24 Steps to a Successful Startup

As the Director of EPIC Lab, the entrepreneurship center at ITAM—a leading private university in Mexico—I have had the great opportunity to closely follow the Martin Trust Center’s Delta v program for the last six years.

“delta v” is our capstone program at MIT for the best of the best student entrepreneurs, the most committed, the ones that made the most progress during the school year. We take a subset of them, about 100 participants, at MIT and in NYC at our Startup Studio and push them to the max to help they achieve “escape velocity”.

I was interviewed on August 23, 2019 by Philip Bouchard, Executive Director of TrustedPeer Entrepreneurship Advisory. This whole interview was republished here with his permission.

A few weeks ago, I had the good fortune to get an early release of the book That Will Never Work: The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea by Marc Randolph. Marc and I grew up about 2 miles away from each other and went to the same high school. He was a very good guy and while we were friends, by the time high school arrived and after, we traveled in different circles. I had heard he was a co-founder of Netflix but it was hard for me to visualize how that happened and while curious,…

It probably all begins with a desire to do more, be more, and connect with something bigger: that’s the common denominator that starts to connect those who enroll in the MITx Entrepreneurship courses on edX. These MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) are centered around Bill Aulet’s global bestseller ‘Disciplined Entrepreneurship’ and made available to prospective students worldwide through the open-source, non-profit platform known as edX.

This past week reminded me yet again of a common pattern in new ventures that is one of the most common killers of new ventures even if they get the 24 steps done well. It is what I call the “tree house mentality”. I call it this because I remember when we were young and growing up, we would build tree houses—which generally were platforms in trees. They could be more elaborate with walls and open windows and maybe even a roof. You had to climb to get to them but once you got to them, you felt…

This past week, a friend sent me a link to a video talking about how Roger Federer sleeps 12 hours per day. Turns out he is not the only athlete at all who does this. Lebron James, Usain Bolt, Steve Nash, Venus William are in the same boat. I know some entrepreneurs would say that “sleep is for the weak”. 

Nov 22–23 @Oxford University

Oct 18–19, 2019 @Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

Teaching entrepreneurship well is really hard. I know this because when I first started teaching, I did a terrible job. As a former professional basketball player and an experienced entrepreneur, I fell back on convenient sports analogies: Work hard, be smart, stay up later, get up earlier. Be prepared.