Evening Walk

Pumpkin Horseman

2011-11-02T13:53:00.000-04:00

Isn't this a cool way to keep up with the Halloween tradition? I love it when people take this one extra step to something fun and special.

2011-10-31T11:31:00.002-04:00

And that's how monumental changes occur. One parking lot at a time.

On another note, isn't it an interesting case of innovation when a company that thoroughly disrupts one market follows it up by disrupting another? Zipcar: redefined urban transportation and now it's in the avant-garde of electric car adoption. Netflix: movie rentals, online entertainment delivery. Apple: personal computing, music, mobile.

2011-10-26T11:55:00.001-04:00

This street musician in Brattle Square last weekend was awesome. He was standing on an Oriental rug, his Birkenstocks off and his white socks patched with colors of rainbow. He had his eyes closed and his body swinging back and forth. He felt free. And his music was great. He was totally awesome.

2011-10-25T11:34:00.000-04:00

Loved this sign. If you're going to have a huge yard sale, why not have a huge sign about it? The union of message and the medium.

2011-10-24T11:41:00.000-04:00

A few days ago I stopped by the office where I used to work two and a half years ago. Walking past my old cube, I noticed that the M.C. Escher poster that I put up was still there. Felt like I never left.

Memory, an antiquated notion in the today's workplace, lives on.

2011-10-17T17:32:00.001-04:00

I made a pleasant discovery at a recent wedding of a friend. That friend went to great schools, traveled to far and interesting places, worked for important organizations, and did meaningful things. But he came from humble beginnings and had to earn it every step of the way.

And in his wedding came together his friends from every step of his way. They came from many different places, and they do different things and lead different lives. I realized that, wherever he went, he reached out, threw himself in, built lasting friendships and cherished them for years ahead.

Life changes, we move places, we do new things, we meet new people. But what a wonderful thing it is to hold it all together through the years.

2011-10-17T14:32:00.000-04:00

What an apt description of our time.

2011-09-21T11:27:00.000-04:00

I think this is a really creative ad for a startups event on campus. Hats off to the creator.

Risk, Magic, and Taking Care of Your People

2011-09-18T00:42:00.006-04:00

The t=0 festival was a lot of fun today. The current MITER executive, Shambhavi Kadam, played a big role in organizing it. I think she did a great job and made MITER proud of the spirited exploits of one of our own.

Here are my two quick thoughts from the event.

When my friend and fellow Sloanie Tyler Spalding went on stage to demo his startup, he had two colorful balloons in his hands. As soon as he got on stage, he volleyed them into the audience and off they went bouncing from one person to another. Tyler then told the story of his startup, StyleSeek, a clothing recommendation and shopping platform for busy men who want style. Their tagline sums it all up, Style Without Effort. They are in closed beta now, but the way it works is you pick a few pictures out of different displayed, the engine does the rest and suggests clothes you'd like.

When Tyler pulled up the site and asked the last person who had the balloon to come on stage and give the engine a go, I went uh-oh. Risky, right? What an easy way to get embarrassed and get sent back to the proverbial drawing board. The stage guest, picked completely at random, looked at the pictures and selected those he liked, click and the engine's hourglass starting humming. You could feel drum roll in the air. But would you know it, boom, to everyone's complete astonishment the engine produced recommendations that included the very shirt and pants that the person had on. There was silence for a moment and then came an eruption of laughter. Magic.

A moment to remember. But there's no way it would have happened without risking the unbearable agony of embarrassment. Tyler has spent the better part of his final year of business school, plus the entire summer after, working dawn to dusk on StyleSeek. He sat next door to my startup Ubiquitous Energy during the E Center summer incubator and I could see him every day painstakingly optimizing the engine. It paid off.

So what is magic? It's risk plus almost obsessive preparation. And that, my friend, takes you to magical places.

Finally, and this is my second thought, when the event concluded there were tables put up with trays of burritos for people to congregate around and enjoy. One of my friends, who's the founder of a super promising startup, grabbed a stack of burritos and headed for the exit. He bumped into me and, showing the stack, smiled and said, "Going back to the office. This is for my team. They are still coding there and I need to take care of them."

It felt great hearing that from a fellow entrepreneur. A burrito for your teammate on a Saturday evening is a small gesture, but it matters big time. It shows how you treat your own. Every successful startups sees a good share of struggles along the way and to go through them you gotta have loyalty, which in turn only comes when you take care of your people in things big and small.

So take care of your people and the rest will take care of itself.

Entrepreneurs Hall of Fame

2011-09-17T13:22:00.001-04:00

I don't know how exactly it came about, but sometime last spring some chatter broke out at the E Center about creating the Entrepreneurs Hall of Fame. It really seemed like a humorous, leisurely brainstorm at first. "Hey, I have an idea, why don't we have sidewalk starts honoring entrepreneurs, just like Hollywood celebrates its own?" People tweeted back and forth about it for a few days, had fun, and then we all moved on to other fun brainstorms.

Or so it seemed. A group of local leaders made this idea their mission. And here we are: the Entrepreneurs Hall of Fame is now a reality, with Kendall Square emblazoned with commemoration of Bill Gates, Bill Hewlett and David Packard, Bob Swanson, Mitch Kapor, Steve Jobs, and Thomas Edison.

Here's a link to the inaugural video. Check it out and check out the stars in Kendall Square too, especially when you want to have a sports night at the newly opened Champions bar.

I hope you do dream to have your star there too one day.

2011-09-07T11:07:00.000-04:00

This summer the MIT Entrepreneurship Center recorded a few videos of local entrepreneurs sharing a piece of advice. Our startup was based out of the E Center this summer and so I ended up being in one of the videos. Thought I'd share.

2011-09-04T23:01:00.001-04:00

Today at the artist colony in Gloucester, I got attracted by a painting of two boxers in a ring fight. I asked an old man watching over the art garage if the painting was his and he said yes, adding that he had painted it years ago during a live radio broadcast of a boxing fight. An artist in him would see boxing in an interesting way, I figured. Turns out he even boxed himself. We stroke up a conversation.

Talk came to boxing practice. The key to boxing was speed, he said. Your hand must shoot out and shoot back with just as much strength before you even notice. When you're punching a bag, if you're really fast, the bag will jump up, not swing. Up, not sideways. "Anyone can get a bag to swing," he said, "It's just like pushing it, that doesn't hurt."

I've punched a bag a couple of times in my life. Naturally, I wanted it to swing, trying to hit harder and make it swing farther. For all I know, I could have punched it a thousand times more without ever realizing that the "jump", not the "swing", was the goal.

And so we often go through with things, shooting for the swing. Sometimes all the difference in the world is the luck of one brief conversation.

MITER's 1st Board Meeting

2011-09-03T23:50:00.001-04:00

Last Thursday the MIT Entrepreneurship Review held its first board meeting. It was a lively reunion of MITER's comrades after the summer break. The summer was an eventful one for us all. Chris Pirie had defended his PhD thesis the day before. Roozbeh Ghaffari had seen his startup MC10 seize new heights and raise a new round of funding. Kevin McCarthy took strides in his research of the dark matter, bringing closer the day when our team will be cheering for him at his PhD defense. Dante Cassanego had a great experience working for a school district in Boston as part of Education Pioneers. Yvonne Chung took the less beaten path and worked at Bain. Rob Lemos (who is on the screen of the laptop) and I graduated from Sloan and started new chapters in our entrepreneurial lives.

The mission of MITER's board is to maintain our focus on the vision of becoming the most regarded publication at the intersection of entrepreneurship, science, and technology. A very important part of this job is maintaining and growing MITER's strong sense of community and friendship.

I am happy to report from board meeting #1 that there's been no love lost.

MITER Dream Coming True

2011-06-27T11:26:00.002-04:00

When we started MITER a little less than two years ago, we wanted to build a tight community of bright minds who were on their way to make big things happen at the intersection of science, technology, and entrepreneurship. This dream is now coming true.

A few days ago members of the MITER team received this wonderful email from MITER co-founder, Rob Lemos.

"Hey Everybody,

The amazing reputations of our writing core continue to astound us! Shreerang Chhatre was featured in The Economist's most recent Technology Quarterly!! If you get the chance, pick up a copy of the June 4th Economist to see a description of his technology, pilot and an interview with him. Way to go, Shreerang!!!

Truly I say, it is because of all the great work that you all do that gives MITER it's prestige. So the next time you're cursing your lab, remember how important your work and research is to what we as a team are doing. Every one of us is truly part of something special! We are changing the world!

Enjoy the summer and keep writing!

Rob Lemos"

Certainly, we can't take credit for Shreerang's work. But we should be absolutely thrilled to have been able to attract someone like Shreerang to our team. It makes me excited for what's in store for MITER and our community in the years to come.

Almost forgot, here's the link to The Economist article: http://econ.st/kZgI3u.

MIT 100k Finale 2011

2011-05-20T01:13:00.000-04:00

Last week was the MIT 100k finale. I went to the event last year, had a lot of fun, and certainly wouldn't have missed it for the world this year. It's clear that it's become one of the key end-of-year festivities at MIT.

The 100K organizers did something new with the competition this year. They opened it up to the world at large through a new YouPitch video pitch contest. Great idea. This is the pitch that won it:

Isn't it really cool? And isn't it inspiring how talented some people are and how much fun creativity they bring to the world around?

Now onto the grand winner. I was overjoyed to see Sanergy will it all. To me, there couldn't have been a better team to win it, or at least one that deserved it more. During my two years at Sloan, few things impressed me more than how Ani Vallabhanehi and his team went about building Sanergy into the promising company that it is today. They just kept at it, kept at it, and kept at it. Perseverance and focus at their height. Shortly after winning the competition, the Sanergy team wrote a heartfelt essay telling their MIT Love Story. Definitely check it out.

The Big Stage

2011-04-26T12:25:00.000-04:00

Champions League semis kick off today - an opportunity to be reminded what a great sport soccer is. You can go anywhere in the world and strike up a passionate conversation about the game with a complete stranger and feel like you've known each other your entire lives when you are done.

Here's to soccer:

Globalization

2011-04-10T12:55:00.001-04:00

Man, globalization, a tectonic and indisputable phenomenon. Unlike climate change, for example, that's still being swept under the carpet like a dirty little secret by some corners of the political milieu, globalization is taken for granted. Still not a reason not to marvel at it.

I recently needed to find out a lot about the telecom business in East Africa. I've never been to Africa before, I've never met people who have been in the telecom business there, and unfortunately, at the moment I know very few people from Africa.

Doesn't matter. I called a friend in San Francisco, who's done a lot of work in East Africa, and within a couple of hours I had a dozen conversations planned with businessmen, policymakers, and academics in the region. Just within a couple of hours.

And that's not even the most fascinating thing. Every contact made had a spirit of goodwill, trust, and desire to help between people who were thousands of miles apart and have never met before, and probably wouldn't have otherwise. Absolutely fascinating and inspiring.

Maniacally Good

2011-04-04T01:39:00.001-04:00

On Saturday I visited an Edward Gorey exhibition. To be perfectly honest, I didn't know who Edward Gorey was before I went there. But there was an air of pilgrimage at the exhibition, like people were there to pay a personal tribute to an icon - they weren't just random passersby like me. I could soon sense why.

Gorey's art seemed to have a loud message, an important one too. It was unsettling, so foreign, and yet so true and personal, so mystifyingly reminiscent. Always seeming within reach, the message always slipped away. True art.

I noticed something else. Edward Gorey was a maniacal practicer. He practiced, and practiced, and practiced, and practiced some more. Pages after pages in his sketch books show object after object drawn in many varieties of ways - slight perspective change here and incremental improvement there. One by one in a thousand steps of mastery, they are the unsung heroes of genius. The final act of art - the reminder of what it takes.

What's in your sketch book?

Knowing Something Very Very Very Well

2011-03-31T11:05:00.003-04:00

I'm always impressed by people who know a certain topic to a remarkable depth, people who can teach about a topic in such a crystal clear way that you won't ever forget it. Such people uncover the magic for you, so to speak, making you appreciate the intrinsic importance of that topic and its complexity, and inspire you to study this topic further. One such person is my Sloan classmate and MITER colleague Jim Schuchart. He knows pricing to a tee.

About a month ago we both were working with our business plan competition teams through the night at the MIT E Center. Our team wondered how to quantify the value of our product and then derive the price. At 2AM, we pulled Jim in and he proceeded to deliver nothing short of a State of the Union Address on pricing, which I remember to this day. This week Jim published a MITER article called "Four Missing Steps to Pricing Like a Pro." If your startup is scratching your head about how to price our product, start with this article. Here's a preview, but do go and read the full piece.

"Too often startups take a dangerous route to setting price: just looking at how much it costs to make and how much competitors are charging, and then setting the price in between. The ambitious may even include “willingness to pay” to justify the numbers (but we now know better than that). But there is a better way. While costs and the competitive alternatives are certainly relevant inputs to pricing decisions, these companies are missing a critical component of pricing that causes them to leak profits. Top-notch pricing organizations know that understanding and quantifying customer value needs to be at the heart of these decisions."

The Treadmill Is Dead, Long Live The Treadmill

2011-03-25T20:01:00.002-04:00

It's getting lighter and warmer outside, the buds of spring will be bursting any day now, and for me, that brings a closing chapter of my time at Sloan. Chances are that this is the last time I'm ever in school full-time again, which is an unusual, unnerving, uplifting, and seriously liberating feeling all at the same time. Hopefully, I won't stop learning though.

Graduation promises a stop (or at least, a pause) to the sometimes maddening treadmill of meeting scheduling. The vast majority of homework assignments at Sloan are team-based, so when you mix that in with MIT's default belief that more (ie, much more) homework is better than less, you're always in the mode of coordinating with three to four people on each of your four to six teams. Finding a time during the day that works for more than two people is usually nearly impossible, so students resort to all kinds of tricks (Skype, divide-and-conquer by email, you-do-this-homework-and-I-do-the-next) and, frequently, late night weekend meetings. Once or twice, OK. But when it happens all the time, not fun, especially when so much time is spent just on coordination.

