People often ask me when I am going to write another book. This is a funny question because I did not intend to write the first one. It is also incredibly hard to do it and get it right. Don’t get me wrong, I am very glad I did but I only did it because I knew there was a big need for it.

That being said, I am considering writing another one and I need your feedback. A topic that I think would be very helpful is “Financial Literacy for Entrepreneurs.” I will be releasing chapters and resources in the following weeks/months on this website, so make sure you subscribe to get notified:

Understanding the fundamentals of finance is not that difficult but too often I have seen entrepreneurs, especially engineers, who are just mystified by it and tend to ignore this critical part of any business for no good reason. This does not mean you have to be an accountant or a finance geek but every entrepreneur should know enough (that 20% that gives you 80% of the value and 95% of the confidence) to effectively run their own business and guide a finance group at a high level. It should not be a mysterious black box part of the business.

So my goal is to make the basics of finance accessible to all entrepreneurs who are willing to put in a little work. You don’t need to get an MBA to understand finance enough to run your business more effectively and to build models to improve decision-making on tradeoffs for an important decision. It is also imperative when the entrepreneur is thinking about and then executing a fundraising process – unless the entrepreneur just wants to delegate based on blind faith this dimension of the business. I strongly recommend against this. I am always saddened to see great entrepreneurial teams not realize their full potential because of a blind spot for understanding the critical scoreboard for their business, finance.

After all, if you don’t have money, you don’t have a business and if you don’t have enough money, your business will die and help no one.

My hypothesis, based on seeing thousands of entrepreneurs now, is the first gap that needs to be addressed is financial literacy and then this leads to fundraising. To do the latter before the former is to put the cart before the horse, i.e., the order is backward.

I should note that I am currently working on an edX course on this topic with MIT finance professors Antoinette Schoar and Matthew Rhodes-Kropf so your feedback will help focus this on the right topics as well.

Thanks for your feedback in advance. If the feedback is sufficient, I will post a new chapter here on a regular basis (depending on how long it takes to complete but it would be approximately every two weeks or so to start) and the project will move forward.

On September 14, 2021, I sat down with my old friend Dr. Peter Hirst for a LinkedIn Live fireside talk on the current state of entrepreneurship as we transition out of the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic and where I think it is going in the future.

While I am asked to give talks on this topic frequently, I particularly enjoyed this one because of the interactive format and Peter Hirst deft moderating. It is always fun to take questions from the audience which surpassed 2,000 live. So, while it is 57 minutes long, you can listen to it as a podcast while you are driving or working out at 1.5x speed and get the information.

COVID has made having an entrepreneurial mindset, skillset, and way of operating more important than ever but it is also changing it in fundamental ways. Without further ado, you can watch the whole event below. While I will take positions and have opinions on things, I don’t profess to be right all the time and would love to hear other perspectives in the comments section so we all can learn and get closer to the truth.

If you have thoughts on this, I’d love to hear them—use the comments section below!

The MIT delta v Demo Day is always my favorite day of the year. It is a chance to see the best of the best at MIT in entrepreneurship crystalize their one-year journey in entrepreneurship and it also welcomes the next wave of students who will be on the stage the next year.

It is a chance to be inspired by the next generation and see what problems they are focused on. Let’s be clear, there are a lot of problems to be addressed: climate change, social injustice, economic injustice, medical costs & access, financial inclusion, food security, crumbling and outdated economic infrastructure, and much more. It is overwhelming and can be depressing. Where do we start?

We must not be overwhelmed and we must try to do something feasible to make a difference. That is the essence of entrepreneurship. Do something small to start to get things going but have a path to greatness to solve big problems. Beachhead market to follow on markets. Land and expand. Nail it then scale it. Call it whatever you want.

The essence of innovation-driven entrepreneurship is to do something and have it work and then grow it.  You must have your feet on the ground and be able to take one step forward but have a plan to get to the top of the mountain where you touch the sky. Do something that will put a dent in the universe and make a difference in the enormous problems facing us all today.

