After over a year at MIT Sloan, I’m starting to believe that the the prospect of a young MBA commercializing science out of an MIT lab is not realistic (read impossible). More broadly, the prospect of someone with 3-4 years management experience and an MBA becoming CEO of any venture backed physical science company in the next 3-5 years is pretty far fetched. Maybe this is obvious – but this prospect was part of the reason I wanted to come to MIT Sloan and was advertised heavily as the thing to do within the Entrepreneurship and Innovation program.
Looking at current CEO’s of energy startups in well known VC portfolio’s, it seems they fit in one of three categories (please share exceptions):
1 – PhD. They are the inventor of the technology, or an expert with very deep vertical knowledge.
2 – Experienced Entrepreneur. They are a proven entrepreneur and have made successful exits of venture funded businesses previously.
3 – Ex Executive. Used to be a mid-level exec, or someone in operations of a company in the same space.
As Jeff Sabados experienced with Avanti, Micah Sze with Lightface, and I’m seeing with Clean Catalyst, as MBA students we can build a case for commercializing the technology, get people excited, maybe even win a business plan competition or two, but things usually end there. When a technology is so early stage, what it really needs is a professor and a couple grad students, or even a large corporation to work on it for a few years in a lab. Khosla and Flagship are funding and incubating many companies like this – no fresh MBA’s required – the leadership team is all PhD’s and investors.
On the flip side, if the technology is closer to being commercialized, and the startup really does require business expertise, or someone to help sell the product, it’s tough to justify that a fresh MBA is the one for the job. It would be ideal to find a technology relevant to our past experience, but its necessary to be more opportunistic when trying to find a promising technology. We likely lack deep industry contacts or a proven entrepreneurial track record, so we’ll either get no traction with funding or be encouraged to recruit someone from industry to be our own boss. Fine – many of us would be willing to take that route, but the reality is that not many technologies coming out of MIT are anywhere near commercialization, so good luck pulling this off.
In general, I’m optimistic about entrepreneurship in the physical sciences, but when you get into the details and specifics of the plan, I’m struggling to see it happen. More likely, any business plan development is just “a good learning experience” that can better prepare you to be head of biz-dev or director of sales and marketing at a startup, or even an associate at an energy VC fund. Idea’s are fun to talk about and play around with, but ultimately, if your goal is to be CEO of a startup within 0-5 years, commercializing technology may not be the way to go…
Tagged: Clean Catalyst, Commercialization, MIT Sloan, Technology