But it's been worth it. It's been really worth it. Now that the bootcamp is almost over, I can't speak more highly of Sloan's team-based approach. I don't think I would have gotten to know my classmates just as well without it. Not a chance. Going out together has been great, but actually working with my classmates helped me realize in full just how really really really good they all are at something in particular. It's pretty inspiring and makes me feel enriched at the thought of now having a great resource for almost anything. I loved it. But again, truth be told, I'm glad it's close to being over.

Although, of course, I'm fooling myself. A new treadmill is just around the corner.

Didn't See That One Coming

2011-03-21T19:50:00.000-04:00

The MIT Entrepreneurship Review recently celebrated its one-year anniversary. Just thinking about this, my heart fills with pride. We've gone from an idea among many in Bill Aulet's mind to a journal that publishes every day. From a team of three Sloanies to a team of forty students - undergrad through postdoc - from all across MIT and beyond. And from a group of spontaneously gathered volunteers to a tight, yet very inclusive, circle of colleagues and close friends.

You know what's fascinating about MITER's journey so far? We knew that we wanted to get to where we are now, but the things that truly got us here were completely unexpected. Hence the title, Didn't See That One Coming. Let me explain.

In the fall of 2009 we recruited our team of Founding Editors. One of them was Christopher Pirie, a PhD student in Biological Engineering at MIT and National Science Foundation fellow. He also had a broad curiosity in entrepreneurship. Needless to say, these characteristics were perfect for MITER. But in the end, they weren't what made the difference.

Here's what did. Very early I had noticed and started loving just how professional Chris was. He came to meetings on time, he always came prepared, asked constructive questions, graciously offered help, and when he promised something, he'd always do it. As students, we all dressed pretty casually, but Chris often went just a touch above casual. All of this may not sound like a big deal, but over time this couldn't but instill MITER with a spirit of professionalism. Yes, we were a student organization and we wanted to have fun, but we also meant business and weren't fooling around. We started to really pride ourselves for that. Didn't see that coming.

Then there's Roozbeh Ghaffari, who also joined MITER as a Founding Editor. We as founders couldn't believe our luck at seeing Roozbeh's application. He had an S.B., M.Eng, PhD, and postdoc - all from MIT - was a co-founder of a life science startup. Why anyone so accomplished would want to join us? We did seriously ponder that question. Well, Rooz just happened to notice a MITER poster somewhere along the Infinite Corridor, and, as he later told us, the liked the word "Review" in our name and so decided to throw his hat in the ring.

Now, it turned out, Rooz was a die-hard Lakers fan. He was so enamored with his team's Number 8 that we started affectionately calling him Kobe, which always produced nice laugh and giggles and so gave our team the go-to esprit de corps move when we needed it. Just say "Kobe!" and everything's gonna be alright. When the NBA playoffs started, we all really hit it off as friends. Many of the MITER folks watched almost all Finals games together, and my only consolation from the heart-wrenching Celtics loss was Rooz being on cloud nine - well, you can't be too sad about your friend's joy.

We couldn't have planned for Rooz being a Lakers fan and a basketball aficionado. How could we? But that bonding that it provided was extremely important for MITER. After spring, MITER, as a student organization, went into a summer lull. However, that spirit of togetherness that we had spontaneously and unexpectedly created carried us through and allowed MITER to pick back up quickly in the fall. Without it, it would have been incomparably more difficult to get MITER restarted in the fall.

In the middle of last year Kevin McCarthy joined our team as Copy Editor. He was a PhD student in Physics and just got interested in what were doing. It was great to have him on the team because we loved having students from different departments. But Kevin's job wasn't glamorous. Essentially, he was correcting grammar and fixing typos. An MIT Physics PhD fixing typos?!

And yet Kevin did do the job, always on time, always with quality, and what's more, always with enthusiasm and genuine commitment. Kevin's attitude fostered a sense within MITER that we're in this together, that no job is too small, and that if you want to do something great, roll up your sleeves and be OK with foregoing glamour. As MITER expanded, there couldn't have been a better person than Kevin to step in as a Managing Editor, which also gave MITER a strong internal sense that we are an organization that rewards hard work and commitment.

Nathan Trujillo joined MITER at the same time as Kevin did. Nathan was on my core team at Sloan and I had been trying to recruit him for several months. All of us at MITER wanted Nathan to join because he was both a PhD in Chemical Engineering and an MBA, a great educational combination for the kind of publication that we were. But what we didn't realize was that Nathan was an absolute stickler for quality. He hated typos and he hated when things on an article page wouldn't look right. And I soon realized that he was like not because he had some high believe in quality, but because he just was like that and that he actually got physical pains in his stomach when things on the page didn't look right. And so he went and fixed the typos and misforms, not because he wanted, but because he had to. I can't stress enough just how important that was. Even though we were a student organization and had some typographical leeway, Nathan's attitude brought to life our desire to be a high quality publication. Not by design, but by lucky accident.

In addition to Chris, Rooz, Kevin, and Nathan there have been many more MITERites who have made MITER a success, because of some unique, wonderful, and totally unexpected qualities. They are all gems, and one day I will tell their stories too.

Happy Birthday, MITER!

2011-03-12T20:41:00.002-05:00

Last Wednesday, March 9th, was the one-year anniversary of the MIT Entrepreneurship Review. The image above was the profile picture on our Facebook page on launch day - a wonderful memento. My mom may frown upon that, but MITER's birthday was more special to me than my own birthday. To me, my own birthday is my celebration of coming to this world; MITER's birthday is my celebration of making a difference in it.

My two fellow travelers at MITER - Rob Lemos and Yvonne Chung - have written their perspectives on MITER's anniversary. They are genuine, interesting, and inspiring, and they made me realize once again what an incredible strike of luck it is to be working with such outstanding people.

Read them when you get a chance. You'll like them.

Happy Birthday, MITER by Yvonne.

Startups Suck by Rob.

Complementary Skills, Consistent Values

2011-02-21T21:58:00.005-05:00

I grew up in a city where you could always see mountains on the horizon. The bustle of the city and the overwhelming equanimity of the mountains poses a beautiful, unforgettable contrast on a bright summer day.

When I moved to Boston I would often look at pictures of mountains to bring back memories of home. That's how I got interested in mountaineering and the stories of people who climb the world's tallest peaks. This week I've read K2: Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain by Ed Viesturs, a book that my classmate and kindred spirit, Max Jahn, has graciously lent to me.

Ed Viesturs has gone to the top of the world's fourteen tallest mountains -- no small feat, considering that one in four climbers who summit K2 dies on the mountain. In opening his book, I expected to find a suspenseful epopee in praise of the achievement. Instead, I found a caution:

"The most important lesson I learned from that beautiful and dangerous peak was a blunt one: Don't ever do that again, if you want to stay alive. Listen to your instincts, and follow them."

Up high on the mountain after hours of climbing and with bad weather looming, Ed and his partners needed to decide whether to push on for the summit or instead camp and wait, possibly never getting the chance again to summit the mountain. Climbing books say that this is the most difficult decision a climber ever has to make.

"As we trudged slowly upward in silence, I started calculating. Five hours to the summit, three back down to here - what are conditions going to be like hours from now if it keeps snowing? It was then that the knot started to form in my gut. As I later wrote in my diary, I was wondering, "What to do? The prudent thing is to turn back, but we kept going. Stupid? Probably. This is the worst part of climbing big peaks. Spend tons of $ & time to get to this point & you're faced with this decision."

Then came the following exchange:

"Scott and Charley obviously weren't going through the same kind of agonizing appraisal. When I finally stopped them and asked, "Hey, what do you guys think?," Scott answered, "Whaddya mean?" and Charlie seconded him: "We're going up!"

Ed Viesturs continued:

"I knew I was making the greatest mistake of my climbing life. And yet I kept going."

The party reached the summit, but the dramatically worsened conditions led to a very dangerous climb back in a horrid whitewash of snow and wind. The climbers did make it out alive, but were they lucky -- they were at a near cruising altitude of planes for sixteen straight hours. Ed Viesturs summed up the incident:

"I sat down in the snow outside our bevy tent. At that moment, I felt no happiness whatsoever at having climbed K2. Instead, I felt only anger at myself."

The Scott that Ed Viesturs mentioned above was Scott Fischer, and they never climbed together again. In the book, Ed Viesturs said that had turned down further opportunities to climb with Scott Fischer, because of their different attitudes on risk, which could be a life-altering difference on an 8,000er. Even though they had been great teammates in every other respect, that one difference was enough to dismiss being partners again. Scott Fischer later died in the infamous Mt. Everest tragedy in 1996.

Now, entrepreneurship isn't as dangerous as climbing K2. But Ed Viesturs' tale should be a telling one for entrepreneurs. It's commonplace to hear that teams should be diverse and partners should complement each others' skills. But this also begs the question of what should be the same. Indeed, what are the important areas, beyond the obvious, where business partners need to exhibit uniting similarities?

Risk profile seems to be one such important area. It's the foundation of so many highly consequential decisions -- the very decision to start a company is, to a great extent, a function of one's risk profile. Risk tolerance also influences the strategic decision of whether you go for broke to try and build a blockbuster or settle for something smaller, but more viable and secure. Your risk profile impacts whether you take money from investors now or wait and work toward a better deal tomorrow. Many, many important decisions.

Perhaps, the motto should be: Complementary Skills, Consistent Values.

Would You Want Kobe As Your Co-Founder?

2011-02-21T15:55:00.009-05:00

Last night, as I was following the NBA All-Star Game on Twitter, a couple of tweets by ESPN writers caught my attention:

"Kobe cruising toward MVP after dunk on LeBron followed by 3, even if he seems fairly determined not to collect assist #2 at any point."

No surprises there. Assists records appease aficionados, but MVP trophies define history. And Kobe knows that.

"Told Blake Kobe nearing Wilt. Blake: Should I tell him? Me: You think he doesn't know? B: Probably right. He checked record book on way in."

Translation: Kobe is an intensely and unabashedly achievement-oriented, ultra competitive shoot-first superstar, and everyone knows that.

For entrepreneurs, I can't think of a more fascinating character to contemplate than Kobe. He routinely makes the toughest shots imaginable, with aplomb, ice-cold expression on his face. Down one with ten seconds left in the game, most fans and players would still want the ball in Kobe's hands. But he's been vilified throughout his career for being a selfish teammate. He's a polarizing figure, to say the least.

Do you think Kobe would make a great entrepreneur?

As basketball fan, I've always tended to dislike Kobe. Because he strives to emulate MJ and to surpass him, which, more than any other player, I secretly feel he can. Because, allegedly, he forced Shaq out of LA, and I've always liked Shaq and his easygoing manner. And lately, because he's won a Finals MVP, which I felt he didn't deserve after a very bad shooting night in Game 7 against the Celtics last year.

Interestingly, I've always rationalized my dislike as, "Kobe is a bad teammate playing a team sport. Bad combination." But I find it hard to reconcile that with the fact that Kobe is a winner. And isn't that more important?

Not that the charges against Kobe are unfounded; I'm just curious to entertain the question. I suppose Kobe's controversial career could lead one to suggest one of the following:

(1) Measure up, not down. If Kobe was a better teammate, he could have won even more. It's not about the five rings he has, but the seven or eight he could have had, and that's the true mark of a champion. Without Kobe-inspired dissension within the Lakers, the Pistons still could have won in 2004, but not by 4-1. The Lakers could have beaten the Suns in 2006, but Kobe visibly gave up on his team in Game 7. Also, if Kobe wasn't an unabashed gunner and didn't go for 6-19 in Game 4 against Boston in the 2008 Finals, the Lakers might not have relinquished that 24-point lead and consequently the series.

(2) It's the journey, not the destination. Isn't there more to the game than records and rings? Take Steve Nash, for example. He is unanimously loved and admired by players and fans alike and will be after he retires, whether he wins a championship or not. When people think of a true ambassador to the game, they think of Steve Nash. Kobe is likely to be remembered in the annals of sports history as the controversial superstar, respected but not admired. And perhaps, taking a broad view of life, it's better to be loved than feared, better to be happy than satisfied.

(3) History is written by the victors. This is the unnerving, but perhaps most useful, conclusion to be drawn from Kobe. Here's what Kobe recently said of his teammate Pau Gasol: "Even when [Pau] was in Memphis and he was the go-to guy, he was always very nice. Very white swan. I need him to be black swan." He said the same thing last year, albeit in different words, and the Lakers won it all, with Gasol playing like a superstar.

Looks like Kobe likes the image of the black swan, he even had given himself the fearsome nickname The Black Mamba. But so what? He wins games, isn't motivated by anything but winning, doesn't beat around the bush and demands the same of his teammates, works hard like a maniac, always stays in shape, doesn't slack after signing a handsome contract, takes shots with the game on the line and is ok to draw the heat and be the bad guy when things go wrong. Wouldn't you want such teammate?

Yeah, many players wouldn't want to play second fiddle to Kobe. But there are also many who'd say, "I know what I'm getting with Kobe. I know that he won't show up out of shape in training camp when I commit to the Lakers for the rest of my career so I can win a ring. I'll let Kobe be Kobe, I'll do my job, set picks, box out and rebound, and we'll win a ring and reap the laurels, and when it's all said and done, I'll have something real to show for it." And there's something to be said for that, isn't there?

Would you want Kobe as your co-founder? Would you work for him? Would you back him as investor?

Interview With Hot Potato's Co-Founder

2011-02-08T11:34:00.001-05:00

As a story for the MIT Entrepreneurship Review, I recently interviewed Saadiq Rodgers-King, MIT Sloan alum and co-founder of Hot Potato, a startup that brought people together online around live events. This past summer Hot Potato got acquired by Facebook and its original URL now redirects to Facebook. I talked to Saadiq about the acquisition, as well as about when startups should raise money. The story got picked up by The Huffington Post, which itself got acquired yesterday by AOL, probably in anticipation of the deluge of traffic that my story might incite ;-)

Anyways, if you're interested, you can read the interview here.