That is precisely what the MIT 2021 delta v teams have done. Huge ambition but concrete plans to get from where they are today to that place of high impact.

I am beyond proud to present this year’s cohort so incredibly ably run by Trust Center Entrepreneur In Residence (EIR) and Senior Lecturer Carly Chase in her first year after taking over the full reigns from Dr. Trish Cotter. Carly, along with the other Core EIRs Paul Cheek, Kit Hickey, and Kosta Ligris and swing EIRs Gabrielle Haddad, Sandy Kreis Lacey, Brint Markle, Dip Patel, and Kathleen Stetson did a fabulous job over the summer to prepare these teams for a Demo Day on September 10. At Demo Day, they presented to about one thousand people live (even in these COVID times) as well as many more than this online. The teams completely rose to this challenge too.

A huge thanks to the Trust Center Team led by Renee Benjamin, Brian Turnbull, Greg Wymer, and Magali Paoli. The teams were also supported by dozens of guest speakers and mentors as well as campus partners such as the Deshpande Center, MIT Sandbox Innovation Fund, MIT VMS, the Technology Licensing Office, and the Gordon Engineering Leadership Center. Finally, a special shout goes out to all of the 160 board members who volunteered their time for the month’s all-important mock board meetings. Thank you for lending your wisdom, expertise, and networks to help make the teams better. It certainly showed after each board meeting.

So without any further ado, let me introduce you to the MIT 2021 delta v cohort, the best of the best up and rising stars for entrepreneurship at MIT in the 2020-2021 Academic Year. The full list of teams, with details and links to connect to the ones you are interested in, can be found on the  MIT delta V accelerator page.

https://vimeo.com/603924504
https://vimeo.com/603938667
https://vimeo.com/603909757
https://vimeo.com/603905649
https://vimeo.com/603921793
https://vimeo.com/603898914
https://vimeo.com/603936021
https://vimeo.com/603933011
https://vimeo.com/603929818
https://vimeo.com/603919123
https://vimeo.com/603875987
https://vimeo.com/603927543

These are the new 2021 t=0 festival/Demo Day themed shirts, a concept originated by the Queensland University of Technology Entrepreneurship Group. Designed by Greg Wymer. Sponsored and made by Puma.

The academic school year just wrapped up and summer has officially started. It is a time to look back and digest an amazing year and look forward to what needs to be done next.

