24 Steps to a Successful Startup

The idea that the head of the country’s patent office predicted the end of invention is laughably ironic until replaced by the irony that it was the opposite of how Commissioner Duell actually felt. How then more absurd is the actual prognostication 56 years earlier, also by the head of the country’s patent office. Want some more irony? Samuel F.B. Morse would invent no less than the telegraph in 1844, a year later. Fortunately for civilization, entrepreneurs are more the Duell types. There is…

“How do you make God laugh? Make plans!” This tiny maxim is at the core of how applying improv techniques to your life and your business will help make you an antifragile human. Of course, plans are crucial to the entrepreneur. But what happens when the plans go south? What do you do when life happens?

One of the great challenges for me as an entrepreneurship educator is knowing whether the material I am teaching works. How do I know it works for others? How do I answer the logical and appropriate challenge of “prove it?”

The dynamics that shape judgment and behaviour have always been in the spotlight of managerial curiosity, since our choices take place within a vast horizon of options, and especially for deliverables with high intrinsic and extrinsic value, like education.

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.