Should We Celebrate Startup Success?

2011-02-01T19:41:00.001-05:00

Seriously, do we celebrate when we throw an apple in the air and it comes back down? Why can't startup success be accorded the same kind of certainty and uneventfulness? Shouldn't celebrating a startup's success be insulting to the intelligence of the startup's entrepreneur, like success was an extremely improbable event that was graciously granted the one-in-a-million kiss of fortune?

This was the provocation offered to students in Noubar Afeyan's course From MIT to CEO: Technologists Leading Startup Ventures. The point of the provocation? A hypothesis. Namely, that entrepreneurship is professionalizing. That it's transforming from a realm perceived as dominated by superhuman industry undertakers and lucky geeks into an industry driven by trained entrepreneurs whose work revolves around applying and improving a formula of venture-creation, which can be passed down from one generation to another; and that what we're witnessing is nothing short of a movement from magic to management. Essentially, entrepreneurship is becoming a profession just like law or medicine.

It's true that much of the mysterious entrepreneurial formula is, in fact, a craft that can be effectively transmitted from one generation to another. It can be taught and learned. Often painstakingly, but still. Entrepreneurship definitely isn't magic.

But on the other hand, what about passion, what about perseverance, what about, indeed, some luck? Essential they are, but formulaic?

One could argue that entrepreneurship could simply become more of a profession in some industries and not others. In energy and life sciences, for example, ventures take time, depend heavily on regulations, require partnerships, and need continuous infusions of capital. So you need a rock-solid management team that's been there/done that and can raise money; you need IP; you also need a stellar product development team to prove the technology; and you need farsighted strategic guidance from the management about the technology's path to market. This much is clear, which makes such entrepreneurial ventures more, for lack of a better word, predictable and therefore apt to be professionalized.

The world would be a pretty interesting place if entrepreneurship does indeed become professionalized. The global economy would certainly become much more hyper competitive. In the meantime, it can be interesting to contemplate what might be the next professional frontier beyond entrepreneurship.

Thoughts From Working In VC

2011-01-12T13:04:00.005-05:00

Last spring and summer I interned in venture capital at Venrock Associates, working with Matthew Nordan on the energy team out of the firm's Cambridge office. I was lucky to have Matthew as a mentor, the internship was an outstanding experience, so I'd like to share some thoughts about it here for entrepreneurs and folks interested in working in VC.

I'll start with the latter first.

Intellectual privilege. You've heard this before, but I'll say it again, VCs tend to be impressively smart people. Many a time I caught myself thinking, "Wow, I can see this VC being a high-flying professor at MIT. But, for better or worse, this prodigious talent instead is applied in VC." It's an absolute privilege to see the application of intellectual talent to a matter as exciting, and valuable, as startup investing.

Empirical learning. VC is a great way to be learning empirically throughout your career. As a VC, your job is to put rigorous analytical structure with predictive capacity on high uncertainty. You're constantly updating that model as you're learning from the market. You make decisions, you invest, and you track the soundness of your analytics and decisions. Over time, sometimes painstakingly, you accumulate some truly valuable body of empirical knowledge and pattern recognition -- if I were to define the word "experience", this would be it.

History remembers entrepreneurs, not VCs. Finally, the hardest part about being a VC, especially a young VC, is not being an entrepreneur. As a VC you get exposed to the broadest range of exhilarating ideas, it's hard to not want to go for broke and go after it yourself.

Now onto thoughts for entrepreneurs.

You're at a serious disadvantage. It's very important to recognize that you as entrepreneur are at a serious disadvantage from the very start vis-a-vis the VC. Before meeting you, the VC likely met with dozens of other entrepreneurs in the space, swapped notes with other VCs, and talked to big company executives who could be potential partners, thus garnering the cream of the best thinking. What's more, the VC likely has done some rigorous analysis on the space and has at the disposal some nuanced details that are important. It's very hard for the entrepreneur, especially a young entrepreneur, to beat that. But challenge yourself to do that. Other than entrepreneurs who make them money, VCs love entrepreneurs who teach them about an industry. And these two things usually go in hand.

Team, team, team - no joke. Before I came to Venrock, I've gone to many speaking events by VCs at Sloan. I've heard VCs say "It's all about team, team, team" over and over again. (With some notable exceptions: e.g. Tom Perkins of KPCB fame for whom the idea matters more than the team). It makes perfect sense the first time you hear it, but over time it can't help but sound like a broken record. Yet, very early at Venrock I learned why "team, team, team" is repeated so much: VCs really do mean it. Teams, more often than not, matter more than the product. And this unwavering belief in the mighty importance of the team shows itself in so many different ways, from pitch to exit. Starting from how you get in front of a VC (e.g. What kind of people introduced you?) to the due diligence process (It's you, not your business, being most rigorously evaluated). This all-eyes-on-you approach can be stressful for the entrepreneur. Sometimes, it's intentionally stressful -- you're evaluated how you as a startup CEO perform under stress.

Rigorous evaluation of the entrepreneur is particularly vital in areas such as energy where paths to success are typically drawn-out and thorny. Your business likely will require multiple rounds of investing, so your VC wants to be sure that you'll wow other investors as much as you've wowed them -- the very survival of your company, and consequently the success of your VC's whole initial investment, may depend on that. This is a tough guessing game -- it's not just "Do I like you?" but also "Do I think others will like you too?"

Furthermore, in a space like energy, your startup's success will lie through strategic partnerships with big companies. Your VC will want to know that you can make that happen by first selling big company executives on your vision and then stewarding your company through the complexities of the partnership.

Also, your startup may at some point benefit from having a big-time super-experienced CEO. Your VC needs the comfort of knowing that you can sway someone like that to your side. In short, VCs in fields such as energy are looking for that rare combination in the personality of the entrepreneur where the promise of being an all-star CEO combines with, but doesn't preclude, the flexibility to attract, if need be, and accomodate a more experienced CEO, while remaining committed to the cause and not rocking the boat. It's hard.

Be a magician. So do you need to be a superhuman? No, not really, just a bit of a magician. Truth be told, even in a booming market it's almost impossible to tell what idea (and what combination of idea, team, and product) is going to be big and how big. Especially at an early stage. And there's always a thousand reasons why you, your team, your idea, or your product may not succeed. Your best tool is to break out your magic wand and "distort" reality -- it's not distortion, really, it's projection of highly plausible future onto the present. Make the VC think, "Jeez, I may have the next Steve Jobs sitting here. Chances are, of course, I'm fooling myself, but in the small chance that I'm not, I'd sure love to be in the game when it happens." VCs are super busy, they hate being wrong, they are looking at many startups at one same time, and without a bit of reality distortion on your part it's hard to get them to exert the kind of urgency that you as entrepreneur really need.

Crush it. The best advice for entrepreneurs that I've heard that's not often mentioned is that you've got to crush it. Crush every meeting, every instance of contact where you're being evaluated. That's the plain truth of it. Everyone you talk to, who has any bearing on your business, however infinitesimally small, has to come away from meeting you inspired, confident in your success, and badly wanting to help and ride your wave. You're being evaluated at every moment, but, unlike in school, you won't get cut any slack. So be an animal, crush it.

And oh, don't forget to have a great product.

Questions for Founders

2011-01-11T03:31:00.003-05:00

(This post got republished in The Huffington Post is an abridged and slightly polished out version.)

I recently went to a digital media symposium put together by Accel Partners at Stanford. The most interesting part of the event was a panel with Andrew Mason of Groupon, Drew Houston of Dropbox, Garrett Camp of StumbleUpon, and Susan Koger of ModCloth. First, some quick impressions.

My first thought was, wow, just how important it is to be around the right people, people who inspire you to make a leap of faith and shoot for the stars. I left the event so pumped up, chanting inside not just that I was going to have a startup, but more, that I was going to build a great company. What's more, it's important to be around people who are doing now what you want to do. Seriously, you don't even get this pumped feeling with successful entrepreneurs who are, so to speak, "retired" -- teaching, doing VC, or fishing. Stories of yesteryear are not the stories of today.
It's great to see entrepreneurs living the dream by living the brand. Susan Koger's dress truly was cool.
Andrew Mason is a fascinating character. One the one hand, he is like the image of a laid-back, intellectual grad student, someone you'd meet at a chill and quirky grad student party playing vinyl records in the background. On the other hand, you hear in his voice the overtones of a business executive far too wise and far too stern for his age. ("We've worked hard to make sure that we're regularly firing people.") Still on the other hand, his eyes quietly spark with mischief. ("We're hiring 120 people a month. Just in Chicago. Main reason? It feels awesome." If you were impromptu asked to describe him, I bet you'd probably start with something like, "He seems like a really good guy..." Fascinating.

Now, Kevin Efrusy, Accel's partner who led the discussion, asked the entrepreneurs a series of questions, which made for a useful glimpse into the thinking of some of the leading entrepreneurs of our generation.

1) Would your business have been possible 10 years ago?
Key message: Some cutting-edge startups are based on timeless stuff.
Interestingly, for both Andrew Mason and Susan Koger the answer was yes. In Groupon's case, "so much of its business is based on email," while for ModCloth, the key has always been about having an authentic conversation with customers. "We have this intimate knowledge of our customers," said Susan Koger, "and giving them voice gave us strength as a brand."

Drew Houston's answers was a sign perhaps that we do live in a 200% world -- 100% of it all is luck and another 100% is everything else we do. He said that Dropbox couldn't exist 10 years ago, or at least Dropbox wouldn't have been as successful -- "so much is based on Amazon Web Services" and, thanks to the iPhone and the iPod, "the need just totally snowballed."

2) What were the one or two things you just couldn't screw up?
Key message: Technical details can really matter.
Drew Houston offered that the idea for something like Dropbox has been around for decades, which made for a pretty high bar for success. "So we focused on keeping it simple. Technically, we really cared about sweating the details. Very fundamental things such as file syncing vs. online drive."

3) What worked in terms of marketing?
Key message: Exercise brute force; go where your early adopters are and improve the virtuous cycle; customer service really, really, really matters; friends are your first marketers. And, don't forget to get The Hindu to write a story about you!
Listening to the discussion of this question prompted a poignant reminder that, belying the stories of meteoric rise to success, there's the often-forgotten story of sweat and toil. Andrew Mason frankly recalled that Groupon's first ten thousand customers were the result of brute force. "It was me going to Chicago's downtown and putting fliers out."

Drew Houston explained Dropbox's early marketing success by the decision to go where its early adopters were. Dropbox created a tongue-in-cheek demo video and posted it on Digg, and that's where it's first seventy-five thousand users came from. In one day. In the end though, Drew Houston cautioned, "all of that wouldn't have worked if we didn't strive to make people happy and create tools that improve the virtuous cycle." As a whole, most of the users in the first months heard about Dropbox from a friend - 20% of users, for example, came from the shared folder functionality.

Susan Koger's marketing needed to be different because ModCloth carried inventory. "We focused on keeping an amazing inventory that people love." When ModCloth got started fashion blogging began to emerge, so ModCloth worked actively with fashion bloggers, which was very innovative at the time. Finally, said Susan Koger, "customer service really counts, and it's really important to call that out."

For Garrett Camp, friends were his first marketers by "stumbling" through his bookmarks. Then came friends of friends and then somehow StumbleUpon got its first media converage. It was in The Hindu, an Indian newspaper, so next thing they knew, StumbleUpon had its first twenty thousand customers.

4) How do your roots affect your product?
Key message: No handicaps for Canadians; Steelers fans make passionate employees.
"I'm a Canadian. I don't know how that affects the product," laughed Garrett Camp. But grad school (Garrett was a student when he started StumbleUpon) did certainly play a role by keeping the operation bootstrapped. Same for Susan Koger, who grew up in Pittsburg and launched ModCloth while in college. "Starting in college taught us to survive. We hired a lot of passionate people who didn't have a lot of experience. It just made ModCloth for a great place to work."

5) What are the small things you can do that make a great difference?
Key message: Shock and awe.
"Friday Q&A with employees. It gets everyone up to speed," offered Garrett Camp, and "Celebrate our wins," added Susan Koger. Now, Andrew Mason's answer was shock and awe. He actually began his answer by saying, "Shock and awe." He then proceeded to tell how fond they are at Groupon of creating events that make people think, "Where the hell do I work?" For example, infiltrating the office with a man in a ballerina costume who goes around the office not making any contact. Around the office, around the clock, and not just for an hour, or even a day, but several days! "We constantly eject surprise. Bizarre, surreal ways of looking at the world. Make people feel alive."

You can hear this and say to yourself that sometimes it takes something so crazy to create something so crazy successful. Or you can say that, if you have the guts to do something like this, having the guts to actually start a company would seem like an afterthought. But I say, I just can't wait to get started.

Great Dumb Money

2010-12-21T02:27:00.001-05:00

Have you been to the Gaylord Opryland in Nashville, Tennessee? You may not see a better example of great dumb money. Great because, by the looks of it, this massive hotel & resort is making money hand over fist. It's the world's largest hotel under one roof that's not a casino. Its 2,000 rooms are currently fully booked, and from what I hear from staff, they usually are. Not bad. Breakfast buffet is $26. When was the last time you paid so much for a breakfast? Not to mention, this place owns a virtual monopoly on the product category of "marquee hotel and entertainment center in the Mecca of country music." So, P=MR.

BUT...

The Gaylord Opryland doesn't know I'm here! My brother-in-law paid for the rooms. So, for all intent and purposes, he's the only one who's visiting. Now, how is the Opryland going to woo me to come back without knowing that I've been here?

I've spent three days here by now -- in the height of the holiday shopping rush, no less! -- and I've parted with no more than $30 in the confines of the facility. On my flight here I thought it'd be cool to get here some country music stockings presents for my family, but I'm leaving with none. (Disclaimer: I had plenty of time to shop.) Even my stingy self says, "C'mon, you can do better than that!"

