WOW! Just woke up at home in Cambridge after a phenomenal week in Europe, first at the University of Luxembourg entrepreneurship incubator run by Pranjul Shah and then in Greece for MIT Global Startup Workshop (MIT GSW) led by the amazing student leadership team and MIT Enterprise Forum Greece let by Vassilis Papakonstantinou, Gerassimos Spyridakis, and Antigoni Molodanof.

COVID Has Receded Thankfully and Entrepreneurship Momentum is Back in Europe. For me the week started in Luxembourg on Monday and Tuesday with a very intense 2-day master class for hundreds of students/faculty/mentors/community. Many great posts on LinkedIn about this and there is a picture below. The environment was electric because of the participants but it was also actively supported by the university Rector Jens Kreisel and US Ambassador Thomas M. Barrett.

Then headed off to Greece for the MIT Global Startup Workshop (MIT GSW) which is celebrating its 25 anniversary, and did they do this great organization proud, they did so much more. I have been to many & this was without a doubt the best ever. The venue was the iconic Megaron Athens Concert Hall with three levels seating thousands (see pictures below), and when you stepped on the stage, you could imagine Maria Callas and others performing. The team filled it up and it was three days of packed programming. It started on Wednesday when Kosta Ligris presented to 550 students (would have been more but it was beyond capacity) in one venue and I presented to over 50 faculty on how entrepreneurship should be taught. This would have been more than enough to justify the trip but then it was followed by an additional 48 hours of absolutely pulsating talks, workshops, serendipitous collisions, and side conversations with entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial leaders across Europe. You can see the program if you google MIT GSW (https://gsw.mit.edu/2023/) but it was so much more. Entrepreneurs, students wanting to be entrepreneurs, educators, ministers, investors, corporates, and many other stakeholders mixing it up in the common areas. There is nothing like being in person. Living in a Zoom world just does not compare. Thanks to all that made this possible and participated.

I return from this trip exhausted but also very optimistic that despite the daunting challenges we face as a society, entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship educators are rising to the challenge and therefore, we should have great hope for the future. But so much still needs to get done and we need to build off this progress. Onward and upward, together!

It is Sunday, February 5, 2023. Two weeks ago at this time, our annual January EDP kicked off IN PERSON for the first time in 3 years. We had experimented with EDP+ last June in conjunction with our MIT delta v cohort and that went well (see EDP+ Innovating On How We Teach Entrepreneurship and Grow the Community) but last week was back to the “classic” version … and it was awesome! It just never gets old.

“What is EDP?” or as it is officially called “The MIT Executive Education Entrepreneurship Development Program. This is when we take as much of what we do throughout the full year with our students to make them innovation-driven entrepreneurs, jam it into one week, and make it available to the outside world on the MIT campus. It is not a series of lectures or talks as much as it is a fully immersive experience of building a company from scratch in five days with people you have never met before. I know it sounds insane because it is … but it also works. Nothing can teach you to be a better entrepreneur in less time as well as this program does. Don’t take it from me, just read the reviews.

Every EDP class is unique and the 2023 cohort was anchored by a very strong foundation of hand-selected participants from Northern Ireland, Scotland, Queensland University of Technology, Danfoss, Poppe + Potthoff, and Southern University and A&M College all integrated with a dynamic group of selected, committed, and talented entrepreneurs from over a dozen additional countries. They might be entrepreneurs in startups, government, academia, or in non-profit, but they all share a determination to up-level their skills in entrepreneurship.

It started on Sunday afternoon when we pulled everyone together for the first time and they were told that “yes they can” be better entrepreneurs and we were starting right away. Under the expert tutelage of Trust Center Entrepreneurs in Residence Paul Cheek (also the Executive Director) and George Whitfield, the participants pitched their best idea and then, through an organic Darwinian selection process, these got narrowed down to 14 teams of 6 to 8 members. By Monday night the number was down to 13 teams as one group decided it would be best if they split up and joined other teams. And we were off.

