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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.

A few weeks ago, I had the good fortune to get an early release of the book That Will Never Work: The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea by Marc Randolph. Marc and I grew up about 2 miles away from each other and went to the same high school. He was a very good guy and while we were friends, by the time high school arrived and after, we traveled in different circles. I had heard he was a co-founder of Netflix but it was hard for me to visualize how that happened and while curious,…

It probably all begins with a desire to do more, be more, and connect with something bigger: that’s the common denominator that starts to connect those who enroll in the MITx Entrepreneurship courses on edX. These MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) are centered around Bill Aulet’s global bestseller ‘Disciplined Entrepreneurship’ and made available to prospective students worldwide through the open-source, non-profit platform known as edX.

This past week reminded me yet again of a common pattern in new ventures that is one of the most common killers of new ventures even if they get the 24 steps done well. It is what I call the “tree house mentality”. I call it this because I remember when we were young and growing up, we would build tree houses—which generally were platforms in trees. They could be more elaborate with walls and open windows and maybe even a roof. You had to climb to get to them but once you got to them, you felt…

This past week, a friend sent me a link to a video talking about how Roger Federer sleeps 12 hours per day. Turns out he is not the only athlete at all who does this. Lebron James, Usain Bolt, Steve Nash, Venus William are in the same boat. I know some entrepreneurs would say that “sleep is for the weak”. 

As I run workshops for entrepreneurs, a key part of our training is that they have to focus. Entrepreneurs have to select a beachhead market and then actively deselect other markets. It is very common that students have resistance to this step from mild to actively and emotionally rejecting this concept as wrong.