What's more, I was here for a wedding in the company of a couple dozen twenty and thirty year olds ready to party to no end, craving to make this a memorable experience, and willing to say goodbye to their hard-earned money. Again, Gaylord Opryland has no idea that that's the case. Shouldn't they be planning group activities for us all and make sure we can't wait to come back? The two group entertainment options noticeably advertised are an ice rink and a golf course. Doesn't Gaylord Opryland consider that for it's northern visitors (e.g. us from Boston) ice skating isn't particularly exotic at this time of year? And that, unlike in Miami or San Diego, it's a little chill for golf in December in Tennessee? Why didn't the Opryland know that for someone like me it's prohibitively expensive both in time and money to go to a Patriots game in Mass and that I would have absolutely loved to go to a Titans game? I had an afternoon wide open the Saturday of my arrival and what better way to acclimate to Nashville than with a Miller Light in a really good seat at a Titans' victory.

Finally, what's really surprising, I haven't seen or heard a live country musician inside the Opryland in my whole three days here. Wait, this is supposed to be the Mecca of country music? Really? Is this where Johnny Cash and June Carter met? Why isn't this a bigger deal? Why didn't I see country musicians signing autographs, selling CDs and inviting folks to their concerts? Why wasn't there a documentary cinema or museum here telling the history of country music? I'd spend, and pay for, most of my downtime to visit them. Just doesn't seem right to me.

When Gary Loveman came and spoke to our Economics of Information class recently, he was asked why more companies aren't aggressively adopting customer analytics methods that he's put to such great success at Harrah's. His answer was surprising: Some companies get so good at making money "as usual" that they don't need to make it any smarter. I bet that's the predicament of Gaylord Opryland. C'est la business!

A Thought For When You're Stuck In A Grocery Line

2010-11-30T17:13:00.005-05:00

"Who gets the best service in grocery stories?" asked Gary Loveman, who was our speaker today in the "Economics of Information" class. "The people who buy the least and can get out faster," he answers his own question. "How dumb is that?!"

Loveman is the CEO of Caesars Entertainment, Inc., a company he joined in 1998 as COO, when it was known as Harrah's, and which he has since transformed into the world's largest gaming corporation now boasting 54 casinos around the world. Needless to say, the visitors who pay the least in his casinos are treated "smarter". He put it this way: imagine you have two gamblers playing slot machines side by side, one of them is a Diamond VIP cardholder -- a card you get by spending at least $10,000 in Caesars' casinos annually -- and the other one is not. (Such member cards help Loveman and his crew know, for example, that a 64 year-old woman living in Memphis, who stops by a local Caesars casino to play a $10 slot machine, is a fantastic customer; while an average MIT student isn't. Chances are, that woman has both time and money, which are big prerequisites for consummate gambling. She's a serious gambler too -- who else plays $10 slot machines as a regular pastime? Your average MIT student, on the other hand, despite the glamorous image created by the movie 21, has neither time, nor money, at least for now.)

Now, imagine that both gamblers win $1,000 simultaneously. The casino staff will be sure to get champagne and photo crew over to the Diamond cardholder immediately -- make it an occasion! What about the other lucky winner? They might get to him only after they have served all the other Diamond cardholders in the casino.

What's the name of this seeming discrimination? Predictive analytics. This is the approach Loveman brought from his ivory tower as MIT PhD and Harvard Business School professor to the world where, he recalls, the opulence of casino facilities was the way people thought about value and competitive advantage. Forget the gilded fountains and princely flamingos. Get that Diamond VIP card and your parking valet's service will outdo the British queen's butler, you'll get your favorite presidential suite any time you want even if it's booked, you'll get your favorite table by the window in your favorite restaurant even if it's taken, and you'll get into nightclub at 1am without waiting. "We want to know who of our customers are more valuable," says Loveman. "We want to make everything for them better." It's a high-touch business for customers who matter.

Predictive analytics are only scratching the surface of what's possible and Loveman predicts that more and more businesses will be embracing this mindset. To him, the principles applied in his casinos can be applied to just about any consumer experience imaginable. Asked whether this transition has been slow for most businesses, he cautioned, "This is hard work. The greatest challenge is not in determining what's to be done, but motivating people to do it."

Built To Last

2010-11-29T11:53:00.001-05:00

This Thanksgiving break I took a trip down memory lane visiting the northern English town, Bradford, where I graduated from college. I haven't been there since six years ago when I moved to Boston. I couldn't wait to see how it's changed and what artifacts that accompanied my life there were still around.

In my student days there the town sported a dingy takeout restaurant called Raja's. Their "marquee" item was a lunchbox containing two fried chicken drumsticks covered in a handful of fries that went for £1.50. It was so greasy that it was probably the most unhealthy lunch in the entire England. But it was a godsend to students. Raja's was probably the most inexpensive way to have lunch in the entire England. And it was delicious. And it was fast, despite the communist-era-sized food queues building there every day at lunch. You were in, out, and comatose-full in under fifteen minutes. So, boy, was it popular. Students kept coming and coming, even though Raja's was in the "dodgy" part of town.

I drove into Bradford with Ellen, parked the car on the street where I used to live, and the first thing we did was go and see if Raja's was still around. And it was.

It was thriving too! They bought a shop next door and expanded the restaurant. They now have glass walls and even a stylish logo. They look, for lack of a better word, upscale.

But you know what, I'm not surprised. They had a great product -- greasy but unforgettably delicious -- at a great price. And the market hasn't changed -- Bradford is still a college town and students don't like to cook; the nearest supermarket is relatively far away, and most students at Bradford come from lower middle class backgrounds, making the price of £1.50 for two filling drumsticks and a handful of fries just right on target. In other words, they got the product/market fit right.

I think it's an inspiring lesson. Get a great product for the right market, put your head down, roll up the sleeves. Good things will happen.

Conversation With Tom Perkins, The Godfather Of Venture Capital

2010-10-20T17:58:00.001-04:00

The Huffington Post just ran a story today that my MITER partner, Nathan Trujillo, and I put together. Last week, we met with Tom Perkins, the Tom Perkins of Kleiner Perkins fame, which served as the inspiration for the story. The post is also a part of MITER's growing relationship with the Huffington Post. Needless to say, things are getting pretty interesting.

"One can't help but wonder at the tales of a man who once wandered the halls of MIT pondering circuit design, only to now claim personal responsibility for converting the orchards of Silicon Valley into parking lots -- back at a time, no less, "when Silicon Valley wasn't even called Silicon Valley." This man is Tom Perkins, who founded Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, one of the most venerable and successful venture capital firms in history.
Go to the KPCB homepage and you'll see a front-and-center summon: "In Search of the Next Big Idea." Well, Tom Perkins has many to his name. Starting KPCB with Eugene Kleiner, he planned to raise a $10 million fund, but managed only $8 million -- there was much skepticism back then that venture capital could be a business. He disagreed, "If it isn't high risk, then everyone will be doing it and it will be too late." Fast forward to today and KPCB portfolio companies include such giants as Google and Amazon, employ over 250,000 people and generate many billions in annual revenue." Read more...

A Truly New School Year At MIT Sloan

2010-09-12T11:13:00.003-04:00

The new school year at MIT Sloan hasn't been on for even a week, but there's already a big difference from last year - the new Sloan building.

I've long believed that how physical spaces are arranged has a powerful influence on how people within them behave and interact. The new building adds significantly more collaborative space for students -- conference rooms for groups large and small, private dining rooms for working lunches or lunches and dinners with speakers who come to campus, as well as sets of chairs or sofas arranged circularly in almost every corner of the building. Last year many team projects seemed like a chore because it was just very difficult and time-consuming to find working space. This definitely won't happen nearly as much this year, which is extremely important for most of the class work in business school is done in teams.

While the new building is a conduit of group-based work, what's wonderful is that it also offers a lot more space for quiet study and private reflection. I can't say enough how often I needed last year to just seclude myself from the world and focus on a problem set or just space out. The building's front entrance (depicted above) looks out on the Charles River waterfront and the Boston skyline. It's just a meditatively beautiful place that brings respite and reflection.

The motto of MIT is "mind and hand". Now, seemingly, it's also a bit of "mind and hand and soul".

Welcome MIT Sloan Class Of 2012

2010-08-28T15:01:00.000-04:00

Welcome to campus, first-years! On one hand, I wish I was in your shoes savoring the intrigue of a fresh start at MIT. On the other hand, I'm glad I'm not - this wonderfully crazy institution is a crystal ball to the future and future is what one always, for better or worse, looks forward to here.

Your lives here will be interesting and diverse and they will take you to unexpected heights. So here's my only one thought (wrapped as unsolicited advice that hopefully will be forgiven if it's useful):

Build A Lifetime Connection With MIT

The 20th century was a century of science. The 21st century will be a century of science even more. If there's one academic institution to be a backbone of this century, it's MIT. Make no mistake about it. And if you're here, chances are that your careers will play out in areas driven by sciences and technology. While you're here, create the always open doors for yourself to come back to campus anytime - to scout talent or stay close to innovations, for example. That won't happen just by virtue of being an alum. Build lasting relationships with professors and research centers, they will be here after you leave. That can only come if you create value.

Find an activity, an "opening", that MIT would find valuable and then throw yourself wholeheartedly into building it. Get people interested and attract them to the cause. The intense life of MIT will force you to make sacrifices, it will be hard, you won't have it all, but that just comes with the territory. In the end, you will build enriching relationships, learn a ton, meet great people who will be your partners in the future, and trust me, having a reason to come back to campus and be received will weigh like gold.

MIT For Liberal Arts Enthusiasts

2010-08-20T11:11:00.000-04:00

Before I set my foot on the MIT campus I had no idea just how different it was going to be. I came to MIT with a through and through liberal arts background. Most of my homework thus far had been essays, not problem sets, and the classwork that I've gotten accustomed to was creative discussion of text and theories, not deduction of proofs. I've gotten used to titles like Pedagogy of the Oppressed, not to titles like Dynamic Optimization. And over time I've come to regard, perhaps subconsciously, liberal arts education as education as is.

MIT was a BIG surprise. It was a shock. I said to myself a few weeks in, "Wow, a lot of the things I learned and skills I honed don't really count for a lot here." People here, especially in my interactions with other/"real" parts of MIT outside of the Sloan business school, just seemed to think differently. Finding the right answer through a neat logical trail was preferred to being satisfied by just looking at a problem creatively from different angles without even a nudge of obsession to find the right answer.

A year into MIT I'm grateful that I wound up in this environment. It pushed my mindset in a new direction and helped me appreciate the vastly different approaches to making decisions and making sense of the world. If you went to a liberal arts college and are now thinking of business school, come to MIT. It will push you in a whole new direction and you're going to be better for it.

S.O. In B-School

2010-08-20T10:21:00.000-04:00

In the last couple of months I've been helping admissions at Sloan field questions from prospective applicants. It's been lots of fun and gave me an opportunity to look back on the shoes I've been in myself just over a year ago. I'll be posting my answers to some of these questions on this blog as I go along.

One of the questions I often get is whether there are a lot of students at Sloan who are married. This question is usually followed up by whether it's difficult to balance family and school.

My answer to that is that it's GREAT to be in business school when you're married. I'm married and it's been wonderful to share my journey with Ellen. She's working, but it feels like we're in business school together. We go to lots of school events and really have developed a big new group of friends together. Yes, it's difficult to balance at times, but the advantages far outweigh the occasional difficulties.

And yes, it does seem like there are a lot married couples as well as students who are not married but have significant others. When students involve their significant others in their school life that gives you an opportunity to build much deeper relationships with your classmates. You get to know your classmates a lot better and build stronger, lasting bonds. You have family cookouts and date nights -- it's fun and enriching to your life.

So if you're married and worried about what business school might entail, don't think twice, go for it. It's going to be fun and it's going to be worth it.

What Is Your Audience?

2010-07-12T21:52:00.002-04:00

Last December we held an inaugural ceremony for our editors at the MIT Entrepreneurship Review (MITER). We were so happy with ourselves and so excited to have the ceremony -- we had founded MITER just several weeks before that and managed to recruit an unbelievable group of editors (PhD and Master's students from across MIT - just see their profiles!). We invited our advisors to the ceremony and fully expected to impress them with what we had achieved. The ceremony went great, but alas our advisors weren't very impressed. They kept grilling us over and over again with one simple question, "What is your audience?"

What is your audience? What is your audience? What is your audience?

Truth be told, not only didn't we know at the time what our audience was, we didn't fully understand just how important that question was. We started MITER on a spur of inspiration. We knew that MIT was a hotbed of startups and felt that that phenomenon had to be covered. We also saw an opportunity to create an honors-based, student-run publication - think Harvard Law Review - to push thought leadership in an area that reflected our unique strength. In MIT's case, that area was entrepreneurship. Not a bad narrative, right? But notice how it didn't say a word about who would read such a publication. The narrative only mentioned the general topic area and how MITER was going to be organized, which - unsurprisingly - was exactly what we focused most of our attention on.

When we did have to answer the question head-on, we generally said that we wanted to be useful to current and aspiring entrepreneurs, science and technology industry practitioners, and investors in innovation-driven businesses. (What a broad answer!) We bulked at getting the answer to be more specific - entrepreneurs are ambitious, how can they not want to address the greatest audience possible. But this approach made life difficult for us, for it belied the important reality that it's not the size of your presumed audience that matters, but how much your users -- however few in the beginning -- clearly benefit from your product, love it, and are ready evangelize it.

To be fair, we didn't avoid the question or didn't believe that it wasn't important. We knew that it was important and we wanted to find an answer to it. In fact, we directed many of our conversations with entrepreneurs in the digital media space to understanding how they came to define their audiences and then internalizing that process. We just didn't have rabid urgency to find an answer.

However, answering this question as early as possible has two important benefits. First, once you know super clearly what your audience is, you can understand it a lot deeper, giving your product a much better chance of success. Second, the "Who is your audience question?" permeates explicitly or implicitly every conversation you have about your startup -- especially with potential partners, sponsors, and hires. It's a vital part of what your startup is. Once these people have a better answer to this question, they are in much better position to help you and to tell others about you. The productivity of every conversation you have just skyrockets.

