Thoughts to Begin Summer 2021

The academic school year just wrapped up and summer has officially started. It is a time to look back and digest an amazing year and look forward to what needs to be done next.

1. Observation – The Bar Keeps Going Up: After grading 41 business plans last weekend for the MIT Entrepreneurship 101 class (yes, despite the ranting about them, business plans are still an incredibly useful thing for entrepreneurs – just be careful how you define them and frame them in their value), I see the bar for quality in entrepreneurship continue to rise. This is so pleasing to see. Students are learning a broad portfolio of fundamentals and, very important as well, how to integrate them to increase their odds of success. That being said, there is still a lot of room for improvement (we were coming from a very low base) and I will get into some of this later in this article. I see this not just at MIT but also beyond. The headline observation is that highly skilled entrepreneurs are now much more common than they were just five years ago.
2. Summer Goal #1 – What Effect Will Pandemic Have:  Something that I am watching very closely is what effect the pandemic will have on entrepreneurship when it is finally over. It has made the value, or may I say the necessity, of being an entrepreneur clearer than it has ever been before. However, from an operational standpoint, what will the landscape look like when we can take our masks off and go back to work physically?  At this point, all signs point to what I like to call “pandemonium after the pandemic” rather than a return to the previous status quo. An economic boom is underway where fears of inflation have replaced fears of recession.  This is not true for all markets but true for enough to give entrepreneurs a target-rich environment. That being the case, what will this look like otherwise? Will there be an even more intense war for talent because it will be no longer restrained by geography? Will a great data scientist in Indianapolis be able to work for a Silicon Valley startup with the associated compensation while enjoying the quality of life and costs of living in Indianapolis? (replace Indianapolis with your favorite living place). What will the hybrid workplace of the future look like? There are profound unanswered questions and while many have hypotheses, nobody knows for sure. It will surely affect the future of entrepreneurship, potentially in dramatic ways which just don’t know how yet. This topic is rapidly evolving over the next few months and definitely something I am going to digging into more.
3. Summer Goal #2 – Entrepreneurial Sales: One of our most important courses, Entrepreneurial Sales, has just run into a crisis. After teaching the course so successfully for many years, the incredibly talented and successful trio teaching it, Kirk Arnold, Jim Schuchart, and Lou Shipley, have had to step back from leading this course for a variety of reasons. Living the Antifragile credo, we saw this crisis as an opportunity to rethink the course completely. In that process, we seem to have hit a vein of gold. Sales in an entrepreneurial environment have changed dramatically. The model we had built from the original frameworks that Howard Anderson put in place in 1998 when he started the course has lasted to this day. While there is much valuable material to be carried forward, we are thinking hard about whether a new framing of sales is in order to help us train the Chief Revenue Officers (interim or longer-term) of the next decade. We are also thinking about with that new framing, what additional materials and skill development we should add. The final question is how we should teach this. We have a task force looking at this and the more we dig into it, the more excited I get about the opportunity to produce very valuable new content for our students and the broader entrepreneurial community. We have to get this done over the summer because once September hits and the new school year starts, it is game time and the window of opportunity to have the time and space to do such significantly rethinking, redesigning, and developing is past – until next summer.
4. Summer Goal #3 – delta v 2021: Similar to the Sales course, we have new leadership in our flagship delta v program at MIT. After Trish Cotter was able to get us to a whole new level, Carly Chase has taken the reins and will build off what Trish has done and add her impact to the program. In these times of transitions, there is even more opportunity to explore experimentally-driven change. I am looking forward to supporting Carly as she does this and seeing how we can take this cornerstone program to yet another level. I look forward to seeing how we can continue to improve the apprenticeship model of teaching entrepreneurship and press forward the frontiers of entrepreneurship education.
5. Summer Goal #4 – Finance and Financing for Entrepreneurs: As previously mentioned, I think we now have the teaching of the mechanics of entrepreneurship to a more than acceptable level (but we will always seek to improve) but other areas need attention. In my personal entrepreneurial career, I realized how valuable it was to have an engineering, marketing, and finance skillset to build products and companies.  Having all three gave you a balanced perspective. I was surprised to find that that was unusual that was and have seen the consequences of unbalanced perspectives. Without at least a comfortable knowledge of finance, which is completely feasible and not that complicated, entrepreneurs tend to make decisions that significantly adversely affect their efforts. It starts with basic financial literacy. There is nothing to be scared of here and it can be explained relatively simply. Even if the entrepreneur wants to outsource these operations, it is still important to have an understanding of the fundamental concepts to manage them correctly and integrate them back in with the rest of the operations. After this, the process of fundraising can an unnecessary process of risk that can cripple or kill a company if not done correctly. We are creating an online class with world-renowned experts Professor Antoinette Schoar and Matthew Rhodes-Kropf (also an MIT professor but additionally a successful and currently active Venture Capitalist) to demystify Finance (starting with Financial Literacy) target at entrepreneurs. I must note how stimulating and fun it is to work with these experts who have dramatically different experiences and perspectives. Our goal is to no longer have great entrepreneurs who have found a great product-market fit with a differentiated product lose momentum because they don’t understand the financial aspects of the business. In my humble opinion, it is the easiest part of build a great new venture. Stay tuned and I have been working on this project for about a year and hope to wrap it up this summer. This will be a great complement to other materials like Brad Feld’s Venture Deals but bring a new unique piece of content to fill in the gaps.

I am sure there will be others things that pop up but there are my top four as we hit the first day of the summer. If I can get those done, it will be a very productive summer. If you have any thoughts on these topics, please share them with me. The collective wisdom of the group is always more than any individual or subgroup.

Best wishes to all of you for a restorative and enjoyable summer and I can’t wait for September when, hopefully, we can get back to a more normal life with the pandemic in the rearview mirror.