a century-old white shoe firm (aside from the fact that less than a third make partner)? Lots of things, actually. Few law students even get the chance to buy the losing lottery ticket: the government estimates that 215,417 jobs for attorneys will open between 2008 and 2018 and in the same decade, there will be over 430,000 new legal graduates so only half will get to practice in their chosen field (at substantial opportunity and tuition costs). By contrast, of 5,000 businesses started in 2004, almost 56% were still in business in 2010, despite suffering through a brutal economic downturn….

Another consideration: you can actually make real money with new companies. The actual money entailed in entrepreneurship can dwarf the outcomes from legitimate toil at established businesses. A quarter of first-time venture-backed firms are acquired for at least $50 million or file for an IPO. That's not a guarantee that every early worker makes a fortune, but it suggests the odds are better than we would intuit. And in a world that has structurally shifted to bimodal outcomes, why not shoot for the mode that allows you to build wealth?

And if lower than expected comparative risk and higher than expected financial returns aren't enough to improve opinions of the entrepreneurship, Gibney and Howery add, “people who start or join new companies tend to actually like what they are doing.”

If what this pair of VCs says is true, and entrepreneurship is less risky compared to other paths than is commonly acknowledged, why is our image of the start-up life as only for the brave so inflexible? Perhaps because many of us are still struggling to come to terms with how much conventional careers have changed, how fragmentary and unstable the professional future looks for young people today and how few truly "safe" paths remain. Perhaps it’s not that entrepreneurship has become vastly less risky, but that in a world of lightning fast tech change and global competition, that old standby of "getting a good job" has become vastly more risky.

Do you think the risks of entrepreneurship are often exaggerated?