I feel uplifted to have had the experience that led me to this thinking. Sometimes it takes months pushing a rock up a cliff to truly know the weight of something.

The Longer View On Hopes Once Dashed

2010-07-08T13:05:00.003-04:00

June was a terrible month for my country Kyrgyzstan. It was a month when ethnic clashes started in my home city of Osh, then quickly spread across other cities, left hundreds of people dead and thousands displayed, with their homes burnt and destroyed. Now these people have no homes to return to. I can only imagine the hollow it burns in your heart when you've spent your life nurturing your house, growing grape trees for fruits for your grandchildren and for shade on hot summer days, looking forward your children's wedding ceremonies in the shades of those grapes, spending years gathering presents to pass on to your children, and then have that all taken away from you in flash by a madly possessed mob.

People now have no jobs to return to either. The conflict imploded the economy, and with many public buildings burnt and ravaged, there are no offices and normal jobs to speak of anymore. Those who can are leaving the city. It's hard to imagine anything but poverty and continuing instability once a disaster of this scale happens, particularly with the hatred, deep-seated tensions, and mistrust that ethnic conflicts channel and multiply. What's more, the causes and culprits of it all remain largely unexamined by our both disinterested and incapable government, and as such, will be left untreated. It's a very sad situation for Kyrgyzstan and a terrible culmination of our country's 20 years as an independent nation.

Never before this conflict, had I considered that it may have been better for the Soviet Union to stay and for our country to be in it. Now I do, and I'm sure many people in Kyrgyzstan who remember the stability, secure jobs, free education and healthcare of the Soviet days -- all the things you want and remember when they suddenly disappear -- do as well. What's independence and the alleged freedom good for if all you get is the dictatorship of anarchy and degradation?

In this deepest moment of worry for the future of my home country, my friend Brennan Klose shared with me his hopeful thoughts which I want to share here. He called his letter to me "Battlefield of Antietam, American Civil War."

Just something to share. There is nothing evaluative here. It's just images as I witnessed them.

Last week I took my son Max to visit the Antietam battlefield up in central Maryland. Antietam was fought in 1862 and was the bloodiest day of the American Civil War, twenty-two thousand killed and wounded. Now it is a national park.

It was a beautiful sunny day and Max and I walked the rolling landscape. A group of re-enactors were giving an artillery demonstration, led by the local high school history teacher. They had two shining golden cannons rolled out and stood by the guns sweating in woolen Confederate uniforms. The cannons pointed at the North across a green mile of fields.

A crowd had gathered to watch -- moms and small kiddies, six black teenagers wearing blue Union Civil War caps, some big Harley Davidson motorcycle riders and their ladies, a squad of veterans back from Iraq led by a Filipine-American medic about four and a half feet tall.

The teacher/gun-captain stood with his microphone explaining the cannon drill. Ramrod, sponge, powder and shot. Lanyard and primer. It was all totally low-key. The voice was calm and kind, and the audience interrupted with questions about the history. Then: "Range 1200 yards. Aim. Number One, Fire! Number Two, Fire!" WHAM! WHAM! From the golden muzzles, lightning flashes, and dense smoke rolling off on the breeze toward the old battle positions.

This day was a little piece of America, 150 years after the Civil War. Barack Obama is President. A teacher in a gray slaveholder's uniform speaks gently to a crowd as mixed as can be. We are woven together by tolerance and it is a very beautiful, if imperfect thing. Right in front of us the cannons flash -- real, but not in anger any more. I think we are healing, and almost healed.

Somewhere Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King are looking down. Blue-clad ranks stand behind them, heads bared.

Brennan

< I dreamed I saw a valley >

< Covered with bones in blue >

< All the brave soldiers >

< Who cannot get older >

< They're asking after you >

< >

< -- Crosby, Stills & Nash >

< "Daylight Again" >

Paying It Forward

2010-06-09T15:45:00.000-04:00

As I mentioned in my previous post, today we had a pitch session with entrepreneur Vijay Manwani. During the session I caught myself thinking that as entrepreneur you best resource is often other entrepreneurs with a passion for helping others. It's often so hard to get a startup off the ground, let along have it succeed, that for most entrepreneurs being collaborative, goodwilling, and paying it forward becomes second nature. This makes entrepreneurship a really great "profession" and a great community to be a part of.

So no fear, start a company. Yes, it will be hard, but there will be fantastic people along the way to help you on your journey. And when you succeed, you'll pay it forward.

Entrepreneurial Summer at MIT

2010-06-09T15:21:00.002-04:00

What's fantastic about the entrepreneurial culture at MIT is that many students are taking the summer months to get their startups in motion. Many students who have done that last year have generated excellent "escape velocity" and are ready to start companies now that they are graduating. Their summer investment gave them a runway of a full year to find partners and polish their ideas using the brainpower available on campus.

Here at Sloan students have summer office space for their startups and are working side by side and having fun. In fact, if you like being around startups and don't know where to catch the early morning World Cup games, the 7.30AM game-time breakfasts at the startup lab here would be a great place to start.

But the entrepreneurial summer at MIT doesn't just stop there. We have speakers too. Today offered a terrific two-hour pitch session with entrepreneur Vijay Manwani. Vijar co-founded BladeLogic, a company recently acquired for $800 million. The pitches and their discussions were so vibrant that we didn't even get through all the pitches in two hours. This combination of entrepreneurial students motivating each other, having fun together, and drawing on the expertise of outstanding entrepreneurs is creating an off-the-charts summer full of amazing possibilities. Come and join the entrepreneurs here!

Graduating Entrepreneurs

2010-06-04T14:53:00.006-04:00

It's graduation day at MIT. Here at the MIT Entrepreneurship Center ("the E Center") many graduates are stopping by with their families to show this magical place where they have been hacking away on their startups while at school. It's wonderful to see the personal touch with which the E Center is sending off into the world graduates who are starting companies.
As you can see, there are many of them!

One just added himself to the list!

Touched My Heart

2010-04-09T13:12:00.003-04:00

Over the past two days I've received so many emails from friends and classmates expressing concern for the events in Kyrgyzstan and hoping that my family and relatives there are safe. Thank you all. This means a lot to me and my family.

I also received emails from several MIT administration representatives, with whom we haven't personally met before, and they too expressed concern and offered support. Touched my heart. Thank you.

More Than You Think

2010-04-04T21:08:00.005-04:00

This Wednesday is the MITER launch party. We're planning to entertain more than two hundred important guests from the entrepreneurial ecosystem of MIT and Boston. It's hard to believe that this event is actually happening. Several months ago MITER was just an idea heard in the halls of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center. Today, we have a dynamic team of students from across MIT - our most important asset, our site is in public beta, our articles are creating new views into MIT, we are enjoying the support of fantastic entrepreneurs and sponsors, and we're building excellent, far-reaching relations with other entrepreneurship-focused organizations at MIT.

We have come far. And our reward was this important lesson: It takes more than you think. Even when you're working 24/7 in a group of stars also giving 24/7, you can do more. Now at this point even tiny, incremental improvements require monumental effort and foresight. Perhaps this is the true dividing line for entrepreneurs that succeed or fail. It's tough, but it's also exciting and inspiring, for when you begin to feel these atmospheric bounds, your journey continues.

MIT Entrepreneurship Review On MIT Homepage

2010-03-18T10:04:00.003-04:00

We're on MIT homepage again!

MITER Is Live!

2010-03-08T11:55:00.003-05:00

Friends,

The MIT Entrepreneurship Review is now live! We'd love and greatly appreciate your feedback on our public beta. Most importantly, engage with us, comment on our articles, write for us, suggest ideas, and join our vibrant team.

Thank you all SO much!

Innovation Reading List

2010-03-07T18:53:00.004-05:00

I'm taking an interesting class that involves reading a lot of scholarly papers on innovation and entrepreneurship. The class is appropriately called Managing Innovation and Entrepreneurship and is taught by Professor Scott Stern (who, by the way, is a Faculty Advisor for the MIT Entrepreneurship Review). Following scholars is fascinating because they offer research evidence for a myriad of topics that are hotly debated by entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship commentators today. As I've been avidly following entrepreneurial blogs for some time now, I find that some scholars are way ahead of the game - they've studied fifteen years ago topics that are only becoming current among entrepreneurs today. So I think it's useful for anyone interested in entrepreneurship to read up on such scholarly work. As I go along in the course, I'll be gathering a reading list and sharing it on this blog. Here's the first entry:

1. Responding to Structural Industry Changes: A Technological Evolution Perspective by Allan Afuah and James Utterback (Industrial and Corporate Change, 1997).

Seminar With Prof. Sandy Pentland At MITER

2010-03-03T21:47:00.004-05:00

The MIT Entrepreneurship Review (MITER) hosted a lunchtime seminar today with Prof. Sandy Pentland of the MIT Media Lab. The goal was to expose our student editors to a leading thinkers, discuss entrepreneurship, and generate interesting ideas for articles. It was a fantastic experience.

Prof. Pentland argued for the broadening of the term of entrepreneurship away from the narrow focus on the nuts and bolts of starting a company. To him, entrepreneurship equals making great impact that lasts over time. So find a great challenge, identify how you can address it in the most impactful way, and do it in a way that lasts.
This is precisely the kind of seminar that we will hosting at MITER on a regular basis. We want MITER to be not only a platform for expression, but also a unique learning opportunity for our editors and writers. It is in this way that we believe we can produce truly unique and outstanding content. Today was a great step in that direction. Thank you, Prof. Pentland.

Newtonian Wisdom From MIT Entrepreneurship Review

2010-02-28T11:05:00.004-05:00

I just can't help but post this video from one of our editors known adoringly as "Chris UK". There can't be a better promotion for the MIT Entrepreneurship Review. Not a chance.

Some Humor From MIT Entrepreneurship Review

2010-02-27T18:48:00.003-05:00

We've had a lot of fun at the MIT Entrepreneurship Review recording videos for our launch. Here's one humorous preview from one of our illustrious editors.

Startup Visa

2010-02-25T11:07:00.004-05:00

In my recent life as an immigrant to America I've come to believe that supporting entrepreneurship and innovation in America isn't important just for America but for the entire world at large. Innovation, free enterprise, human and civil rights, and democracy are mutually complementing elements of a delicate societal ecosystem that this country has created. In truth, this ecosystem is always fragile - as any first-generation immigrant can see with a naked eye.

America is such a beacon for the world at large; it's a hard proof to billions of people across our planet that aspirations for freedom and the pursuit of happiness aren't just fantasies. And this feeling of hope is incredibly important and uplifting for someone living in a country that's not free. Take that away in America and the world loses.

So in my book, Startup Visa is one of the most important developments of our day. Please support it.

The Emergence Of A New Vocation

2010-02-25T00:17:00.005-05:00

Everything that I've seen at MIT in the past few months makes me believe that we're seeing the emergence of a new vocation. This vocation is still somewhat nontraditional, but is on its way to becoming an established one, and respected too, just like medicine or law.

It's entrepreneurship.

But not in the sense that we've come to expect - sleeping bags and webs of wires in a garage. But entrepreneurship in the sense of mastering the art of initiating and keeping momentum, starting companies and investing in them, joining large companies and stewarding their technology S-curves, experimenting, directing data modeling for navigating ambiguity and uncertainty, applying rigor and creativity to identifying opportunities, attracting talent, nurturing it, and educating and inspiring new generations of entrepreneurs. And not just knowing and doing one or some of these things, but all of them. As a norm.

Now that's a vocation.

(If you like this idea, let me know, and we'll turn this into a story for the MIT Entrepreneurship Review. It's launching on March 1st!)

Why Aren't You Starting A Company?

2010-02-18T18:16:00.003-05:00

I just came out of a lecture by Clayton Christensen. I had to skip a class for it, but you know what, it looks like I'm skipping this class two times again, for there are two more installments left in the lecture series. If there was only one impression that I could share, it would be this:

Entrepreneurs these days are so lucky.

They have the benefit of some of the most leading-edge, insightful, inspiring knowledge discovered and produced for them by minds like Clayton Christensen. And they can take that knowledge and experiment with it and build amazing companies.

Why aren't you starting a company?

MITER Is Coming In Two Weeks!

2010-02-15T13:51:00.004-05:00

Here's a snapshot of an email that went out today to friends and partners of the MIT Entrepreneurship Review.

New MITER Logo!

2010-02-07T16:04:00.004-05:00

Do you like it?

Uncertain Innovations

2010-02-03T17:57:00.005-05:00

What was interesting about the today's Managing Innovation and Entrepreneurship class with Prof. Scott Stern is that we went through a long list of very successful technology innovations that initially:

Didn't have clear applications or uses (Geolocation, nylon)
Depended on complimentary innovations (The automobile and roads. Interestingly, it was bicycle producers who first started to lobby for the construction of paved roads)
Were developed in the context of very narrow applications (Oil, originally used in the Middle Ages to make incineration weapons, before the combustion engine unleashed its true power)

What does this list say for the Technology Push vs. Market Pull distinction, as well as the for assertion frequently made by venture capitalists that entrepreneurs/innovators should not expect and rely on change in user behavior?

From User To Manufacturer

2010-02-03T17:24:00.004-05:00

In the today's How to Develop Breakthrough Products and Services class Prof. Eric von Hippel introduced an interesting conceptual distinction: user-innovation vs. manufacturer-innovation. The former is driven by people who experience a particular problem and, not finding an acceptable solution, proceed to solve it by creating a new product or service. The latter is driven by existing producers who innovate on existing products or create new ones within constraints imposed by their internal and external business environment.

Why does this conceptual distinction matter for entrepreneurship?

In essence, it matters because user-innovators expect to benefit from using the products they create. Meanwhile, manufacturer-innovators expect to benefit from selling the products they produce. Perhaps, the trick for entrepreneurs is to start as user-innovators, create products that solves real problems, and then shift gears and begin wearing a manufacturer-innovator's hat for successful selling.