Each day has a theme and begins with a lecture on the relevant Disciplined Entrepreneurship steps and associated materials with an emphasis on hands-on guidance followed by working sessions and then rapid-fire simulations with empathetic experts (and yes, there’s time between sessions to adjust the teams’ works based on the feedback). The students regroup at night and continue to iterate on their plans. The daily focus areas are as follows:

• Monday: (A) Define Target Customer, (B) Value Proposition
• Tuesday: (A) Product, (B) Competitive Advantage
• Wednesday: (A) Business Model, Pricing & LTV, (B) Go-To-Market and Cost of Customer Acquisition
• Thursday: (A) Financial Model, (B) Fundraising, (C) Final Presentation Prep
• Friday: Final Presentation to a Jury of Judges

You’d think such a timeline would be destined to produce shallow plans, but that is not true. Even though all teams start with just an idea, by Friday they have compelling plans that are not only logical in their flow, but also validated by Primary Market Research completed by the teams during the week. They also know what they don’t know, but have a plan to get started. It is absolutely compelling to see the presentations on Friday, which never cease to amaze; they get better every year.

But EDP is not all sunshine, butterflies, rainbows, and unicorns. During the week, there is tension on many fronts. People are pushed well beyond their comfort zones and team dynamics can be on the border of explosive. That being said, nothing great is easy or accomplished without great work. The teams find their ways through the struggle and come out stronger at the end. They not only understand the process, they now have the confidence to execute it again assisted by the network of warriors who they can count on from a special shared experience.

I am not sure if it was the pandemic or what, but this year’s class was the strongest we have ever had top to bottom. No offense meant to any previous cohort, but the bar just keeps going up every year. We seem to get more and more experienced (but very open to learning to get better) entrepreneurs. I saw a team knocked out in the first round of presentations that would easily have won in other years. That is no disrespect to others, just an objective benchmark on how far entrepreneurship is advancing. You can’t stand still.

The course is a micro-test of antifragility. You can’t just survive the course, by the end the participants must (and do) thrive in the ambiguity, the fast-moving pace, the entrepreneurial community, and the humbling environment created. That’s the point. The mindset, skillset, and way of operating to see change as an opportunity to be embraced as opposed to a threat and seek to avoid it. All in one wild week.

It never gets old. Many of the students went to the Celtics-Lakers game on Saturday night (after they slept in to recover) and it was a great metaphor. The Celtics went on a roller coaster ride during the game seemingly winning and losing it a number of times, but they never lost their focus or confidence. In the end, the Celtics won in a most rewarding way … but it sure as hell wasn’t easy. A perfect metaphor.

A few other observations:

1. The World is Flat: You can be an entrepreneur anywhere in the world now. You can also build teams across countries as well.
2. AI is the New Game Changer and It is Pervasive: Data Analytics and Machine Learning (ML) specifically can be applied to almost any problem, and if they have not already, there is a good opportunity for significant improvement. It’s like digitization was in previous times, but that is just table stakes now. You need to get the data and apply ML in order to get to the next level. And yes there were a number of teams leveraging ChatGPT technology.
3. Entrepreneurship (that we teach) is an Ethical Activity: I was so proud that all of the teams were doing things that were so much more than just profiteering off a soulless arbitrage opportunity. They were helping blind, dyslexic children, building a better platform to advance careers for women in tech, and even the vaping team (which I will admit to being worried about early in the week) came up with a way to help addicted vapers find a way out.
4. One Week Can Changes People’s Lives: This has always amazed me but it is true. Just see the reviews, which motivate us every year to bring our A game and keep improving EDP.
5. The Process Works: Trust the process! John Knapton of the Catalyst Organization in Northern Ireland commissioned a study showing quantitatively the profound impact on the teams over time and the results are summarized in the article “What Gives Me Confidence That We Are Successfully Teaching Entrepreneurship”.

Huge thanks to my fabulous co-conspirator Paul Cheek who is taking Disciplined Entrepreneurship to the next level in the classroom. Also to Ann Marie Maxwell who has been working on EDP for 5 years now and gets it done with a smile and at a level that is truly wonderful to be a part of. Much thanks to her team: Mary, Michelle, Magda, and Jan. So much love to all the mentors and judges who give their time to help out they are too numerous to name here, but you know who you are. Also, guest lecturers Adam Blake, Matt Rhodes-Kropf, and Jeff Fagnan. It is a small but mighty team. Lastly, a very special thanks to all the participants who just get it done. Reminds me of a line I love from a famous bullfighter poem:

The bullfight critics ranked in rows
fill the enormous plaza full.
But only one is there who really knows,
and he’s the one who fights the bull.

Go get ‘em EDPers of 2023 and we look forward to hearing how you change the world for the better! Welcome to the community.

