Day 39 in MIT Sloan Fellows Class 2023, Leadership learning from cohorts - 6 Entrepreneurial mindset
Diving into the entrepreneurial world
I decided to dive into the entrepreneurial world as an experiment because I have been really interested in this field, and some ideas came to mind after staying here at MIT.
Undoubtedly, MIT is one of the best environments to challenge your passion and creativity to start your own business. There is a robust ecosystem, network, and funding institutions. It is a total waste of excellent opportunities if you do not leverage this opportunity.
MIT Sandbox
This is a very brief context of why I decided my mind to join the MIT Sandbox project.
MIT Sandbox provides seed funding, mentorship, and tailored entrepreneurship education that empowers student innovators to explore ideas, take risks, and prepare to launch. The program aims to enable any MIT student — inspired to solve a problem with an innovative solution — to learn and experience entrepreneurship.
Feedback from my Brazilian cohorts opened my eyes
I introduced my idea with a deck to some mates.
All the feedbacks were constructive, and I drastically pivoted my idea and added some slides.
However, one guy gave me tons of advice, and these shots opened my eyes.
With his advice, my approach is too shy and too classy in a bad sense.
He said how to learn as an entrepreneur.
There is no information or textbook, so you must learn from potential competitors. Just subscribe to these competitors' products or purchase them. Then, steal whatever you can, and identify where your product can beat them. In the e-commerce world, you can do it without paying a lot. Just order a lot of items from various vendors and cancel them. However, you can check how invoices are published and designed. You can experience the customer journey of competitors' services.
Also, I recognized how small options I looked at as available ones. There are more diverse options to generate the data, experiment with your ideas, and validate proof of concepts. The people in enterprises tend to forget this freedom of choice because always we examine a limited number of options with a bunch of reasoning. However, the startup is a totally different world, and enterprises tend to invest a lot of time and people in "reasoning". This mindset is crucially vulnerable in the startup world. If you want to start a new business, you need to create your option by yourself and differentiate yourself through these activities.