Big vs. Small

2010-02-03T16:32:00.004-05:00

The fear that some big company would arrive on the scene, steal their idea and eat their hard-earned lunch can't but cross the minds of aspiring entrepreneurs. But when a startup does break through and disrupts a powerful incumbent, people wonder how the incumbent with all its vast resources could allow that to happen.

Frequently, that's attributed to the incumbent's slowness, foolishness, or general incompetence. But the best answer I've heard so far was given by Prof. Eric von Hippel in the How to Develop Breakthrough Products and Services class today. Put simply, everything new starts out small. New products don't have established or proven markets, which is where established producers are able to harness their advantage of scale. So they often pass on new opportunities and so make room for upstart competition.

Does this mean that a secret to starting and building a successful company is growing while holding off for as long as possible the incumbents' advantages of scale?

Imagining Imaging Ventures

2010-02-02T20:52:00.004-05:00

The MIT MediaLab course Imaging Ventures inspires with possibilities. Wouldn't it be neat if you could produce Avatar-like movies in your home? To do that today you would need Hollywood-level imaging sensors costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. But tomorrow you will be able to pick them up at BestBuy. All thanks to continuing advances in the field of imaging research. Wouldn't you want to star in a Avatar-like movie produced by and crowdsourced from thousands, or even millions, of people across the globe who are abstracting their motions in the comfort of their homes and superimposing on them computer graphics. That's imagination made infinite. Even tremendous is not the world to describe the exciting implications for movies, gaming, and virtual/augmented reality, as well as society and entertainment at large. The world really will be different.

By the way, that was just one of the many examples in the class!

Advice From Our Board

2010-02-01T21:42:00.008-05:00

This afternoon the MIT Entrepreneurship Review editorial bootcamp featured talks from members of our Board of Advisors. We had Michael Hopkins, Editor-in-Chief of the MIT Sloan Management Review, and Bob Buderi, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Xconomy, talk to us about what we need to think about as we look to build a successful and impactful publication. Professor Scott Stern also joined us and gave a talk with a fitting title of "Entrepreneurial Writing and Editing on Entrepreneurship."

Michael Hopkins strengthened our confidence in what we are doing with the thought that entrepreneurship content continues to be a proliferating field, driven by rapid proliferation of entrepreneurship - particularly innovation-based entrepreneurship - worldwide. This powerful trend will be putting the wind in the sails of the MIT Entrepreneurship Review.

Bob Buderi shared with us many valuable, even counterintuitive, nuggets of insight. Here are some of them:

Article length doesn't really matter for an online audience - be it a 300-words brief or a 3000-words feature. A good story is a good story.
Tight editorial process, even for a student-run publication, is essential. It gives your freedom to be creative.
There's no need to despair when some stories don't get traffic. Some topics inherently tend to be more or less popular. Good stories, no matter their traffic, bear fruits longterm in many different ways, not least through traffic from search engines.

Professor Scott Stern's talk, first of all, convinced us all that his passionate and super vibrant intellectual interest in entrepreneurship makes his class Managing Innovation and Entrepreneurship a must-take. Here are some thoughts and advice that he inspired us with:

Getting everything right is not nearly as important as developing a voice as a straight shooter. This is exactly how new media has become such an effective reprieve to old media.
Ninety-nine percent of the questions in entrepreneurship and innovation are open for debate. This makes it a unique ground for stimulating content.
Write for someone in particular, even some specific person. That gives you a voice and makes you a more effective writer.

Part of our formula for success at the MIT Entrepreneurship Review is that we want it to be, first and foremost, a unique learning experience for our team. Because then we can make it into a unique learning experience for our readers. The bootcamp today really delivered on this front in full.

Team, Vision, Process

2010-02-01T20:22:00.003-05:00

These past three days were a seminal event for the MIT Entrepreneurship Review. We have strengthened our team, sharpened our vision, and designed our process. Saturday was for fun and we came together as a team; Sunday was for post-fun visioning and planning, and today was for working out our editorial process during an intense full-day bootcamp with professional journalists and editors, faculty, and founders of leading business publications.

This morning our editors ran an exercise where they studied a scientific paper that addressed a narrow academic audience and detailed a very complex, almost arcane, technology. They then distilled that paper into an engaging article that discussed and drew an educated layman's attention to that technology's broader relevance and applications. As that was happening I caught myself thinking how amazing it was that we had an editorial board that could grasp complex science so quickly and then relay that science for a broader audience. We will be building on this strength as we seek to install ourselves as a valuable player in the global entrepreneurship media.

Highlight Of The Weekend

2010-01-31T21:48:00.006-05:00

This weekend the MIT Entrepreneurship Review retreated to a forest house in New Hampshire, generously provided by our faculty advisor, for team-building with our editorial team. We spent weeks planning the event and everything was going smoothly. Yet nevertheless on Saturday morning we felt somewhat apprehensive. Would our editors enjoy the event as we had hoped they would? Would they connect as a team? Would they feel enthusiastic about our planned activities? With so much energy invested, perhaps it was just natural to feel that way.

We had agreed to all meet at 9am sharp. Needing to load our cars with supplies, we - the organizers - ended up running late. Although not by a lot, just five minutes, it still deepened the apprehension. I arrived, however, to find all our editors standing in one big group around heaps of backpacks and sleeping bags, all ready to go, chipper, chatting, sipping coffee. I asked, "How are you guys?" and the way they answered, smiling and excited, just popped the apprehension out.

The whole event turned out to be legendary, but that split second was my highlight of the weekend. Makes you feel excited and confident to do other things like that.

Bury Your Career

2010-01-29T18:35:00.010-05:00

The Distributed Leadership IAP seminar last week featured an interesting (and famous) exercise. It was of the often-sorely-needed Let's-Close-Our-Eyes kind. We sat back and painted in our minds the picture of our own ... funeral. It was a relaxing exercise - we were overlooking Boston's relaxing afternoon skyline from the broad windows of the MIT faculty club. Moreover, Prof. Tom Malone's voice is positively hypnotic - you have to experience it for yourself.

The point of the exercise is to help you understand and envisage what matters to you the most. After the exercise we shared our impressions with the group. Many of us said that work and career, unlike family, didn't feature in our funeral images, which pushed the group discussion in the direction of the "Family matters, not work" conclusion.

This is an understandable conclusion. But it's probably not the best way to look at life. What about going for, "I love family and I want to be great at it and inspire others to have family. And I love what I do for work and I want to be so good at it that I want to inspire others to follow suit. I am happy at home and this adds to my work. I am happy at work and this brings energy and perspective to my family." It's a virtuous circle.

Why not?

Of Nuts And Bolts And Cowboy Hats

2010-01-27T00:51:00.006-05:00

Quite an entertaining and insightful "Nuts and Bolts of Business Plans" seminar today. First off:

Above is a picture of an elevator pitch delivered by a fellow student to Shawn Broderick (TechStars) and Amir Nashat (Polaris Ventures). This is a neat educational feature of the seminar that you can pitch ideas to experienced VCs and gain confidence and receive feedback in the process. There have been brave student "pitchers" last time, today, and I hope there will be more tomorrow.

On how to successfully raise venture money, Shawn Broderick suggested that you need to work with a VC that's at the right spot in their fund. The size and timing of your startup's financing arithmetic has to go well with the size and lifespan of that fund. So when you're talking to VCs ask them questions such as When did you raise your fund? How much was it for? Over what period of time? And don't be afraid to ask VCs, Shawn Broderick also noted, if they've returned their current fund yet. If they have, they'd be pretty excited to talk about it. This means that they've been pretty successful.
Amir Nashat shared an interesting observation that, contrary to what one would expect, Polaris Ventures' seed stage investments have increased as Polaris raised larger funds. When you have a 1 billion fund, you can afford to make a 3 million bet. If the bet fails, it's a drop in the bucket; but if it succeeds, you have enough reserves in your fund to carry this bet through to success.
Discussing legal matters, Joe Hadzima cautioned that you should strive to incorporate your startup and divide shares early. It's hard to do particularly in technology cycle-based ventures where engineers do the upfront work and everyone else ramps up later, but there could be serious tax implications if you don't. In a hypothetical example, if you raise 2 million in return for fifty percent of your company, you own the remaining half at 2 million. Now, according to IRS, if you get property (i.e. stock) in return for providing a service (i.e. working on your startup), that property is treated as taxable income. So at the point of raising that 2 million, you could be liable for 2 million * 30-40% in taxes to the government. Not the best way to celebrate raising money.

So far this has been a terrific seminar that gets into the nitty-gritty of all things entrepreneurship. Just what the doctor ordered.

Show Me The Money

2010-01-24T13:56:00.003-05:00

One thing that the "Nuts and Bolts of Business Plans" seminar at MIT brought home last week was that, if your main goal is money, don't do entrepreneurship. Or at least venture-backed entrepreneurship. Turns out, after an angel round plus A and B rounds the founder on average retains only 7.3% of the company. So if your company exits at $100M, you as a founder earn only 7.3M pretax. Now divide that by however many years it took and you get a much more nuanced picture than headlines of sensational exits can ever offer. Something to think about.

Tailor-Made

2010-01-22T00:13:00.005-05:00

Something funny happened today at the "Distributed Leadership" workshop at MIT. We were talking about values in life and doing an introspective exercise that involved imagining what you would do if you only had one day left to live. It was a touchy-feely exercise, which, you know, can sometimes cause silence (read stupor) within the venerable walls of MIT. We were supposed to be having a lively discussion, but instead our professor was looking inquisitively and then imploringly at the silent classroom. And then his eyes blinked with a sparkle and, as if strangely coming back to his senses, he rattled off, "It's all about looking at your probability distribution of death and minimizing your risk of regret." The rate of return on teaching energy invested then went rapidly uphill.

East Meets West Continued

2010-01-21T23:25:00.003-05:00

"The Nuts and Bolts of Business Plans" is a great seminar that's happening this and next week at MIT. So far it's really helped students (a packed classroom by the way) to get a grasp of critical, yet often frustratingly amorphous, necessities such as financial projections. Sloan alum Charlie Tillett (serial entrepreneur and business manager of a professional poker player - how cool is that!) did a terrific talk along the lines of "Yeah, your real financials will be quite different from what you have in your snazzy spreadsheet and no one knows the future, but here's how you do it right."

In addition, this seminar has been a great opportunity to compare Sand Hill Road demigods with their Route 128 counterparts. They really are different. They stress different things; they ask different questions. While West Coast VC's seem to focus on, or at least enjoy talking about, billion-dollar ideas and twenty-somethings disrupting industries out of their college dorms or, even better, garages, their East Coast colleagues are more interested in asking for quarterly projections for Year 3.

Different approaches for different entrepreneurs.

East Meets West

2010-01-21T15:43:00.006-05:00

Several days ago my friend Rob Lemos and I wrote a piece for The Tech on our impressions from a trip to Silicon Valley. I thought it might be neat to repost a shorter version here.

***

EAST MEETS WEST

3 Observations on Silicon Valley from an MIT (East Coast) Perspective

During the first week of January a class of 90 MIT MBA students traveled to Silicon Valley as part of the annual MIT Sloan Entrepreneurship & Innovation Class Trek. Our purpose was to cast a broader glance at the entrepreneurial ecosystem on the West Coast by engaging entrepreneurs and venture capitalists in the Valley. We met with successful companies such as Genentech and LinkedIn, hot startups such as Aardvark and Yammer, and premier VCs from Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, Accel, and more.

As co-founders of the MIT Entrepreneurship Review (think Harvard Law Review but from and for MIT; set to launch in February-March), we were keenly interested in entrepreneurial and industry trends, local investment perspective, and the Silicon Valley culture.

Here are our top 3 observations:

3) Beware: Cleantech, Hardware, and Enterprise

Almost every VC presentation in the Valley stressed capital efficiency. So interestingly, we found, at least anecdotally, that cleantech start-ups don’t seem to be as hot in the West as they are (or seem to be) here in the East. Reason being that cleantech typically requires significant infusions of initial investment while taking long cycles to produce returns. This disenchantment with cleantech was a surprise to us since there’s so much excitement about energy here East and particularly at MIT.

In a similar vein, while hardware and enterprise software bets certainly can be very successful, the pressing feeling in the Valley is that it’s important to choose wisely. Software, for reasons of capital efficiency, is more preferable to hardware; and within software, consumer web is more preferable to enterprise. As founder and CEO of Aardvark, Max Ventilla, aptly pointed out, the only real risk in consumer web is product fit, so entrepreneurs need to have a super strong reason (like a commitment from a big/important client or extensive network/domain knowledge that could translate into competitive advantage) to pick enterprise over consumer web.

2) Silicon Valley is Flat

The Valley environment really endears and attracts with its social flatness, which often seems a world apart from the often entrenched and bureaucratic culture in the East. We were amazed that on our trip we were able to schedule meetings with some very busy and accomplished people at just a couple of days’ notice.

1) The Risk-Taking Spirit of the American West

Fail often but fail quickly is perhaps the most reiterated message from the Valley. And it’s not that this message isn’t well known – most of us have heard it so many times before. It’s that hearing this message live being continuously stressed by some very successful people brought it to life that much more. At the same time, we heard from Doug Leone, Sequoia Capital partner and MIT Sloan alum, that successes and failures should be balanced. If you haven’t failed, you haven’t tried; but if you’ve only failed, you don’t know how to do things right.

After our trip we were left wondering if Silicon Valley will continue to be the mecca of, so to speak, Malcolm Gladwell’s “outliers” in entrepreneurship? If not, where will the new mecca be and what will drive its emergence?

At the MIT Entrepreneurship Review, we hope to continuously explore this question and many more by examining the interplay of science, technology, and entrepreneurship. If you want to stay on the cutting-edge of thought-leadership in entrepreneurship, follow us on Twitter @MITEReview for updates and news about our upcoming launch.

Rob Lemos and Erdin Beshimov are MIT Sloan MBA students Class of 2011. To see the MIT Entrepreneurship Review’s “About Us” video, go to http://entrepreneurship.mit.edu/MITER.

