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Successful entrepreneurs know how to thrive amid uncertainty. They pare down to the essentials. They lean into change. And they solve problems by sidestepping traditional constraints.
With that in mind, we asked four entrepreneurs in residence at the Martin Trust Center for Entrepreneurship at MIT for advice on managing risk, harnessing artificial intelligence, and launching during uncertain times.
MIT Entrepreneurs in Residence
Ben Soltoff
Ecosystem-Builder in Residence at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship
Here’s what they had to say:
What advice would you offer entrepreneurs trying to navigate the current economic landscape? How can and should they approach launch and scale in an age of uncertainty?
Jenny Larios Berlin — Entrepreneurship is always about managing uncertainty. My advice is to learn to listen to yourself. If the problem you want to solve is so critical and essential to you, then solve it! The only wrong decision is no action.
Devon Sherman Daley — Uncertain times can exacerbate problems that need to be solved, and entrepreneurs excel at solving problems. Disciplined entrepreneurs don’t simply avoid or eliminate risk. Rather, they excel at managing inevitable risk as intelligently as possible by identifying and acting upon opportunities to de-risk.
Chris Moses — Survival requires focus and efficiency. Early-stage companies need to practice operational excellence and increase the speed at which they learn from their customers. When companies are flush with capital, focus and efficiency tend to fall to the wayside; companies that have done bootstrapping are better off for it. As the saying goes — you’ve got to nail it before you scale it.
Ben Soltoff — Startups should look beyond the best-known venture capital firms and consider grants, angels, family offices, more specialized VCs, and corporate venture arms. For climate and energy ventures, the largest pool of capital by far is infrastructure financing rather than traditional VC. Startups may not be able to access that sort of capital right away, but they should be strategically moving in that direction if they want to have any chance at scaling.
What’s one thing you wish someone had told you when you were starting your first company? What unexpected roadblocks did you hit, and how can others avoid them?
Larios Berlin — Understand the difference between commitment and attachment. Commit to building your venture, but beware of getting too attached to an outcome, because it starts to narrow your thinking.
Sherman Daley — My advice, particularly for B2B companies, would be to drill down on potential customers to make sure they are not going to be a drain on the strapped resources of your founding team before moving forward with them.
Moses — Surround yourself with mentors who are both supportive and brutally honest. Mistakes are unavoidable, but the entrepreneurs I’ve seen progress the fastest are those who actively seek out advice and mentorship.
Soltoff — Entrepreneurs should take the time to collect information and set the right course, but this intentionality comes at the risk of analysis paralysis. At a certain point, you need to take action and move forward.
How is artificial intelligence changing entrepreneurship? What opportunities does it open up, and what should founders work to avoid?
Soltoff — In terms of building ventures, AI can be crucial, but it is a technology, not a solution in itself. Adding AI to something does not automatically make it better than the status quo. And regardless of how AI is used, it’s going to require a lot of energy. There is a huge demand for solutions that allow data centers to run more efficiently and for solutions that provide them with clean power, both of which are essential to ensuring that the further growth of AI does not wreak havoc on the climate.
Sherman Daley — Here at MIT, we’re very excited about AI’s ability to enhance the entrepreneurship experience. Orbit, our digital platform with a generative AI assistant, offers personalized guidance to entrepreneurs based on our Disciplined Entrepreneurship methodology. In particular, it’s been energizing to see how Orbit can help students who perhaps didn’t identify as entrepreneurs play around with an idea and see it come to life in a matter of seconds, [giving them] increased confidence in their entrepreneurial abilities.
Larios Berlin — One of the things AI is particularly good at is completing work involving data processing. I mention this because the venture-building part of entrepreneurship requires working from first principles, designing experiments, collecting data, and making decisions from insights gathered. AI has rapidly accelerated the process of collecting, synthesizing, and analyzing data.
Moses — The downside of these amazing tools is that it makes it even easier to skip steps and build too quickly, reinforcing the common practice of launching and learning rather than being more methodical and putting the work in to better understand your market.
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What’s a unique lesson that participants take away from the Trust Center’s Entrepreneurship Development Program?
Larios Berlin — Entrepreneurship is a craft, and it can be taught. EDP participants are always surprised at how much they are able to accomplish in a short period of time. We try to keep our ear to what’s going on in the field on an ongoing basis so that we can keep things super fresh and practical for budding entrepreneurs.
Sherman Daley — Our Disciplined Entrepreneurship methodology stresses the importance of figuring out who your customer is and what you can do for your customer before building a product. We push our students to remain open to pivoting away from what they originally envisioned as their product based on the insights they uncover during their primary market research. It’s a crucial mindset to develop in the early stages of building a business, to remain as customer-centric as possible.
Soltoff — I’ve often seen entrepreneurship taught in a piecemeal fashion, with excellent deep dives into one topic or another but nothing bringing it all together. Our approach is more integrated and holistic. We look at the whole puzzle, not just a single piece.
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