Every year it is fun to look back and see what your favorite articles of the year were. Often, we have a feeling of confidence in some but there are always surprises when we look at the year-end data. This year it is no different.  At a high level, the 2022 list is dominated by new materials but three seemingly evergreen classics have secured a spot in the top ten and they are all written by people not named “Aulet”. Still, the most popular articles for 2022 are populated most of all by the ones that give a sneak peek and ask for feedback on the new proposed book on Financial Literacy for Entrepreneurs.

One interesting note, the article by a guest, Md. Rashed Mamun, on how Disciplined Entrepreneurship has had an impact on creating entrepreneurs in Bangladesh (Disciplined Entrepreneurship: A Gamechanger in Supporting Young Entrepreneurs of Bangladesh) got more than double the views of what I thought would be sure clickbait regarding the back story of how the English Royals came to visit Boston (Disciplined Entrepreneurship Helps Bring Prince William and Kate to Boston). I don’t know how you feel about that but it made me feel good about our readers who correctly, prioritize impact over publicity and interesting storytelling – although there is a role for both.

Without further ado, here are the top articles from 2022 as voted on by your clickstream (i.e., page views) in reverse order:

Honorable Mention: EDP+: Innovating On How We Teach Entrepreneurship and Grow the Community

There is a very real and powerful community of hundreds of successful EDP alumni and you never know for sure why something is successful, but my guess is that this helped drive these numbers. That being said, as the field of entrepreneurship is constantly changing, we also need to continually innovate the way we teach it so this should ring true to an even broader community and it appears it did.

#10: Chapter 3: Financial Modeling (Part 1)

This is the first of four entries that made the top ten hit list for 2022 regarding the first draft of a book on Financial Literacy for Entrepreneurs. Clearly, a lot of interest in this very important topic, and I agree there is not enough out there that meets the need here. This is the reason we made an edX course on the topic as well and why I drafted this material for our courses and workshops at MIT. It still needs a lot of work and not sure if and when it will come out in a polished format but the message is clear. There is lots of incentive now to finish the job based on the feedback. Just need more time.

Ironically, not sure why this particular article got fewer hits than the follow-on article which was the second part of the chapter but I am guessing this is because Part 2 got into more specifics on the actual modeling…. but you still have to understand the context and assumptions so don’t skip Part1!

#9: LTV Calculation Spreadsheet

An absolute classic, this was the #1 article of 2020 (the year it was written by guest writer Joe Gibson a Lecturer at Clemson University) and it remains popular to this day. Extremely useful and really a basic spreadsheet to help people calculate Life Time Value (LTV) with simple directions on how to use it. Nothing fancy, just high value and straight to the point. Never gets old.

#8: All People Are Born Entrepreneurs, Then Society Takes This Away

Published in April 2022, this was a translation of an interview done by a Greek newspaper. Didn’t realize it was going to be so popular but people loved the title and it drew them in and they stayed. It covers a lot of topics with relatively short answers. The trip to Greece was also very popular so not sure why it got so many hits but we know it did.

#7: Chapter 2: The Basics of Finance

When this second article got so much interest and lots of comments, it was clear there is a real market for this and it was not just a one-hit wonder. Again, you will see two more entries beyond this one and the #10 on this list reemphasizing this point. Won’t repeat what is in those entries.

#6: The Decision-Making Unit: The Who-is-Who of Your B2B Sales Process

Congratulations to guest writers Martin Giese & Matthias Hilpert for an article that was originally published on September 5, 2021, that is still getting hits today. It highlights some of the material from their book, Fast Forward: B2B Sales from Startup to Unicorn, and is very substantive and specific in its guidance on the topic of life and death for entrepreneurs.  Yes, we can take a more systematic (i.e., engineering) approach to sales and it makes a huge difference.

#5: How Well is MIT Really Doing at Creating the Next Generation Entrepreneurs?

This was published late in the year (November 22, 2022) but I was confident it would get a lot of interest. The article is really an analysis that we had to do internally at MIT to understand better the PitchBook university rankings data when it came out that month. Taking the numbers and doing a more scientific manner was definitely in order and that is what we did. Once done, thought it was worth sharing and it seems it was. Interesting results.