A Toolkit For Progress And Happiness

2010-01-19T18:00:00.009-05:00

I think every organization should have its own Toolkit of Progress and Happiness. This toolkit would be a set of shared guidances and mental/behavioral models to help members of that organization deal with difficult and/or unfamiliar challenges, analyze situations, adjust behavior, build unity, foster cohesion, achieve understanding, initiate, plan, lead change, and make decisions. Thanks to the intensive, educational, and not least, entertaining Distributed Leadership seminar by Profs. Tom Malone and Wanda Orlikowski here's one model that will be going into the toolkit of my organizations:

Above is my hand-drawn diagram of the MIT Sloan leadership model. According to this model, effective leaders essentially do four important things: sensemaking - understanding the context around, inventing - designing ways to solve problems, visioning - drawing a compelling horizon to strive toward, and relating - developing relations and communicating across organization.

I didn't feel particularly enlightened when I first saw this model. It's certainly not superior to most other leadership models out there, nor do you need to know this model to be an effective leader. And yet, it could be useful. Useful when you have a challenge on your hands, when you're under pressure, when there's a crisis - in short, when people tend to act on pure reflex. Take this model and a deep breath, and then, just like an engineer would try and diagnose a problem, prodding with his tools, first gently here and there and then more intently, ask yourself, "Is some sensemaking needed here, or maybe some inventing or relating, or perhaps some visioning?" If you're stuck, which we all often are, this could be a good mechanical way of dealing with the situation and making progress. Trial and error would show the rest of the way.

So I like this model, but I think there were even better nuggets of wisdom at the seminar. I'll try and write about them sometime soon.

You Too Baby!

2010-01-12T14:45:00.004-05:00

Ellen and I spent the Christmas break in the company of Ellen's sister Lucy and her two sons Charlie, 3, and Malcolm, 1, who everyone, including Charlie, lovingly called "Baby".

For Charlie, there couldn't be a Christmas without toy train presents. The windows of their house look out onto train tracks so closely that you could literally jump out on a passing train. The rhythmic beat of rails has been Charlie's sound of life since birth. He loves trains, he is absolutely fascinated by them.

As soon as the presents were unwrapped, Charlie immediately sprawled out on the carpet, gazing at and conducting his new trains in semicircles back and forth. In that moment of explorer's oblivion, that was Charlie's only world and nothing else. But Malcolm, as irresistibly as little brothers do, just couldn't miss the action. Of course Charlie's toys were more interesting than his - they were Charlie's!

Every time Malcolm reached for Charlie's trains, Charlie promptly enveloped the trains with his hands and chest and wiggled and repositioned himself away from Malcolm. They were his toys and it was his and only his time to play with them. Persisting, Malcolm went around, but Charlie turned away again. And so on until Malcolm finally succeeded in grabbing one of Charlie's trains.

Everything that followed we could see in slow motion and foretell. Charlie suddenly dropped his stance of avoidance, cried out an exasperated "Baby!" and launched an unrestrained straight fist into Malcolm's body. Malcolm flew back and landed on the floor, with his tears of desperation and offense popping our slow motion bubble.

Lucy jumped from her chair, lifted Charlie away from his toys and sat him sternly in a chair. "Time Out!" "Time Out!" "Time Out!" She then, in a moment of stupendous comedy completely unexpected by everyone else, hoisted Malcolm off the floor so briskly that he stopped crying, sat him in the corner of the sofa, and, pointing a finger at him, said "You too Baby!"

Malcolm will likely remember this for the rest of his life and break history's all records of early childhood memories. We could barely hold back the laugh.

Unexpectedly Fantastic Logistics Meeting

2010-01-05T14:35:00.004-05:00

Yesterday after a full menu of super exciting events, which was capped by an unbelievable conversation with Doug Leone, a partner at Sequoia Capital and MIT Sloan alum, we students had to attend a late-night logistics meeting. Needless to say, the collective desire for it was one of a prolonged arghhh -- how can you end a day like that with a logistics meeting!

But something outstanding happened when students gathered in the room. We had just returned from an alumni networking reception and Bill Aulet, the E&I Trek's faculty leader, went in the center of the room and asked a simple question, How Do You Approach Networking Receptions? Indeed, how do you?

What ensued was a profoundly enriching and boundlessly entertaining back-and-forth that brought to surface such simple yet empowering tips as:

Wear your name badge on your left, so it's easily seen when you're shaking hands;
Have a wingman and work the room together. You say "I want to meet so and so" and your wingman engaged the so and so and introduces you so as to give you status boost. And you do the same for your wingman;
Save your classmates from "Velcro's" -- meet-and-greets that go just to long and don't give your classmates the opportunity to meet your people. You see a Velcro, get yourself into the mix, start a new conversation, and give your classmate a chance to "float";
And much more.

Students didn't want to leave the room. Now this is a community of students really coming together and learning together. I'm sure we'll be fondly reminiscing on this "boring" logistics meeting twenty years from now when we meet at...wait...oh, yes, alumni receptions!

In The Car

2010-01-05T04:45:00.004-05:00

For students who are part of the Entrepreneurship & Innovation program at MIT Sloan the new year began with the Silicon Valley Trek. From dawn to dusk we're meeting entrepreneurs, hot new startups, and VCs. It's an experience of a lifetime. But for me the best part of the experience has been sharing rides with fellow classmates on our way to and back from meetings. We debate about companies that we're seeing and after the visits we share notes and compare impressions. It's fantastic. We are learning about the world and we're learning about each other in the process. This experience is really bringing us together and has planted yet another seed to the years of stimulating friendship between and ahead of us.

The Most Important Skill

2009-11-30T23:45:00.003-05:00

The days of deep economic distress hopefully will soon be over. But many people, against their will, actions, or merit, continue to struggle -- some without jobs, others having to hold on to jobs they wouldn't otherwise desire. Frustrated, they rue. Time is passing while they could be gaining skills, getting ahead in life, going somewhere. But you know what, struggling and dealing with it is a skill too; sometimes, the most important one that you can have. Getting knocked down, getting up, chin up, self-belief surging. It will pay off.

Chasing Bernie Madoff

2009-11-30T18:12:00.003-05:00

Today at Sloan Harry Markopolos, one of the chief protagonists in the uncovering of Bernie Madoff's ponzi scheme, gave a talk entitled "Chasing Bernie Madoff". First, albeit somewhat off-topic, impression: just how proficient - masterly - he appeared to be in matters of finance. Sure that's his job, but it's not often that you see individuals who exude so much knowledge and so much confidence. Some people have it, but just don't show it; others just don't have it. And it's impressive when someone's mastery makes you want to follow suit. If there's a benchmark for mastery, it's this: Do you inspire others to do what you do?

MIT and Sloan

2009-11-28T12:53:00.005-05:00

Many students come to MIT Sloan not because of the business school itself, but because they want to be part of the MIT community at large. I was one of those students, and I wanted to apply what I learned in the classroom by working side by side with outstanding engineers on bringing new technologies to market. To me, that seemed like a great way to prepare for and anticipate the future evolution of business and society, as opposed to treating business school as just a springboard for a job.

But once I set my foot on the campus I quickly discovered to my chagrin that MIT doesn't quite conform to the image of an embracing union of businessmen and engineers, an image so actively promoted by the school. Engineers and businessmen at MIT represent two very distinct cultures and mostly keep to themselves. What's more, a business student's literal interpretation of the school's Mens et Manus motto -- i.e. actively exploring the campus, its labs, and the work done by MIT's technologists -- could be frowned upon by engineers and even seen as a disguised attempt to take advantage of someone else's work.

This barrier is a downer for many students who discover it, but after three months at MIT I've come to believe that it will change. For one, many students take active steps to bridge the campus closer together, instead of receding into their distinct spheres. The MIT 100K competition is the mothership of this movement, but there are many other initiatives such as Wednesday night IdeaStorm's at the MIT Entrepreneurship Center (E40-196), for example, that too bring and engage students from different departments together. Many engineers take the New Enterprises class offered at Sloan and, finding it valuable, they generate excellent word-of-mouth for the cause of cross-campus collaboration. Thanks to these activities the campus as we see it today won't be the same tomorrow. Sometime soon a company that emerges from one of these initiatives will become really big and famous, and its example will compel a serious departure from the divided atmosphere that reigns today.

Finally, no matter how difficult it may be for students to operate in this barrier-ridden environment, on second thought that may actually be a really useful thing. After all, probably most technology companies do have some form of a cultural tension between engineers and the rest of the company. For those planning to be a part of innovation-based businesses, it should be valuable to experience this tension, understand it, and finally overcome it and use it for creative purposes. So enjoy it while it lasts!

Instant Response

2009-11-23T17:09:00.003-05:00

What makes MIT so unique and amazing is its almost instantaneous reaction to many issues and challenges that are shaping the world -- no matter how new or difficult they are. The U.S. Congress recently passed a seminal healthcare bill, and there are groups of students on this campus working already on building technologies that will plug into and enhance this new healthcare environment. This instantaneous response -- as well as the self-confidence, enthusiasm, and ability to distill a very complex environment and identify viable opportunities -- is absolutely amazing to see. It's contagious.

The Inclusive School Pride

2009-10-27T21:04:00.003-04:00

Every MIT student who participated in the today's MIT 100K Elevator Pitch Contest must have felt tremendous school pride. There were so many, impressively many, students from other schools -- even as far as Michigan and Penn -- who tried their luck in this world's greatest American Idol for entrepreneurs. What's more, there were people who weren't even students or alums, and they gave it a shot too -- some of them may even go to the finals! It was just so inspiringly inclusive.

Magic happens when you merge bright with inclusive.

Wine In The Elevator

2009-10-27T00:44:00.002-04:00

What’s the closest thing to having wine in the elevator? At MIT, it’s having wine at a practice bootcamp the night before the MIT 100K Elevator Pitch Contest. That’s exactly what happened tonight at a session organized so thoughtfully by the MIT Entrepreneurship and Execution Club. Students practiced their pitches and received feedback, and the event spoke volumes about the often unsaid wonders of entrepreneurship at MIT.

First, it’s really remarkable that students felt completely at ease practicing and polishing their pitches in front of their future contestants. This symbiosis of cooperation and competition is a powerful fiber in the fabric of MIT. Second, it was amazing, pride-instilling, and heart-warming to see how generous the students were with their time, knowledge, and ideas.

These are the things that often aren’t easy to see when looking at MIT from outside in, but they are very much the things that serve as the very definition of entrepreneurship at MIT.

Who Brings You Here?

2009-10-23T14:35:00.004-04:00

"What brings you here?" is often the first question you get at networking events. It's a way to engage, but it's hit-and-miss - there are just so many ways to answer. It's a hit, and you exchange contacts. It's a miss, so you move on.

But what if you had an event where it all began with, "Who brings you here?" A professional networking event, for example, where people bring their mentor. An event to celebrate and exchange stories about partnerships and goodwill between people. There won't be a single one uninteresting or irrelevant conversation at such an event. Instead, you'd come away full of stories, familiar stories, yet nonetheless ones that never fail to delight and inspire.

A Sip For A Semester

2009-10-22T13:47:00.004-04:00

It's SIP time here at Sloan, i.e. Sloan Innovation Period - a week when regular classes are off and students instead attend one-off seminars picked from a myriad of choices. SIP has many meanings. For some students, SIP means breezing through the required seminars on Monday and Tuesday and then going off to travel. For others, it's about letting random learning run amok by sitting all manner of disparate seminars. And yet for others, it's simply a chance to catch up on some blogging.

As I'm sure one can gather from the list, SIP isn't a particularly important period. But it can be. What if SIP wasn't just for a week, but for an entire semester. Just imagine, an entire semester of business school dedicated to disparate learnings and roaming from one random seminar to another. Every new learning will then come wrapped in surprise, and I bet you'd learn a ton.

Care for a routine of delight?

From Impractical To Practical

2009-10-21T21:50:00.003-04:00

Business school education isn't always a tailored experience, so it's not surprising that students often ask, How is this useful? As in, How is this piece of knowledge that seems at once complex and basic and abstract - and often jarring to creativity, free thought and imagination - useful? Useful to my career, life, or learning goals?

Fair question, but one that gets quickly resolved during exams. With midterms looming, you have to learn, you have to know, you have to understand, and so you do. You cram, and suddenly, a piece of knowledge that only seconds ago appeared incorrigibly impractical becomes so useful in a million ways. Enlightenment.

And why just a moment ago did it seem so far beyond imaginable that you can't find something useful before you know it and understand it?

When Feeling Bad Is Good

2009-10-19T14:51:00.002-04:00

Business school is peppered by moments of discovery and delight, but it's also punctuated by subtle moments of disquiet, moments when things just don't feel right. Often a product of subconscious expectations, not all of them can be explained or explained away. But they are good. When they come, focus on them, savor them, enjoy them, for they are showing you a way to understand yourself when you are changing.

Entrepreneurship @ MIT

2009-10-08T19:38:00.003-04:00

As I immerse myself into the entrepreneurial ecosystem at MIT, I continue to look back on the days when I just got in and started talking to MIT students interested in entrepreneurship. What's amazing to me now is that the first three students that I talked to all became entrepreneurs. This is inspiring, and it tells me that entrepreneurship at MIT is for real.

For some inspiration, check out Upward Mobility, an MIT startup that only some months ago was just an idea. Its founder, Ted Chan, was the first Sloanie that I talked to last spring. It's ironic (and good business too!) that Upward Mobility's new iPhone app should be so pertinent to all of my classmates vying for careers in strategy consulting.

Greatness Through Fun

2009-10-05T11:34:00.005-04:00

MIT is such an interesting and complex institution that there's an entire seminar course dedicated to its understanding. Paul Gray, the man who's held virtually every leadership role at MIT, including President, spoke at the seminar last week.

When asked why MIT - a relatively young institution founded roughly a century ago - has made such dazzling progress and become arguably the world's most successful university of the past century, Paul Gray gave a simple, even somewhat anticlimactic, answer: "Great students, great faculty, great donors."

