Articles

Entrepreneurship is vital not just for economic growth and prosperity, but also for social harmony. It creates jobs and gives peoples’ lives more purpose and meaning. The solutions for many of society’s most intractable problems come not from governments or established companies, but from new companies that unleash the creativity and energy of the human race.

This past week, I had a reminder of the toughest and maybe most critical challenge a founder has to face. A very composed founder had worked incredibly hard over the summer to get their new startup off the ground and they were succeeding. They had real customers and they had real investor interest. Things looked great but they weren’t. As so many startups have, the executive team was not working well together.

In entrepreneurship, you are taught to first identify a problem, then find a solution. When you put this solution into action, you begin creating ideas and establishing them into a business plan. At MIT, you are taught to be disciplined and structured; yet, you are also reminded to loosen the grip around our ideas. When you hold on to an idea too tightly, you risk suffocating it.

Since 17th April 2018, I am founder and host of the MIT Bootcamp Alumni Association (MBA²), a bespoke and private online network that holds space for the MITx Entrepreneurship Bootcamp Alumni: “An exclusive Mighty Network, built by MIT Bootcamp Alumni, for the MIT Bootcamp Alumni.” 

You never know what in a day will make your day a great one. Recently, I had on my calendar a meeting with Vicky Hamilton from Scotland Can Do Scale Summer School. It is always fun to see Scottish entrepreneurs, especially after this program because they really treasure the workshop and then go out and work hard to put the concepts to work.

Theranos. The now defunct company creates a visceral reaction with people when you say its name. Try it. Its story has been detailed in the book Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by Wall Street Journalist John Carreyrou, as well as the HBO documentary movie The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley. I would hope none of my students would ever do such a thing, but how do I know?

On September 12, 2019, Martin Trust passed away peacefully in Brookline, Massachusetts. While not a surprise, this was still sad in so many ways, but, as he would wish, there was a positive side to this news. In the big picture, you could not ask for any more from 85 years of life than what Marty Trust got out of it and what he gave back in the process.

As the Director of EPIC Lab, the entrepreneurship center at ITAM—a leading private university in Mexico—I have had the great opportunity to closely follow the Martin Trust Center’s Delta v program for the last six years.

“delta v” is our capstone program at MIT for the best of the best student entrepreneurs, the most committed, the ones that made the most progress during the school year. We take a subset of them, about 100 participants, at MIT and in NYC at our Startup Studio and push them to the max to help they achieve “escape velocity”.

I was interviewed on August 23, 2019 by Philip Bouchard, Executive Director of TrustedPeer Entrepreneurship Advisory. This whole interview was republished here with his permission.