#4: The Problem Statement Canvas: A Deep Dive in Problem Definition for Startups and Innovation Teams

Again, a classic published in an earlier year (2021) but like wine, it just gets better with time. I look back at it now as one of the best of all time. It is deep but extremely easy to digest and put into action. Not surprisingly, it is written by the grand master of this d-eship.com website and the illustrator of the Disciplined Entrepreneurship books, Marius Ursache. Even with his greatness and seemingly magical powers, he can’t make you read the article. Still, you did and it has the most votes and associated highest scores for reviews. If you haven’t read it, definitely worth a read, and bookmark it. Not surprising it has come back and hope it does for many years.

#3: Chapter 1: Why Financial Literacy and an Investor Readiness Program?

Published on January 2, 2022, to start the new year, not surprising that this is at the top of the list. The positive reception to this encouraged the release of three more installments, making the top 10 of the year.

#2: Chapter 3: Financial Modeling (Part 2)

Interestingly the last installment just barely edged out the first installment (by .1%) so the interest did not wane over the year. Now we have to find a way to complete the package of material on this topic, polish it up and get it out. We hear you on this. We just need to get the resources and bandwidth, more below.

#1: DE Workbook Worksheets Now Available in Digital Form

Ironically but not surprisingly the number one most popular article for 2022 by far – by over 2X – had only five sentences in it, and (most importantly) one download button. It was providing free access to all the digital worksheets from the Disciplined Entrepreneurship Workbook. This did not surprise me at all as it has been beneficial to our students at MIT and was glad to make them generally available. Don’t lose the bookmark! Suspect, this will be on the Greatest Hits List for years to come.

What you chose to click on is something that we take seriously. It tells us what is important. We will look to produce more of this kind of material in 2023 and encourage guest writers to use this platform as four people have above to give broader perspectives than I can.

What else does 2023 bring? I wish I could promise you more on the Financial Literacy book for entrepreneurs but someone pointed out that 2023 is the 10 anniversary of the release of the original Disciplined Entrepreneurship book. Wouldn’t it be nice for a new version? Not promising anything specific but assure you will hear really interesting things starting with my MIT colleague Paul Cheek’s work on Venture Creation Tactics will be forthcoming shortly.

It never ends, thank goodness. Something is always new. That is why we love entrepreneurship. Happy 2023 everyone!!!

As some of your who know me, I prefer the less structured talks and events where there is more audience interaction.  A one-way talk seems to me like you can just be reading a script so what’s the point? You can just read that. There is inherently more energy and surprise in the improvised events and that more reflects what entrepreneurship and life are all about. You have to adapt.

Recently (December 7, 2022), MIT Exec Ed ask Paul Cheek and me to sit down and talk with the Dean of MIT Executive Education, Peter Hirst, about the current state of entrepreneurship and basically produce content that will help get people to apply to EDP. Since I love EDP and I have seen it change so many lives, it was not a hard sale to get at least me to do it. Technically the title is “Unlock Startup Success with MIT’s Bill Aulet and Paul Cheek: Discover world-renowned frameworks and tools used by successful startup founders and corporate teams to build new ventures,” which is quite a mouthful. Don’t be scared. Once we start, it takes on its own wonderful trajectory.

You can tell when an event is going well and the response on the chat was great so am making that available now for you to watch if you want but know you can listen to it like a podcast if that is your preference. There were hundreds of people online peppering us with questions and comments so you will see improvisation in action. And I am confident you will find it useful and stimulating information in many ways while also being entertaining – and if done properly, the second reinforces the first.

Here is the link to enjoy it and many thanks to Peter Hirst, Ann Marie Maxwell, and the whole team at MIT Exec Ed who makes it possible to run EDP and other classes as well as this LinkedIn live event.

This past week, you have probably seen that Prince William and Princess Kate visited Boston for their big Earthshot Prize and what a week it was. President Biden and scores of others were on hand for this enormous event. The hoopla from the visit was really quite amazing.  What does this have to do with Disciplined Entrepreneurship? Well, actually a lot.

While we entrepreneurs generally don’t care about credentials and titles (read “royalty”) for their own sake, the cause of fighting climate change is one of, if not the most, consequential challenges we face. As such, we applaud William and Kate’s efforts with the Earthshot Prize. Using their platform and access to capital to create incentives and visibility for entrepreneurs working to address this challenge is very helpful.

