MIT Antifragile Entrepreneurship Speaker Series: A Must Watch, Free & Available NowClassics 

One of my proudest projects from the past few years is the Trust Center Antifragile Entrepreneurship Speaker Series, which is now available to watch for free in its entirety. These 8 sessions were designed like a course to help the viewer understand what it takes to become more antifragile in concrete ways within the context we are living in right now.

The series went from concept to execution in about 30 days and it is content that will be relevant for a very long time. What follows is the story of how it happened and why you should spend time with it. You can view the full series of talks, with additional supplemental materials, or you can pick and choose individual talks, by going to https://entrepreneurship.mit.edu/speakers/

The spark for the series came when I saw just how unmoored our students were at MIT. The school has some of the best students anywhere and the COVID-19 crisis had turned their world upside down; they seemed frozen and did not know what to do next. This was truly unprecedented, unlike any other crisis in magnitude and uncertainty. The dotcom internet bubble burst, 9/11, the housing crisis of the late 2000s, the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombing, and the tragic killing of an MIT police officer all seemed more manageable than this. COVID-19 completely permeated all aspects of our lives and there was no end in sight for rational thinking people. It was a humanitarian and economic catastrophe of epic proportions… our students and others seemed lost at sea.

I had started to write individual pieces about what should be done. I found myself constantly referred back to a November 2019 article I had written about how our goal as entrepreneurship educators was to produce antifragile humans rather than to focus on their companies. That article now seems prescient—as if I had some insight on what was to happen. (I certainly did not.) I referred to this piece in every interview, article, and general discussion I had about how we should move forward.

Finally, it hit me that what was really needed was an integrated program on antifragility, like a mini-course, focusing on this specific context of our times. It would be rigorous yet give specific actionable guidance to participants. I thought the fastest and easiest implementation would be a speaker series, much easier now because people did not have to (and could not) travel. Everyone was getting used to being on Zoom. On Friday, March 27th, I drafted a program with themed lectures ordered in a logical sequence. The program would last for one month and have two talks per week at lunch time (Tuesday and Thursday) when MIT students did not have classes; 8 talks in total.

Talk 1: Decision Making in a Crisis

To start to be antifragile in a crisis, you have to stop the bleeding and make the initial decisions to essentially stay alive and stabilize things to buy yourself more time. For this topic, I immediately knew of two fantastic speakers who had literally been in life or death situations and had to make decisions with the ultimate consequences. Jocko Willink was a Navy Seal in Ramadi in the heat of battle during the Gulf War. He also became a renowned trainer of Navy Seals and a #1 New York Times best-selling author on the topic. My long-time friend and very successful business executive, Billy Campbell, had his own life-or-death ordeal when he was on the famous flight 1549 “Miracle on the Hudson,” which had to land on the river after its engines caught fire from bird strikes. Billy was in the back of the plane and had to make decisions on how to exit that, while different from Jocko’s, share similarities in their urgency and importance. He was the last passenger off the flight and has become friends with Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger.

Talk 2: Staying Mentally Strong

Our second talk focused on how do you stay mentally strong to fight the good fight over a longer period of time. Being antifragile in a crisis starts with a few decisions, but it needs to be sustained to be successful. I knew I wanted to get Arlan Hamilton, a young black woman who had the mental toughness to start a VC fund while she was homeless. I wanted to know how does one find the inner strength to achieve this when the adrenaline has slowed down from the initial rush. Founder and investor Brad Feld was also perfect to get involved in this discussion as he has frequently spoken out more honestly than anyone I know about the mental challenges that entrepreneurs face. Lastly, to show how this could be translated into concrete action, Kathleen Stetson was a “must get” for me. She had been very successful in her life then became an entrepreneur and experienced first-hand the relentless pressures that need to be overcome. Kathleen (along with the Trust Center’s own Trish Cotter) has been a very successful architect of a program for our most advanced student entrepreneurs, delta v, that helps them face this exact problem.

Talk 3: Making the Ethical Decision

The third talk was what I refer to as the “raison d’etre” or purpose that keeps you going when the going gets so tough. To be successful, the pursuit has to be about much more than the money. For this, it was clear that the work my friends and colleagues Tom Byers (Stanford), Jon Fjeld (Duke), and Laura Dunham (University of St. Thomas) was the ticket. Their discussion on Principled Entrepreneurship showed that profiteering is not going to last and is not an antifragile trait; instead being principled is sustainable and at the core of antifragility.

Talk 4: Creativity in a Crisis

The fourth talk would be centered on how to ideate once you know the general direction you wanted to go in. How do we manifest our desires, talents, and assets into concrete actions? For this, Tina Seelig, author of “Creativity Rules” and a professor in the world-famous Stanford Design Lab was my target speaker. At MIT, like many other places as noted in articles by Michael Grimshaw, we have also experienced great success with the use of “improv” to enhance the ideation and creativity process. As such, our favorite improv teacher, Dave Morris of TED Talk fame, was our first choice.

Talk 5: What Are the Opportunities on the Other Side?

