24 Steps to a Successful Startup

This book provides significant value to a specific group of deep tech entrepreneurs, particularly in the Climate and Energy space.

I sent John Hauser, my MIT Sloan colleague, a chapter from the Expanded and Updated Disciplined Entrepreneurship book. He delivered the kind of feedback that makes you take things to a whole other level.

There’s a new DE book coming out! "Disciplined Entrepreneurship for Climate Energy Ventures" is the first how-to entrepreneurship book that's tailored specifically to the unique journey of building climate and energy ventures.

Summer has the perception of a time for relaxing, but the opposite is true for entrepreneurship at MIT.  Great companies, and more importantly, great entrepreneurs, are developed in the summer in our delta v program, where the students get to work full time on their ideas with the full support of our staff.  This is the time when they make the greatest progress.

After many years of work, the next Disciplined Entrepreneurship book is with the publishers now and will be coming out later this year. It dates back to over a decade ago now when we started to apply the Disciplined Entrepreneurship methodology to the all-important Climate and Energy sector. It turns out that the first principles definitely applied but there were additional dimensions to consider and the sequencing might change a bit.

Back in the 1980s, when I was just getting started in the computer industry and the business world, working at IBM, I was assigned to work in the extraordinarily exciting area of personal computers as it was just starting to blow up. I saw for the first time what entrepreneurship was about (there was very limited understanding of tech entrepreneurship before this), and the leaders in the field of entrepreneurship included Bill Gates (Microsoft founder), Steve Jobs (Apple founder), and Mitch…

First big takeaway: Orbit/JetPack isn't just a fancy chatbot. It acted as what we call an External Enabler. Academic researcher Professor Per Davidsson from Queensland University of Technology talks about how external enablers change the game for entrepreneurs by making things less "opaque" and reducing "agency-intensity".

Remington Hotchkis, a serial entrepreneur in Los Angeles (LA), California, had just seen his latest and biggest venture—Bixby Roasting, a successful D2C subscription coffee business patterned after Dollar Shave Club and Chewy.com—acquired by a much larger company in a successful exit where it could realize its full potential. He should have been celebrating and maybe even relaxing for the first time in six years, surfing at Laguna Beach, and appreciating how he had made people’s lives better by…

It is hard to describe MIT EDP (Entrepreneurship Development Program) to people who have not participated in it. It’s a six-day fully immersive program at MIT held in January, often in brutally cold weather, like this year. Entrepreneurs come together from dozens of regions worldwide to form a cohort of about 70-80 participants. Over six days, they have to build a company plan; each day some milestones need to be hit. The lectures in the morning provide examples of how to apply the first…

If you think you are going to read about yourself in this post, let me warn you it’s highly unlikely. Doesn’t mean we do not love you but there was just an overwhelming amount of great (entrepreneur)Ship that happened in 2024. Here are my top 10 items.