In his own way Paul Gray is right, and yet there might be more to it than that. I say, it's fun. Really, it's fun. Just visit the Edgerton Center in Building 4 and you'll know why. You will see pictures of the Institute Professor Harold E. Edgerton, gently known as "Doc", the father of flash photography, singing, experimenting, playing guitar, building, delighting. You'll see pictures of smiles, of cheers and toasts, of students laughing, and even of Jacques-Yves Cousteau in an MIT hat and aboard Calypso with Doc and his students. Fun, fun, fun. Passion.

That's why science is booming here.

Selling Sales

2009-10-03T13:45:00.001-04:00

The MIT Sloan Sales Club continues to impress with its very thoughtful roster of events. This past Thursday the club treated students to a talk by Maria Cirino - distinguished sales executive, entrepreneur, and now, venture capitalist with .406 Ventures.

Maria Cirino made an observation that really rang true within the walls of MIT, an innovation-driven research university: the companies that are "in the zone" and flying high are companies where both product and sales enjoy an equal pedestal. That's when the company is having fun and making money.

Yet at the same time, it's difficult to achieve this vaunted balance. Technologists often have an aversion for sales, which is driven partly by the general misunderstanding by society of what sales really is. So Maria Cirino offered this piece of advice: If you want to have great technologists who understand and respect sales, show them the data, for smart people in general do value data. And the data is, companies with great sales do well. Plain simple. Pertinent advice from a sales professional who's built successful technology companies.

Analogy For Google

2009-09-29T20:18:00.004-04:00

Today, by all accounts was a Google day at MIT, with talks on Chrome, YouTube, Universal Search, and Google Books by Google's MIT Course 6 alums. Ever wonder how many books there exist? Here's an answer from a Google Books engineer Jon Orwant:

2 million books in print, and
150 million manifestations of 110 million distinct works worldwide, of which
Google digitized over 10 million...

... And it sound like that massive work was lots of fun. Like for example, the Google engineer who found a way to overlay pretty images (and how do you program to decide what's pretty?) over the bland covers on many classics. Go to books.google.com and you'll see it under Classics. Yet another apple from the "20-percent time" tree!

So what is Google, especially when it continues to impress? To me, it's Gary Kasparov and Deep Blue, but... playing on the same side. In modern chess, with computers briskly analyzing more than 2 million positions per second, it's becoming rare for humans -- even for leading grandmasters -- to beat computers. Google's reach, talent, and business model are to the world what in chess computers are to humans. But in rare cases that humans do defeat machines, it's because of creativity and imagination, where the gift of human foresight cuts through the galaxies of bits. And Google's "Don't Be Evil," the "20-percent time," and the general fun that people exhibit working there are exactly that. So it is Kasparov and Deep Blue together.

And oh, in case you're a Life magazine fan, it's now fully digitized in Google Books.

What Is, What Isn't

2009-09-28T16:57:00.005-04:00

In college, you look at "might" and "might not", "may" or "may not". You care about finding questions, not answers. In business school, you care about "what is" and "what isn't". You want them answers.

And some professors do oblige. Happily. Professor Mark Ritson is one of them.

"Segment. Target. Position. And only in that order. Or it will come to bit your ass."
"Don't sell innovation. In the entire history of the world a consumer never bought a product because it was innovative. Consumers buy the benefits of innovation."
"In positioning, the moment you have choice, you're f---ed."
"The reason you think your product works almost certainly won't be the reason some people buy it."
"A good product can be killed by bad marketing."
"The graveyard of (shit) ideas actually exists."

He might be wrong here and there. But at this point, to learn you need an anchor -- the "what is" and "what isn't". So I'll take it.

What Kind Of Somebody?

2009-09-28T16:46:00.002-04:00

You want to be somebody. But what kind of somebody? So you wonder, until you meet that somebody who inspires others to be that kind of somebody. And then it's crystal clear. Inspire.

Time To Learn

2009-09-27T21:25:00.004-04:00

On the one hand, you really can learn tremendous things in business school. Like, for example, the psychological traps in decision-making that we learned about in Organizational Processes or the concept of revenue recognition and its implications in Accounting. Yet on the other hand, it's nothing you can't learn outside of business school. There are libraries, the Internet, and friends with know-how, as well as evenings and weekends. So why go to business school to learn these things?

The answer, if there's any, is that you need the time to learn, to really focus on the learning process, to have it as your number one priority. Most of the time, you get what you pay for. And if it's for two years of active learning and thinking and experimenting, hopefully that's what you'll get.

Talent Benchmarks

2009-09-26T12:28:00.004-04:00

Attracting talent is, in my mind, the entrepreneur's biggest challenge. You need a great tech person, a great sales person, a great marketing person. And it's not just that talent is scarce, it's also that it's often hard to tell what talent is, particularly if the talent you're looking for is outside your area of knowledge and experience. How can a marketing person tell a great tech person, and vice versa? How can a sales person tell a great finance person?

My answer for this so far has been three letters. MIT. Through abundant and challenging team projects, you get to see classmates who truly excel in particular ways. It's a beautiful sight. And they set benchmarks for you to aim for. So when in the future I'm looking for a finance person, I know that that person should be like this classmate. And when I'm looking for a sales person, I'll be aiming for someone like that classmate.

It's an incredibly empowering feeling.

Message To Corporate America

2009-09-24T11:39:00.005-04:00

Dear Corporate Executive,

Please skip your next golf session, come to our campus, and poach students from MIT Sloan's Entrepreneurship & Innovation track. Because if you don't do it now, it will haunt you later.

I was there at the E&I track seminar yesterday. I saw hunger, I saw inventiveness, I saw humbleness. And in the next two years, street smarts will get added to the mix too. For in the class we weren't talking about how rich and famous we were going to become. I know, you ain't afraid of that. You want us to have ego. You want us to let it lead us astray. No, we were talking about how hard and painful it will be for us to take on you, and... (here's the part you don't want to see) the street smarts we'll need to have to do it.

And trust me, some of us will go and do it. Not all, but enough to go and inspire others. And before you know it, you won't be loving your quarterly calls anymore.

So come and poach. While you can.

Yours truly,

E&I Student

Old Faithful

2009-09-23T11:02:00.008-04:00

Old Faithful is a geyser in Yellowstone National Park. It's the most famous geyser in Yellowstone, the park's symbol and synonym. But it's arguably not the most beautiful, nor it's the largest. So why is it famous?

Because it's consistent and it's predictable. You know that if you spend two hours by Old Faithful, you will see it erupt. Any day of the week, month, and year. And you can't say that about most other geysers in the park. Some of them are arguably more beautiful than Old Faithful, or at least appear in settings more mystical and scenic. Some of them are larger than Old Faithful. But you really don't know for sure when they'd erupt. That's why people gravitate to Old Faithful.

See the similarities with other things in life?

Tyranny Of Slides

2009-09-22T22:02:00.007-04:00

This week at Sloan first year students are being bombarded with class assignments involving PowerPoint presentations. One after another. But when was the last time, really, that an original, powerful, creative idea was brought home on a slide?

Never?

The problem of assigning slides to students lies basically in the inherent message, "Go use existing tools. Churn it out. **Don't** create new tools, the only tools to truly raise interest and inspire. Just use the tools that are there. We don't expect more."

Shouldn't the message rather be, "Find or, even better, invent a creative way to convince and inspire others with you idea"?

Fullness Of A Person

2009-09-18T10:32:00.005-04:00

As days go by, your perspective on your classmates becomes fuller and richer. One question leads to another and with time you discover your classmates in new interesting ways. They gradually become a real person, only similar in name to the one-dimensional stranger that we all seemed like on day one.

But some people can bridge this perception gap with remarkbale speed. When our accounting course began, Professor Rodrigo Verdi introduced himself and then showed a picture of his baby and said, "This is my joy in life, but I haven't had much sleep in the past few months. So if something goes wrong, please cut me some slack." And I'm sure we've all subconsciously registered, "Wow, this is a real person, with a real life, with real feelings. Wow, I already feel like I know this person and I like this guy." Just one picture.

Also, yesterday at lunch the Sloan Sales Club brought in Pascal Ronde, VP of Sales at Verigy, to speak to students about sales. The talk begins, Mr. Ronde assumes center stage and then with great gusto addresses the audience in...French! Apparently he was asking whether to speak in French or English. But the effect was, "Wow, I now know how this guy sounds in his native tongue, and it sounds great. He feels like a full person to me now, a person with a story, a story I want to hear." The talk went great.

You Won't Care

2009-09-18T10:11:00.003-04:00

Three weeks into business school and the experience seems so much different from the applications marathon a year ago. Turns out, most thoughts and worries around questions like

Where will I go? Where should I go?
Will it be a good place for me?
Will it open doors?

...really just don't matter. You won't care. Because you're gonna love it. You're gonna meet your classmates and they'll impress you a great deal. You're gonna join the soccer club (if you're like me) and you'll say, "Wow, this is the best soccer I've had in a while." You're gonna go out and party with your new friends -- and the feeling of finding so many new friends, well, isn't it amazing? -- and you're gonna realize you're happy, you're loving it, you're in the right place, life is great!

Subtract 250k for Every MBA

2009-09-16T12:58:00.007-04:00

Image via Wikipedia

The Innovation Club here at Sloan kicked off the school year with a slam dunk presentation by Aaron Patzer, the founder of Mint, the personal finance website just acquired by Intuit for $170 million.

The presentation was fantastic, for Aaron focused on the "garage" stage of entrepreneurship -- the moment when you're just getting started, and that connected with the students here since most of us are still in that wondrous and hopeful pre-garage stage.

But I think the most interesting and important thing that Aaron said, especially in the context of a business school talk, was that it's not the engineer, but the MBA that's an expendable asset. It's something I've believed in since my first encounters a few years ago with MIT and the magic that its techies can produce, and Aaron touche'd this point with this poignant Silicon Valley Unwritten Rule:

"When valuing a startup, add $500k for every engineer, and subtract 250k for every MBA."

!!!

On A Path

2009-09-11T10:24:00.003-04:00

Do you ever find yourself stumbling upon new interesting people where you feel that these encounters, though seemingly independent of each other, are indeed connected? You meet a person, ask a question, but get an unexpected answer, an answer that suddenly reveals that person's unique adventures with curiosity. Right there, you're enriched, you're a person with new questions. And you ask them. And you're now on a new path, on a path of discovery, illuminated by a rolling light from sparks of probing minds.

Rare Polish

2009-09-09T14:10:00.003-04:00

One thing that I sorely regretted on my roadtrip across America was not knowing more about photography. I've always enjoyed photography, and even had taken it up seriously for a brief while, but it never really broke through into my regular family of hobbies. And the sights I've witnessed all across the vast spaces of the Southwest, sights that I couldn't possibly do justice to with my limited array of camera tricks, made me regret that.

This poses an interesting question, How do you keep up with skills that you really love to have now and then, but just don't utilize on a regular basis?

As I was asking myself that question, an essay by Robert Clark landed on my lap. A few years ago this National Geographic photographer challenged himself to roadtrip across America and record the sights with a simple camera phone. The result, in my opinion, was art. And I think that's an inspiration precisely for the question above. Use your camera phone, and this experience will help you appreciate the basics -- the basics that with a measure of imagination and proper focus can produce art.

And then you won't have any regrets when you take your latest Nikon to the Yellowstone National Park.

Yet Another Reason For Entrepreneurship

2009-09-08T09:22:00.003-04:00

One of the things I'd really love to accomplish while at Sloan is a study trip to Japan. For I think entrepreneurs in America should take inspiration from the culture and companies in the Land of the Rising Sun.

What's really impressive about the Japanese, as so many people note, is how proud they are of their work and how much they truly do believe in it, however insignificant that particular function could seem to outsiders. And that manifests itself in every infinitesimal detail. Workers on bullet-trains, for example, at the start of every ride go through the safety-check routine with extreme thoroughness, day in and day out without fail. That's why they haven't had any fatalities in very many years. They are always neatly dressed and you won't see them talking on their cell phones on the train. Compare that to America. Japan indeed is a country of the beauty of details, and that has been possible because of its people's amazing commitment and care.

This brings me to think that if you're an entrepreneur in America, or anywhere else, if you could recreate the spirit of a Japanese company, you are well on your way to being a very formidable competitor. You really can compete, however small you are in the beginning, if you can have that spirit.

Mens and Manus

2009-09-07T21:56:00.004-04:00

It's incredible how deeply the culture of learning by doing permeates MIT, and I saw that once again at an MIT Sailing Club crash course. The instructor welcomed us the eager and then proceeded to bluntly promise, "You're going to see plenty of water today." He also added that they'd teach us the basics -- balance, turns, and sails -- and then let us capsize. His tone suggested he actually wanted that to happen. Those in the audience who'd been at MIT for some time now didn't seem at all surprised -- I even vaguely recall them nodding.

We did see a lot of water, as well as some capsizing, and it made for a Can't Wait To Do It Again experience. By the way, the view of the Charles and the Boston skyline from MIT piers, especially when the boats are out, makes MIT much more palatable on the Yes, I Have A Life scale.

Ps. We sailed on boats so appropriately called Tech Dinghy's.

The Truth

2009-09-05T17:50:00.005-04:00

It was a house party for MIT students, mostly undergrads, and I was there as the token Sloan student, making my first steps exploring the world of MIT. Standing by the kitchen table and getting a glass of Dr. Pepper, I made some small talk with a student behind me who was waiting for that bottle.

I told him that I remembered my first ever sip of Dr. Pepper. It was at a picnic in Portland, Oregon on my first visit to America. The sip didn't go down well and it reminded me of a Soviet liquid medicine for children. But for some now-forgotten reason I gave it yet another go a couple of years later. And I said, "So then I realized it was..." And in that brief pause the student interjected, "It was the truth."

"It was the truth." For me, that tiny moment encapsulated MIT. A young student, but a long beard. A pensive, sometimes detached, sometimes super engaged, inventive look under the glasses. A shyness that amusingly belies a vibrant mind and temperament. And the pursuit of truth.