In the fifth talk, I wanted viewers to get some expert guidance about where the new areas of opportunity would likely be. Forrester Research is the leading market analysis firm in the world and, when asking their founder and CEO, George Colony, who would be the best to address the topic of where the opportunities would be in the post-pandemic world, he immediately pointed me to James McQuivey. James was not just a VP and Principal Analyst there, but he was also an expert in consumer behavior and had literally written the extremely influential book, “Digital Disruption.” I also knew that the EdTech sector was facing substantial changes and we are very fortunate to have the world expert in educational disruption and entrepreneurship on the Trust Center Advisory Board. Jean Hammond had conceived, designed, founded, and runs LearnLaunch, the world’s largest accelerator, incubator, and investment fund focused on EdTech. It would be very helpful and concrete to hear her thoughts on how this sector will be transformed by the current crisis.

Talk 6: Market Positioning In and After a Crisis

The sixth talk was a chance to take a step back and think about how existing companies needed to be more antifragile. The world is made up of much more than startups. For this program, I knew exactly who I wanted, but I had no connection. It was Chris Reitermann, who was the head of Ogilvy Asia and Greater China. He was the author of a brilliant slide deck that had gone viral about how companies should position themselves in and after a crisis, and specifically focused on COVID-19. He was also particularly interesting because China was about 90 days ahead of the U.S., Europe, and pretty much the rest of the world is grappling with the pandemic, so it was an opportunity to almost look into the future to gain insights. We were also fortunate that when we finally got in touch with Chris, he brought along a fantastic operator, Allen Wang the CEO of Babytree, to give that perspective as well.

Talk 7: What Are the Opportunities on the Other Side

The seventh talk was to give guidance to students about geographical considerations when pursuing their chosen opportunities. Did geography matter before? Does it matter more or less now? Where will the hot spots for innovation be in a post-COVID-19 world? It is clear that Zoom and other digital technologies make a difference in how we work. Should it affect how they think about their plans going forward? The first expert in this area is Professor Scott Stern of MIT Sloan. He has extensively studied not just the importance of clusters, but also the effect geography has on entrepreneurship. Scott was the co-creator of the Startup Cartography Project, with his Ph.D. student, now Professor Jorge Guzman of Columbia, which is the most extensive research project ever on the relationship between location and entrepreneurship. I also felt it would be interesting to incorporate the work done by Inc. Magazine journalist Emily Canal on the Surge Cities Index of the most vibrant hubs for entrepreneurship.

Talk 8: Anfrifragile Teams, Organizations & Society: a How-To

While we had been talking primarily about creating an antifragile mindset, skillset, and way of doing business, in the last lecture I wanted to elevate the discussion to how to build antifragile teams, organizations, and ultimately, societies. While antifragile individuals are necessary building blocks, little of significance gets done by an individual; it is teams and organizations that create real results. As humans, we see the humanitarian and economic catastrophe that the COVID-19 crisis is creating and we want to move towards a more antifragile society as well too. Our dream team to speak to this was Hall of Fame Coach John Calipari, the head basketball coach at the University of Kentucky, and former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick. Every year, Coach Calipari has to take a new crop of the best young basketball players in America and mold them into an antifragile unit. He has written the book “Bounce Back” on this topic of how to utilize adversity to make a team better, successfully implementing it to win a National Championship and building one of the top college basketball programs for over a decade now. In Governor Patrick, we had an eloquent speaker who had addressed making society more antifragile for a long time and then had to put it all into action after the Boston Marathon Bombing incident.

When I started drafting out this program on March 27th, I did not have all of these details done, but I could see the picture coming together … and loved it! I could not help myself and worked continuously through the weekend to flesh out the series and get invitations out. Remarkably, by Sunday, March 29th, I had confirmation from 2/3 of the invited speakers. NO ONE said no!!! Every response was, “This sounds great. Count me in and my schedule is open right now because of the crisis.” I get excited often, but this was at a whole new level. I knew these talks were something that people really needed and there was nothing like it out there.

When the Trust Center announced the series, the response was immediate. Not only did MIT students sign up in droves but we also got people from around the world signing up. We had over a thousand people sign up for the first session with only 48 hours notice. It took off from there. Other regions took our content and built off it or crafted similar programs of their own in places like Australia, Ireland, Scotland, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and even domestically at places like the University of North Carolina. Because these events were virtual, we could make it available to everyone at no additional cost and also record the sessions for future viewing. Over 7,000 people signed up to view the live sessions and to date over 9,000 people have watched or listened to the 8 programs since. These have become the most popular material on our website at the Trust Center, and certainly for some period of time, for the entire MIT website.

I am confident that this material will have a long life and will be useful well after we make it to the other side of the COVID-19 crisis. I am also confident that this has spurred more beneficial dialogue and follow-on programs that will make us all a bit more antifragile as individuals, teams, organizations, and society. Enjoy any or all of the sessions and let me know your thoughts after you have watched. They are not meant as entertainment, but rather to provide inspiration, strength, guidance, and community to foster positive action from the anxiety our increasingly turbulent world causes for us.

I would also like to acknowledge the following groups for co-sponsoring this event with the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship: Queensland University of Technology (QUT) Entrepreneurship, MIT Startlabs student club, MIT Sloan Entrepreneurship Club, Martin Trust Exec Startup Group, MIT Sloan Executive Education, MIT Sloan Women In Management (SWIM) club, MIT Sloan Mindfulness & Leadership Club, MIT Regional Entrepreneurship Acceleration Program (REAP), and the Bernard M Gordon Engineering Leadership Program.