1. Observation – The Bar Keeps Going Up: After grading 41 business plans last weekend for the MIT Entrepreneurship 101 class (yes, despite the ranting about them, business plans are still an incredibly useful thing for entrepreneurs – just be careful how you define them and frame them in their value), I see the bar for quality in entrepreneurship continue to rise. This is so pleasing to see. Students are learning a broad portfolio of fundamentals and, very important as well, how to integrate them to increase their odds of success. That being said, there is still a lot of room for improvement (we were coming from a very low base) and I will get into some of this later in this article. I see this not just at MIT but also beyond. The headline observation is that highly skilled entrepreneurs are now much more common than they were just five years ago.
2. Summer Goal #1 – What Effect Will Pandemic Have:  Something that I am watching very closely is what effect the pandemic will have on entrepreneurship when it is finally over. It has made the value, or may I say the necessity, of being an entrepreneur clearer than it has ever been before. However, from an operational standpoint, what will the landscape look like when we can take our masks off and go back to work physically?  At this point, all signs point to what I like to call “pandemonium after the pandemic” rather than a return to the previous status quo. An economic boom is underway where fears of inflation have replaced fears of recession.  This is not true for all markets but true for enough to give entrepreneurs a target-rich environment. That being the case, what will this look like otherwise? Will there be an even more intense war for talent because it will be no longer restrained by geography? Will a great data scientist in Indianapolis be able to work for a Silicon Valley startup with the associated compensation while enjoying the quality of life and costs of living in Indianapolis? (replace Indianapolis with your favorite living place). What will the hybrid workplace of the future look like? There are profound unanswered questions and while many have hypotheses, nobody knows for sure. It will surely affect the future of entrepreneurship, potentially in dramatic ways which just don’t know how yet. This topic is rapidly evolving over the next few months and definitely something I am going to digging into more.
3. Summer Goal #2 – Entrepreneurial Sales: One of our most important courses, Entrepreneurial Sales, has just run into a crisis. After teaching the course so successfully for many years, the incredibly talented and successful trio teaching it, Kirk Arnold, Jim Schuchart, and Lou Shipley, have had to step back from leading this course for a variety of reasons. Living the Antifragile credo, we saw this crisis as an opportunity to rethink the course completely. In that process, we seem to have hit a vein of gold. Sales in an entrepreneurial environment have changed dramatically. The model we had built from the original frameworks that Howard Anderson put in place in 1998 when he started the course has lasted to this day. While there is much valuable material to be carried forward, we are thinking hard about whether a new framing of sales is in order to help us train the Chief Revenue Officers (interim or longer-term) of the next decade. We are also thinking about with that new framing, what additional materials and skill development we should add. The final question is how we should teach this. We have a task force looking at this and the more we dig into it, the more excited I get about the opportunity to produce very valuable new content for our students and the broader entrepreneurial community. We have to get this done over the summer because once September hits and the new school year starts, it is game time and the window of opportunity to have the time and space to do such significantly rethinking, redesigning, and developing is past – until next summer.
4. Summer Goal #3 – delta v 2021: Similar to the Sales course, we have new leadership in our flagship delta v program at MIT. After Trish Cotter was able to get us to a whole new level, Carly Chase has taken the reins and will build off what Trish has done and add her impact to the program. In these times of transitions, there is even more opportunity to explore experimentally-driven change. I am looking forward to supporting Carly as she does this and seeing how we can take this cornerstone program to yet another level. I look forward to seeing how we can continue to improve the apprenticeship model of teaching entrepreneurship and press forward the frontiers of entrepreneurship education.
5. Summer Goal #4 – Finance and Financing for Entrepreneurs: As previously mentioned, I think we now have the teaching of the mechanics of entrepreneurship to a more than acceptable level (but we will always seek to improve) but other areas need attention. In my personal entrepreneurial career, I realized how valuable it was to have an engineering, marketing, and finance skillset to build products and companies.  Having all three gave you a balanced perspective. I was surprised to find that that was unusual that was and have seen the consequences of unbalanced perspectives. Without at least a comfortable knowledge of finance, which is completely feasible and not that complicated, entrepreneurs tend to make decisions that significantly adversely affect their efforts. It starts with basic financial literacy. There is nothing to be scared of here and it can be explained relatively simply. Even if the entrepreneur wants to outsource these operations, it is still important to have an understanding of the fundamental concepts to manage them correctly and integrate them back in with the rest of the operations. After this, the process of fundraising can an unnecessary process of risk that can cripple or kill a company if not done correctly. We are creating an online class with world-renowned experts Professor Antoinette Schoar and Matthew Rhodes-Kropf (also an MIT professor but additionally a successful and currently active Venture Capitalist) to demystify Finance (starting with Financial Literacy) target at entrepreneurs. I must note how stimulating and fun it is to work with these experts who have dramatically different experiences and perspectives. Our goal is to no longer have great entrepreneurs who have found a great product-market fit with a differentiated product lose momentum because they don’t understand the financial aspects of the business. In my humble opinion, it is the easiest part of build a great new venture. Stay tuned and I have been working on this project for about a year and hope to wrap it up this summer. This will be a great complement to other materials like Brad Feld’s Venture Deals but bring a new unique piece of content to fill in the gaps.

I am sure there will be others things that pop up but there are my top four as we hit the first day of the summer. If I can get those done, it will be a very productive summer. If you have any thoughts on these topics, please share them with me. The collective wisdom of the group is always more than any individual or subgroup.