Almost fifteen years ago, inspired by then MIT President Susan Hockfield, Tod Hynes and I started to work to do something unique with the existing committed players in the MIT energy field, at both the faculty and student levels (including John Deutch, Ernie Moniz, Richard Lester, John Tester, Don Lessard, and more; and probably most importantly the students, including David Danielson, Nol Brown, Joel Moxley, and others too numerous to name). We looked to integrate our expertise in entrepreneurship with the powerful technical and policy capabilities that MIT had in the field to create a specialized lane for students of clean energy entrepreneurship.

This started with a class called “Energy Ventures,” which was built off applying the fundamental framework of launching a company to the energy sector. The course was designed to be interdisciplinary and bring together technical, policy, business, and strategy courses across MIT and Harvard to create a space and structure to develop new startups in the field.

It turned out this was not as easy as we thought it would be, as these two articles about the journey explain (What’s Wrong with Energy Investing Part 1 and What’s Wrong with Energy Investing Part 2).  The insights we gained as we dove into it led us to carefully design the Energy Ventures course differently than our other entrepreneurship courses at MIT.

We also had another insight; that we needed to celebrate these entrepreneurs and create a new platform for them to succeed because these ventures were not going to be able to compete with traditional entrepreneurship for short-term recognition. This was the genesis for the MIT Clean Energy Prize, which owes eternal thanks to NSTAR’s and now Eversource CEO Joe Nolan for supporting us at the birthing stage and the first five years of existence.

Fast forward 15 years later and the Energy Ventures Alumni group is now a strong and extremely powerful community of 500+ change makers who continue to help each other in this generational challenge. Alumni have spun off many dozens of companies and organizations like Greentown Labs that have done enormous good for the world. Many alumni are now in government, large corporations, investing groups, academia, and other organizations so the community has expanded well beyond just startup founders.

At the Trust Center, we now work with leaders in Texas on a project called TEX-E to bring this influence beyond just those entrepreneurs getting educated in the Boston area. We have hired our first EIR (Entrepreneur in Residence) dedicated to climate tech, the great Ben Soltoff. He works closely with Greentown Labs, now the biggest clean energy incubator in the world, in both Boston and its new location in Houston. Our center not only continues to support Tod Hynes, Frankie O’Sullivan, Libby Wayman, and Jacquelyn Pless in teaching the continually updated Climate and Energy Ventures course, but we have brought Tod on as a Senior Advisor to our center after his success in the marketplace.  The Boston/MIT Clean Energy Innovation Ecosystem is considered the gold standard for building entrepreneurs who can address the two-prong imperative of energy and climate.

So what does this have to do with the English Royalty coming to Boston? Actually a lot.

When it became clear there was an opportunity to bring this high-visibility program to Boston, there were some interesting connection points. (Note that they give out five awards for £1 million each, which gets a lot of attention, but with all the other press and dignitaries and a big party, the eyeballs are even more critical.)

First of all, the Earthshot Prize is based on the concept of the US Moonshot program; i.e., set out a big hairy audacious goal that then helps to align massive resources behind it to make it happen in a dramatically expedited fashion. It all started in September 1962 with President Kennedy’s speech on the subject that said the US will work to land a human on the moon before the end of the decade, which many felt was preposterous. (Note: It is so worth watching that speech again; just click on the link and it has the critical 60 seconds. Amazingly inspirational!) President John F. Kennedy is from Boston and his beautiful library resides in this city. It is the 60th anniversary of that transformative speech and this was not lost on his daughter.

Caroline Kennedy sent a personal letter to the Earthshot Prize selection committee to propose Boston as the site for the prize ceremony in 2022. But more than just a sentimental narrative was needed to be successful. There also had to be a logical narrative and this related directly to the leadership role that Boston has taken in this area. The selection committee was intrigued, but more needed to be done.

The second step was closing the deal in convincing the selection committee that Boston was the proper venue – and the Kennedys turned to Tod Hynes. Tod hosted them at the Trust Center with slides, videos, and visitors. He organized and then gave them a red-carpet tour of MIT and then the city, which he was now working to align behind this bold concept. He was very close with the selection committee and convinced them Boston was the location.

Simply put, while the Kennedys are at the front of the line for making this happen (and there are other players too), it is fair to say that there is no Earthshot Prize in Boston without Tod Hynes. By extension, there is also no Earthshot Prize in Boston without the powerful community that made this region a leader in this field. While you will not see them in the pictures of glitterati, I could care less. They are the real heroes here in my mind. It was a fifteen-year overnight success. Everyone shows up for the party but the hard work was done well before.

