A Time of Crisis Is Not Something an Entrepreneur Survives, It’s the Reason Why You Are an Entrepreneur

Berlin is a city that has always intrigued me.

When I graduated from college and had just played a season of pro basketball (don’t be fooled, the pay was not great but I did get paid to play basketball so I am not complaining) in England, I headed to the European continent to explore. I had never been so far from home before. As I hitchhiked across Europe, I headed to Berlin which was then behind the Iron Curtain, meaning it was in the middle of communist Eastern Germany. That experience blew my mind. I even traveled to East Berlin to see how they lived there and had beers with some locals, which was very interesting because I did not speak German and they did not speak English.

Berlin was absolutely bursting with energy on all sides. A wild frontier for sure. That was 1981.

Fast forward to 2010… I have become good friends with Thomas Andrae, the Director of 3M Ventures, and we are doing a lot of productive things together. One of his employees, Dominik Guber, comes to MIT and becomes an absolutely memorable student and successful entrepreneur who I use as one of my case studies in my class today. Thomas got me to travel to Berlin to see the burgeoning entrepreneurial ecosystem there and I was hooked again. The energy and heterogeneity were just like I had remembered it but translated into the current world of entrepreneurship. We had the Technical University of Berlin team in one of the first MIT delta v cohorts as a result.

I think of Berlin as a very unique city. Like London is not really an English city but an international city, the same is true for Berlin. It is a place of convergence for all kinds of people. I have gone back a number of times and it never lets me down. One of the visits was to give a talk for the opening of Signal Iduna’s new entrepreneurship and innovation center called “Signals”. It was an accelerator, incubator, educational platform, funder, and more wrapped into one. It was a very innovative ecosystem for entrepreneurs.

I was very pleased and honored when they asked me this year to speak at their annual conference even if I couldn’t travel to Berlin. Once again, it was very energizing and my talk is below – and as you can see from the picture, it was not a corporate outing at all.

Thanks to Signals, Thomas, Dominik, and all my friends in Berlin. As President John F. Kennedy said, “Ich bin ein Berliner“.