Best wishes to all of you for a restorative and enjoyable summer and I can’t wait for September when, hopefully, we can get back to a more normal life with the pandemic in the rearview mirror.

Interview by Robert Thurston for SFMBA Entrepreneurship Roundtable, February 2021

If the pace, abruptness, and unpredictability of change during the global pandemic has you hoping for a chance to catch your breath, MIT Sloan Professor of the Practice Bill Aulet has a word of caution. “The world never will be slower than it is today,” he says. “That’s a fundamental state of affairs that entrepreneurs must embrace if they are to thrive in the midst of—and most certainly beyond—this current global crisis.”

“The traditional approach to launching an enterprise is based on a command/control/conquer model,” says Aulet. “Gain control of resources and overpower your competitors. Go forth and win. The problem is that this approach only serves to optimize large organizations into doing what they’ve always done—which builds in a perilous fragility that can cripple a company when the marketplace and the world become more fluid and chaotic.”

According to Aulet, many leaders default to a posture of being robust and resilient in the midst of a crisis. “Robustness is a trap, however, because it’s actually a neutral condition,” he warns. “Robust people and teams maintain their course when faced with adversity or unexpected events. In today’s world, weathering storms by continuing to march straight ahead is not a sufficient condition for success.”

Building ventures that don’t break

The Martin Trust Center, by contrast, teaches what it refers to as a resilience-plus approach. “Resilience-plus comprises a mindset, a skillset, and a mode of operation better suited to chaotic, rapidly evolving circumstances,” says Aulet. “We want our students to embrace adversity as an invitation to up their games in the same way that champion athletes or great artists transform setbacks into greater creativity and higher levels of performance. That’s the resilience-plus mindset.”

Aulet summarizes the skillset in six points.
• Understand how technology trends are changing and look ahead to what’s next.
• Track changing consumer behavior patterns and the evolution of cultural norms.
• Build an organizational strategy that capitalizes on your understanding of what lies in the future.
• Be prepared to step on the gas when you see a new opportunity emerging in the marketplace.
• Continually iterate to create a spiral of innovation that refines your response to new opportunities.
• Run data-driven experiments to test and perfect your operating assumptions about future trends.

“Companies that excel in these areas—Zoom, Peloton, Netflix, Grubhub, for example—have thrived during the pandemic,” notes Aulet. “They each invested heavily in their assumptions about changing consumer behavior before COVID. When the crisis presented a window of opportunity, each company accelerated and evolved their offerings to meet the moment.”

A Marshall Plan for entrepreneurship in the U.S.

Going forward, Aulet sees an even greater need for MIT-style entrepreneurship across the country. “Forget any notion of restoring what existed pre-pandemic,” he advises. “We will have more health crises, additional civil unrest, greater climate-driven challenges, additional economic disruption. To succeed under those circumstances, companies must resist the natural temptation to hunker down and focus just on what they themselves do well. For the resilience-plus entrepreneur, the flipside of less control is greater opportunity to collaborate.”

Aulet believes a community approach will drive the next wave of entrepreneurship in the U.S. “Don’t let a lack of control over resources discourage you from pursuing a new opportunity that you believe is right for your company,” he says. “Instead, tap into the skills and resources that lie within your network but outside your organization. If you can create something of value through collaboration, you can help build an ecosystem in which every party gains something for their investment in a particular project. Be a great collaborator, and you will attract great collaborators.”

Even though the Martin Trust Center approach has gained global recognition, Aulet believes there’s much more work to be done. “If the world is coming around to us,” he says, “then we need to reach further out into the world. Kentucky, Ohio, Idaho, Pennsylvania, you name it. The entrepreneurial spirit is out there, waiting to be tapped in places where people feel alienated and believe they have little control over their destinies. My hope for the future is that young entrepreneurs will not only be inspired to make money but to make more entrepreneurs. If we build more resilience-plus people, we will build a resilience-plus society.”