JFDI

This past month I watched my classmates get sucked into the all-encompassing vacuum of on-campus interviews.  I estimated in my previous post that 60% of the class did these interviews, primarily with consulting firms and investment banks.  I don’t think this percentage should surprise anyone, but I was shocked when I realized that close to 50% of students in the MIT Entrepreneurship & Innovation program (E&I) participated in them.  Talk about getting sucked into the herd mentality.  OK, the reality is these students were probably never that serious about entrepreneurship anyway.

Now what about the other 50% in E&I?

Complementing a post by Charlie O’Donnel (First Round Capital) about what MBA’s should be doing to get a job at a startup,  Rob Go (Spark Capital) recently made some great suggestions on how B-schools can prepare their students to become entrepreneurs.  Rob says that “MBA entrepreneurs shouldn’t be looking to join great startups.  They should be looking to start great companies.”  And I couldn’t agree with him more.

Unfortunately, most of us don’t have  ”great” companies to start.  So what happens?  We try to get a job at a startup, thinking this will give us the experience we will need to start a company later.  The logic makes sense, right?  I buy it, and I’ll seek out an internship at a startup (while heeding Charlie’s advice, of course).  The problem is knowing we have this option when we graduate can often lead to our complacency.  Research by Ed Roberts showed that the median age for MIT alums starting a company was 28 in the 1990′s.  That’s trending down from 41 in the 1950′s and 35 in the 1970′s.  One way to interpret the data is it is becoming increasingly more difficult to start a business the older we get.

As Rob implied, if you’re really serious about starting a company, there needs to be a sense of urgency.  We have two years to start something up (really it’s more like 1.5 years because, let’s be honest, you can’t count core semester).  That’s not a lot of time to take advantage of all the resources MIT (or other business schools) have to offer.  We better make it count!