Last Thursday, the guys at TechHub had an interesting guest from MIT (Bill Aulet) to talk about entrepreneurship. Along with two Romanian entrepreneurs (Marius Ursache and Andrei Marinescu), they talked about the issues you could have if you do not start in a “beach head” market, how to bootstrap, where would you get cofounders (great idea: going to a Hackaton – Google is organizing one soon in Bucharest).
Here are some ideas from the talk:
In Bill’s perspective:
- entrepreneurship needs to be regarded as a profession
- the supply of quality entrepreneurship education today is very limited
- entrepreneurial education is contextual, so it’s difficult to teach
- entrepreneurship is experiential, it’s mentor-intensive
- the objective of education is to teach people how to fish, not how to catch a fish
- it’s easy to fail at doing education in entrepreneurship (Donald Trump has an entrepreneurship institute – storytelling and shark-tanking – now he’s being sued for that)
- you have to have the right spirit, to think differently, to be motivated
- you need to foster an environment of creative irreverence, like they do at MIT (hacking)
- hacking is about taking on Goliath, about swimming against the current
- we need not to make entrepreneurship sound easy
- we need the execution skills of a navy seal and incredible self discipline
- you can’t just have practitioners in an entrepreneurship education program; you also need researchers and hard date people
- if we want to make this a profession, we need the data to back it up.
Unfortunately I cannot embed it on my blog, so you can go here and look over it. It’s worth listening for 50 minutes (though they had some issues with the mic at some point and it was a little annoying, but the info is so interesting, it’s worth getting over it).
Of course, there is a short review of the talk here, on the TechHub blog (this is where the quote is coming from)
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