It’s dangerous to do so because I will leave someone off the long list of so many extremely deserving individuals, but I will still make a call out to a few who have contributed so much to this effort yet were not mentioned above: Alex Prather, Emily Reichert, Lara Cottingham, Brian Korgel, David Baldwin, Barbara Burger, Michael Kearney, Alicia Carelli, and Susan Neal.

Thanks to all whether named or not. And now you know how DE helped to get Prince William and Kate to Boston and all the other commotion. Still blows my mind. What we create can really change the world. Believe.

PS: By the way, winning these prizes can be overrated. Working hard to try to win them and creating a dedicated team that is able to achieve initial escape velocity, whether it wins or not, has been shown to be the real gold that comes out of these competitions. More often than not, the entrepreneurs who don’t win end up being the most impactful and the competition just got them going. Still, I can’t help myself from sharing that one of our student teams, Takachar, was one of the five winners in the first round of Earthshot Prizes, and came out of our Energy Ventures course. So proud of them.

Very sad to see the passing of truly one of the most impactful (and often overlooked for the magnitude of his impact) and greatest people in the history of the computer industry, Fred Brooks, but happy to see him acknowledged with a robust obituary in The New York Times.

His vision and then subsequent implementation of the first commercial operating system (System/360) essentially made not just the software industry viable but arguably the entire computer industry. To put it simply, he allowed software that was written to be abstracted from the hardware allowing that investment and progress to continue independently of the rapidly evolving hardware (which was driven exponentially, powerfully, and inexorably by Moore’s Law). I had always profoundly admired him while I worked at IBM, because he (the Hacker) along with Thomas Watson, Jr. (the Hustler), created the dominant company that IBM became—so much so that our only serious competitor when I started working there in the early 1980s was the US Antitrust Division which constantly (and appropriately) brought anti-trust litigation against IBM. And creating IBM, really created the computer industry.

I also treasured and still do treasure his book “The Mythical Man Month” which crossed the line from straight engineering wisdom to wisdom of how to better understand how human systems work with technology as well. Both are needed to produce advancements.

I had the enormous privilege of working with him at SensAble Technologies when he was the head of the Computer Science Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I remember him as clear as day as one of the nicest people you could ever meet. He was already a legend and I was in awe of him. He was in his 60s, yet he had more energy, intellectual curiosity, and youthful zeal than any student I had ever met. The conversations were electric. I was stunned when this old man (to me then) wanted to pull all-nighters to keep working on the projects (admittedly with Thomas Massie then in his twenties and the true hacker founder). I was blown away.

His contributions make him a towering figure in the history books but, to me, he was an even better human. It makes me so happy to hear he lived such a full life in wonderful Chapel Hill and the most joyous part of the whole article to me is “In addition to his son Roger, Dr. Brooks is survived by his wife; his brother, John Brooks; two more children, Kenneth Brooks and Barbara La Dine; nine grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.” RIP Fred and kudos for a life well lived.

I have so much respect for people like Fred and Bob Metcalfe and Mitch Kapor who have been such impactful figures in this field yet can also be such decent humans and give back. This is the model we should celebrate. We certainly see some examples that are not aligned with this humanistic way of living and too often it is celebrated in many forms of media. Sometimes I have heard very misguided people state that you need to be like that to be impactful. Not true! Fred was a shining example. Let us not forget that part too. Maybe that is the best legacy of all for the rest of us in today’s world.

A Critical Analysis Through the Lens of the Oct 31, 2022, Pitchbook’s Ranking of Universities Based on Entrepreneurial Output.

How does one assess the effectiveness of one’s educational programs? This is an incredibly hard problem in any case especially when it comes to entrepreneurship education. There are so many contributing factors it becomes impossible to know for sure. That does not mean we should give up. We must strive to constantly look for data points to objectively provide feedback on the reality of how well we are serving our mission.

In this regard, the just released “Pitchbook Study of Universities: Top 100 colleges ranked by startup founders,” by Jordan Rubio & James Thorne provides one relevant and insufficient benchmark. While I have an immediate negative reaction to rankings in general (we should never pit entrepreneurship educators against each other, we are all in this together), this one is extremely data-driven with a powerful data set that Pitchbook has been able to accumulate and does not have ambiguous formulas to determine ranking. Jordan and James are very transparent and even give filters to look at the data, which will come in very useful.

