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change, social injustice, economic injustice, medical costs & access, financial inclusion, food security, crumbling and outdated economic infrastructure, and much more.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.”

Last month as things started to wind down for the holidays and lecturing in classes slowed down, I had the exciting opportunity to host the CFOs from Zoom, Peloton, and Grubhub at the MIT CFO Summit and the CFO Leadership Council Conferences. This was a great chance to talk directly with leaders in some of the real rocket ships in this COVID crisis. These are three poster examples of companies who have seen effectively managed the dramatic market shifts to more digitalization as was highlighted on the front page of The Wall Street Journal at the same time.

Let me summarize six key lessons learned from analyzing what made them so successful:

1. Understanding how technological capabilities are changing.
   All saw the possibilities from the evolving technological advancements but that was necessary but wholly insufficient on its own.
2. Understanding changing consumer behavior patterns.
   Just because something is possible, does not mean customers will adopt it. You need to understand customer habits and if they are open to change, which generally they are not… unless…
3. Building an organization with the capability to realize this opportunity.
   The companies vision is that something will be possible and it will be adopted by customers over time. The question is “When?”. You have to put yourself in a position to capitalize on the changing trends in #1 and #2 above but not bet on a specific time. It usually takes much longer than it seems it logically should (in B2C and B2B). Put yourself in a position to capitalize with a strong organization and resources but not too many resources that you lose your muscles to listen to customers very carefully. Creating new markets and changing customer buying habits is very hard and takes time. You can’t just listen to what customers say they want in terms of product, you have to understand their *real* underlying problem and continually validate that you can address it even if their embrace of your efforts is not as complete and as widespread as you would like. Believe in the vision of what these trends are telling you but do not get ahead of yourself in counting on customer adoption faster than they are willing to accept. Push the frontier with a market segment (your beachhead market) but also have patience.
4. Recognizing a window of opportunity when it comes.
   Sometimes, luck will fall your way, and there will be something to disrupt the status quo. These often represent outstanding opportunities to change behavior and habits for the better. You must recognize them immediately and capitalize on them. We talk extensively about this in Step 13A in the Disciplined Entrepreneurship Workbook. Realize this is your time and you must invest to take advantage of this finite window and if you miss it, your investments in customer acquisition afterward will likely be at best much less efficient and likely a waste of resources. You must seize the moment.
5. Moving fast—clock speed is critical.
   The speed with which you can iterate with customers once you get the opportunity in this window is critical. One of my favorite quotes is from Thomas Edison who said something to the effect that the measure of innovation is how many times one can iterate on a new idea within 24 hours. You have this golden, perishable opportunity and you have to deliver, be responsive, and win their trust. Be humble, hungry, and even more hardworking during this unique time.
6. Being data-driven:
   In his book That Will Never Work, Marc Randolph talks about how “nobody knows anything.” All we can bring to the discussion to start is a well-reasoned hypothesis but we need to then test it with data. Great companies like Netflix, Amazon, Google, and others use data religiously to tell if the hypothesis is right (or what we call Step #23 “show the dogs will eat the dog food”). Peloton, Zoom, and Grubhub, not surprisingly, also strongly embrace this approach.

Now that I have given you the lead, let me explain how I got there and dive a bit deeper. (It should be noted that Marius Ursache is the editor of this website and when I first sent him my blog post, he wisely suggested that I not “bury the lead.” Maybe I am getting more academic without even noticing so I rewrote to bring the six points to the top.)

I agreed to moderate the fireside chats/interviews because I was interested to see firsthand if they had seen the opportunity coming and intentionally prepared in a way that would be instructive to others. I was also anxious to see what they did they separated them from their competitors. Lastly, I was interested in any other lessons to be learned that could be translated to other situations on how to be more “resilient plus” (the new term for “antifragile”).

On the first point, for all three companies, they saw the megatrends changing in their favor but even so were caught by surprise by how it was all dramatically accelerated by the pandemic. Weren’t we all! They had no special insight at the micro-level. They were all however completely committed to the future of dramatically more digitization so they had a head start for sure. So the answer to the first question above is that they did not succeed because they had brilliant insight with regard to a crisis like this happening, it just happened to support their existing thesis. Like everyone else, they were caught off guard.

Secondly, what separated them from their competitors seems clear to me was their attention to the data signals and the clock speed with which they adjusted. It was also very reassuring to see that they all did so with empathy. By this I mean, they were not trying to profiteer but really thought hard about the impact it was having on their customers and broader society. Zoom made its platform available for free to over 100K schools very quickly. Grubhub thought deeply about the ramifications on their restaurant owners as well as the consumers and made the conscious decision to forego short-term profits to help the communities deal with their very deep and serious challenges.

It should be noted that all of these companies had sufficient resources – cash on the balance sheet – to think longer-term which is a luxury but one earned by disciplined execution. This had put them in a place where they were not vulnerable or fragile to sudden challenges. Very smart and not an accident. It should also be noted that they did not have so much money – see WeWork as the grossly extreme case of this – that they had lost their discipline. They were financially frugal but also had built a buffer so they could be resilient. This kept them hungry, humble, and in touch with the market place.

What was strikingly clear in talking to all of these companies is that they were not some sort of super visionary led companies with a Steve Jobs-like character at the top talking about dramatic changes that no one else was seeing yet, they were driven by data. The most important data was with regard to customer engagement and adoption by market segment. They also noted that dramatic changes in CAC/CoCA as well. In the heat of this crisis, the story of success on these gold standards of excellence is not some special crystal ball or insights by a futuristic guru making big risky bets, it was about understanding the market place and adapting quickly.

A great example of this was Zoom and security. While sales were taking off for this company early on, there were competitors chomping at the bit to take them down. Product and service shortcomings were certain to be exposed and highlighted by analysts and competitors. The newfound spotlight created more scrutiny than they had ever had before. There were features and usability shortfalls that needed to be taken care of and Zoom did an outstanding job addressing these rapidly.

The existential threat came with the security challenge. Starting in April, the media questioned with great intensity and great specificity the security of Zoom and it was not clear if Zoom was going to survive this valid question. The company responded with speed and force not by attacking the messenger but by addressing the problem. They made security a top priority and systematically came out with new features (including buying a security company) at a pace unimaginable just a few years (if not last year). While the issue has not gone away and should not, it is no longer the proverbial Sword of Damocles dominating every conversation about Zoom. Honesty in reading the market, willingness to acknowledge weaknesses, speed to address and disciplined execution are what have kept Zoom on top.

So this is how I got to the six lessons above in the lead.  Knowing the principles above and executing them successfully, no matter if the crisis is COVID or anything else, is good counsel to help make you and your organization more “resilient+” (the “artist” formerly known as antifragile).