First Year Seminar: Hitchhikers’ Guide to the MIT Entrepreneurial Galaxy (15.A04)

About the Class

Faculty

One of the things that makes MIT great is its rich and continuing legacy of entrepreneurship. A study done by MIT’s Martin Trust Center showed that the companies founded by MIT Alums would collectively form the 10th biggest economy in the world! More broadly, entrepreneurship is a powerful tool that is the basis for creating successful start-ups, but also a critical professional skill for leading a large organization or pursuing successful research. This seminar provides a window on MIT based on the concepts and pragmatics of entrepreneurship. Led by a dynamic team of entrepreneurs in residence from the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship and the MIT Department of EECS, it provides an overview of an entrepreneurial approach to professional life, as well as the specifics of the sometimes complex MIT entrepreneurial ecosystem. The seminar will take the students’ perspective, helping students understand how to apply entrepreneurship in ways appropriate to them. Guided by the seminar’s leaders, there will also be a diverse and dynamic group of guest speakers who lived the entrepreneurial journey themselves. Among the specifics, the class will discuss tools like the Orbit online entrepreneurship community platform, MIT’s 70+ innovation and entrepreneurship-focused courses, mentoring options like the Trust Center’s Entrepreneurs in Residence or the Venture Mentoring Service, and organizations like StartLabs and MIT Sandbox.

Paul Cheek

Paul Cheek is a serial tech entrepreneur, software engineer, an Entrepreneur in Residence at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, and a Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Paul currently teaches the "New Enterprises" course and previously taught the Advanced Entrepreneurship course, "Building an Entrepreneurial Venture: Advanced Tools and Techniques.” He built MIT's entrepreneurship platform, Orbit, and also coaches entrepreneurs in various programs like the MIT delta v accelerator, MIT fuse, Sandbox Innovation Fund, workshops, and hackathons. Paul is currently building Oceanworks, the global marketplace for recycled ocean plastic materials and products aimed at accelerating the market for recycled ocean plastic to clean up our oceans. Prior, Paul co-founded Work Today, a venture-backed digital staffing and recruiting company. As CTO, he designed and built the company's technology platform and grew the business from 0 to 50,000 workers. Paul has also built technologies for and consulted with LogMeIn, BlackRock, Prudential, Mazda, and more.

George Whitfield

George is a serial entrepreneur with three degrees from MIT: BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and an MEng and PhD in Materials Science and Engineering. As an Entrepreneur in Residence at the Trust Center, George is excited to help build future generations of entrepreneurs, drawing upon his experiences in innovation-driven entrepreneurship, engineering, and student life. George’s interdisciplinary career spans computational aspects of e-commerce, FinTech, robotics, transportation, renewable energy, and nanotechnology. Today, George is the Co-Founder and CEO of FindOurView, which is extracting insights from consumer reviews and conversations to help companies do product research, using AI and machine learning. George envisions building on this work to drive mutual understanding across society. Prior to FindOurView, George was Director of Simulation at Nucleus Scientific, where he joined as an early employee and helped grow the company by 10x in size over the course of seven years, working on electric vehicles. While in the PhD program at MIT, George co-founded and was CEO of SunPoint, a solar tracking company that won the MIT Making and Designing Materials Engineering Competition and the Renewables Track of the MIT Clean Energy Prize. George also co-founded Socially Conscious Software to build mobile apps in the early days of the iPhone app store. George was a co-instructor at MEFTI, the MIT Entrepreneurship and FinTech Integrator held at the MIT Hong Kong Innovation Node. He served as a co-instructor, advisor, and mentor at Station1 Socially Directed Science and Technology. George was also a guest lecturer in MIT’s Mechanical Engineering Department on numerical simulation. George is a recipient of the John Wulff Award for Excellence in Education, and Community Service Award from the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering. George is also the author of four issued and three pending patents related to novel actuators and software control technologies. While a student, George served as President of the MIT Graduate Materials Council and a competitor on the MIT Sport Taekwondo Club.

Alfred Spector

Alfred Spector is presently a Visiting Scholar at MIT and a Senior Advisor at Blackstone. For five years ending in mid-2020, he was Chief Technology Officer and Head of Engineering at Two Sigma, a firm dedicated to using information to optimize diverse economic challenges. Prior to joining Two Sigma, Dr. Spector spent nearly eight years as Vice President of Research and Special Initiatives, at Google, where his teams delivered a range of successful technologies including machine learning, speech recognition, and translation. Prior to Google, Dr. Spector held various senior-level positions at IBM, including Vice President of Strategy and Technology (or CTO) for IBM Software and Vice President of Services and Software research across the company. He previously founded and served as CEO of Transarc Corporation, a pioneer in distributed transaction processing and wide-area file systems, and he was on the computer science faculty at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Spector received a bachelor’s degree in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University, where he was a Hertz Fellow. He is a Fellow of both the Association for Computing Machinery and the IEEE. He is an active member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, where he serves on the Council. Dr. Spector won the 2001 IEEE Kanai Award for Distributed Computing and the 2016 ACM Software Systems Award, the latter for his work on the Andrew File System (AFS).