It was a gathering of 122 business leaders from 30 countries in sub freezing temperatures in Boston on January 19-24 to learn about Disciplined Entrepreneurship (DE). A process and set of tools developed by MIT Professor of Practice and Chief Executive of the Martin Trust Center for Entrepreneurship, Bill Aulet. It was a gathering of intense energy and collaboration facilitated by a world class Faculty and the Boston Venture and Angel network.
As someone who worked in a startup and went on to co-found our company, the time in Boston was reminder that what makes for a successful startup is the quality of the founding team. Contrary to my early beliefs that one needed a killer application to be successful. Its the team and the single most important condition for a successful business is a paying customer - a point Bill Aulet drummed the entire week. Below are some of my other take-away from my time at the Entrepreneurship Development Program (EDP);
Entrepreneurship is a process that takes discipline - there are 24 steps in Bill's book which we experienced over the 6 days. We had the opportunity in our project teams to learn and apply the 24 steps. Everything from who is your customer to the pitch deck to potential investors. The 24 steps were broken down into 6 phases. Phase one (who is your customer), Phase two (what can you do for your customer), Phase three (how does your customer acquire your product), Phase four (how do you make money off your product), Phase five (how do you design and build your product) and Phase six (how do you scale your business).
Entrepreneurship education is about teaching a person how to fish and not what to fish - often what we find are story tellers who outline what they did to get to their first million or billion and leave us guessing when our stars will line up to get us to our own nirvana. The Disciplined Entrepreneurship (DE) process provided us a framework and tools we applied to varied set of Innovation Driven Enterprises (IDE).
The mindset of the individual founder is more important that the idea - here we learnt the principle of the antifragile entrepreneur. According to Nassim Nicholas Taleb (a la Black Swan), some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. The antifragile entrepreneur is the person with the mindset and skills to take advantage of the volatility and uncertainty of every day life to create "new venture that produces a product that creates some value for which your new venture can capture some value to make it economically sustainable".
The goal according to Bill, is to to create “Anti-Fragile” humans. People who “grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty.”
All entrepreneurs are not the same - I learnt the distinction between the Small, Medium Sized Enterprises and the Innovation Driven Enterprises (IDE). SME focus is the local market time to market is short, less investment required and linear growth. The IDE other hand, time to market is long, a lot of investment required and prospects of exponential growth is high. For the first time I am clear that our intent is to build an IDE.
The top 7 misconceptions of entrepreneurship were a winner - The first 3 misconceptions were (1) “Entrepreneurs are mercurial individualists” - the team is more important that a lone wolf (2) “Entrepreneurs are the smartest & most high achieving people in the room”. And people point to Steve Jobs as the example. Not exactly, just saw the documentary titled General Magic about all the smart people in a great team that laid the foundation of what is celebrated today as Apple (3) “Entrepreneurs are born, not made”. Like Geoff Colvin found in "Talent is overrated'', there is no gene for great sales people and I might add entrepreneurs. The reality is people who want to be great at anything practice intentionally.
For the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack - this is from Rudyyard Kipling's piece tiled The Law of the Wolves, was a constant refrain by Bill Aulet. I am reminded of Stephen Covey's Habit 6, Synergize which is the whole is greater than the sum of its part. We talk of the whole that is based on the strength, willingness and open-mindedness of each member of the team.
For the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack - this is from Rudyyard Kipling's piece tiled The Law of the Wolves, was a constant refrain by Bill Aulet. I am reminded of Stephen Covey's Habit 6, Synergize which is the whole is greater than the sum of its part. We talk of the whole that is based on the strength, willingness and open-mindedness of each member of the team.