This study provides a benchmark to give a sense of how the overall output of various top institutions.  There could be a list of weaknesses hundreds long of what this fails to capture (I will highlight some later) but because we get a view of the raw data, I would like to make a few observations and add to the dialogue.

On a first pass of the numbers, thinking about ourselves, we are in great company. MIT ranks 4 in undergraduates, 3 in graduates, 6 in female founders undergraduate, and 3 in Female founders graduate. That being said there is another way to interpret the data that I am immediately left wanting. What I want to see is these results in some ratio relative to the total population. In that way, we could compare like to like. Think of this as the density of VC-backed founders (as a proxy, imperfect as it might be) per institution.  I have not seen this before and wished we could normalize the numbers, and we have made a first pass at this below.

But even before this is done, the beauty of this study is that Jordan and James have given us a first step in this direction because in the filters, you can see “Total Enrollment” as the second filter and there are three options: “15,000 or fewer students,” “15,001 to 29,999 students,” or “30,000 or more students”.  When you click on the filter to look at the institutions of 15,000 students or less, MIT is the clear #1 leader in all of these by a wide margin (on average 2.3 in number of founders who raised). This aligns more with what we see on the ground. The MIT ratio would be very high. Is it the highest? We don’t know for sure but normalizing the numbers makes me feel like this is a much more valuable benchmark. Well, when we discussed this at our center and everyone agreed. In fact, one of our EIRs, George Whitfield, took the initiative to utilize publicly available numbers and do this normalization.

This yielded the following (unaudited) results for Undergraduates:

Likewise for Graduate students:

Note: We did not have a data set we were comfortable with regarding the dimension of women founders which is important to provide insights into the inclusivity of the entrepreneurship education programs so that can be a later exercise.

This is in no way saying that these are the only KPIs or the key KPIs to measure our success, they are not in our opinion. It is but one data point that is flawed in so many ways. Does this mean that MIT and Stanford are the best? No, that is not what we are saying and we know that we are imperfect and always strive to get better in any case. In fact, the ranking mentality of pitting educational institutions can have a positive side to benchmark what is working but it also can have a very dark side. Entrepreneurship educators must work together. This is not a competition between each other. We have a common goal. The competition is against bad or no entrepreneurship education. We radically share and open source everything we do. That is what we all must do if we are to advance the field in the manner it needs to so as to address the challenges we face as a society.

That being said, it is good to have objective measurements of how we are doing—this is one data point and it is heading in the right direction. I wish it would go a step further to normalize the numbers based on student population size. It would still not at all be the singular or even most important metric to measure progress, but it would be a proxy for progress and success.

What are some of the other areas for improvement in this study?

1. Assumes that VC-backed founders are a proxy for success. We know this is not the only path to success. Entrepreneurs may not need to get nor should they seek VC funding to be successful.
2. We do not know the success rate of these companies, rather we just know how much they raised.
3. It does not normalize for input. Maybe MIT students would have raised money and been successful no matter what we did?
4. Which raises the question, how much a difference did we really make? Did we instill an entrepreneurial mindset into them? If so, how much? How much did we improve their skill set? How much did we improve their ability to operate like an entrepreneur in a community-based manner with resources beyond their control?
5. Ultimately, we as educators should have a goal (i.e., teaching objectives) that we instill in our students (e.g., mindset, skill-set, and way of operating per point #4 above) and measure our students before and afterward to determine the progress made in all of these categories.
6. In this ideal scenario, we would be able to measure the positive progress in the key areas mentioned above in #5 and our entrepreneurs would thrive as founders but also as entrepreneurs joining startups and also as entrepreneurs in existing organizations (government, academic, corporate, government, non-profit or others) and we won’t have to rely so heavily on numbers like those in Pitchbook but until then we have to work with what we have and keep making it better.

I would also note that recently we completed a ten-year empirical research study of the success of our delta v program that relates back to this topic of assessment and those extremely interesting results are available here.

Assessment will continue to be the 800-pound gorilla in the room for entrepreneurship education in my opinion. How do we know what we are doing works? To know, we have to have measurements and while there is some work done in this area, there is so much more that needs to be done to differentiate the effective from the ineffective… and do more of the effective. Like most other things in entrepreneurship, we can’t wait for the perfect, we have to go with what we have and keep improving it.

Afterword: I wrote this up and then read an email from my original mentor at MIT, Professor Ed Roberts, who had done numerous landmark studies on the impact of entrepreneurship and he had done a similar analysis so I guess I was trained well.