24 Steps to a Successful Startup

When I first started as the managing director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship a decade ago, I thought my job was to help students create more and better startups. Fortunately, some wiser and more experienced faculty members reminded me that we were part of an educational institution. It made me think of the old adage that states, “It’s better to teach a man to fish than to give him a fish.” We wanted to teach our students not just how to launch single businesses—we wanted to…

One of the most recent lessons in letting go and surrendering to what wants to happen in the community was the #24hours24steps prototype: an uninterrupted, 24-hour-long video meeting, designed to be open to all members of the MBA² community.

Recently, a colleague from Stanford sent me a link to an article that he had run across in the Silicon Republic. Now I must admit, that is not a publication I usually read but I was happy when I saw MIT EDP alum Mary Rodgers smiling picture at the top of the article. Mary is an entrepreneurship amplifier in Galway’s (Ireland) Portershed. The title of the article was “Founders need to articulate and sell the value of change to customers” which was nice but I really wanted to hear what else Mary…

Entrepreneurship is vital not just for economic growth and prosperity, but also for social harmony. It creates jobs and gives peoples’ lives more purpose and meaning. The solutions for many of society’s most intractable problems come not from governments or established companies, but from new companies that unleash the creativity and energy of the human race.

This past week, I had a reminder of the toughest and maybe most critical challenge a founder has to face. A very composed founder had worked incredibly hard over the summer to get their new startup off the ground and they were succeeding. They had real customers and they had real investor interest. Things looked great but they weren’t. As so many startups have, the executive team was not working well together.

In entrepreneurship, you are taught to first identify a problem, then find a solution. When you put this solution into action, you begin creating ideas and establishing them into a business plan. At MIT, you are taught to be disciplined and structured; yet, you are also reminded to loosen the grip around our ideas. When you hold on to an idea too tightly, you risk suffocating it.

Since 17th April 2018, I am founder and host of the MIT Bootcamp Alumni Association (MBA²), a bespoke and private online network that holds space for the MITx Entrepreneurship Bootcamp Alumni: “An exclusive Mighty Network, built by MIT Bootcamp Alumni, for the MIT Bootcamp Alumni.” 

You never know what in a day will make your day a great one. Recently, I had on my calendar a meeting with Vicky Hamilton from Scotland Can Do Scale Summer School. It is always fun to see Scottish entrepreneurs, especially after this program because they really treasure the workshop and then go out and work hard to put the concepts to work.

Theranos. The now defunct company creates a visceral reaction with people when you say its name. Try it. Its story has been detailed in the book Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by Wall Street Journalist John Carreyrou, as well as the HBO documentary movie The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley. I would hope none of my students would ever do such a thing, but how do I know?

On September 12, 2019, Martin Trust passed away peacefully in Brookline, Massachusetts. While not a surprise, this was still sad in so many ways, but, as he would wish, there was a positive side to this news. In the big picture, you could not ask for any more from 85 years of life than what Marty Trust got out of it and what he gave back in the process.