Hi, my name is Bill Aulet.
I'm the Managing Director of the Martin Trust
Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, and we're
responsible for entrepreneurship education
across all five schools at MIT.
I'm a engineer/basketball player who worked
at IBM for 11 years, and then became an entrepreneur
three times, making companies each time more
successful, because the first time it wasn't
very successful, so today I'm an entrepreneur
by design and an academic by accident I guess.
I remember when someone asked me to come and
speak at an entrepreneurship class 15 years
ago.
I said, "You can't teach people entrepreneurship.
You just do it."
And over time I've come to see that that is
not correct.
Entrepreneurship is like many other things
in life.
It's not a science in that it's deterministic
that if you do A and you do B that you will
definitely get C, and it's not art.
It's what we call a craft, and that means
that there are first principles that if you
do A and you do B, you're more likely to be
successful, and it's a complicated system,
so you can't really tell, but the data's very
very clear.
The more times you're an entrepreneur, the
more likely you are to be successful, and
so what are those first principles that people
learn?
How do we give them that experience?
And that's what we do, and when we do that,
entrepreneurship can definitely be learned.
Once we realized that entrepreneurship could
be taught, we really focused on what are those
first principles to teach and how do we create
a systematic way to teach that and a prescriptive
way to take people through a journey.
The journey ends up at different places for
everybody, so it's difficult to do that, but
we've come up with a disciplined entrepreneurship
framework that takes you from idea to product,
and then we take you from product to venture,
and how do you know who your customer is?
How do you know what value you create for
your customers?
How does your customer acquire the product?
What are the unit economics of that?
How do you build your product and then how
do you scale your business?
These are all things where they're different
parts that have not been elsewhere before
and we bring them all together in one common
toolbox for our students and a common language,
and I didn't intend to write a book, but I
just found out there was nothing out there
that met this need for entrepreneurs.
When I think about traits of entrepreneurs,
I guess five pop to mind right away.
The first thing is you have to be a team player.
Entrepreneurship is not an individual sport.
It's a team sport, so you have to be able
to build that team.
You have to have that authenticity to be able
to create a team.
The second thing is you have to be willing
to be different.
You can't just do what everybody else is doing.
If all the fish are swimming this way, you
have to get excited to swim the other way.
Third thing is you have to be intellectually
curious about it.
You have to be willing to think about things
in new ways and always be learning.
After those three characteristics, the fourth
one is you have to be willing to work very
very hard.
Tomorrow is promised to nobody in entrepreneurship.
You've got to make it happen yourself, and
the last thing that's important is, even when
you're willing to be different, even if you're
willing to work hard, even if you're intellectually
curious, you have to be disciplined, and those
are the things that we focus on at MIT.
We talk about the spirit of a pirate, but
the execution skills of a Navy Seal.
Look, no matter where you are in the world
today, entrepreneurship is the future.
Entrepreneurship is not just the future of
how we're going to create jobs, how we're
going to solve the world's intractable problems.
It's how you control your own destiny, and
it's something that is accessible to everybody.
Everybody can learn how to be an entrepreneur.
It's like learning a language.
If you have to be, you will learn how to do
it, so the only way you're going to learn
how to do it though is to get on the field
and to get out there and try it.
It's not theory, although there is a role
for theory in this, and it's not just practice.
It's the combination of theory and practice
that will make you a great entrepreneur, and
that's what we'll provide you here at MIT.
Thank everybody for listening, and make sure
you subscribe to the YouTube channel for the
Legatum Center.
