When Remington Hotchkis left a startup founders workshop at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the end of January, he had a company name, a team and a rock-solid, AI-mediated business plan. What he didn’t have was a product.
Hotchkis was one of 76 aspiring founders attending MIT’s Entrepreneurship Development program, where he’d been voted most likely to succeed by his peers. The main attractions of the program are a pair of “JetPacks,” software programs that help entrepreneurs produce business plans by combing the internet for reams of market data. The JetPacks complement a 24-step approach to starting a high-growth company—called Disciplined Entrepreneurship and devised by Bill Aulet, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management—that emphasizes a deep understanding of your customers. Aulet’s program can create a detailed road map to finding your potential customers, starting with a small segment (the “beachhead market”) and expanding from there. Hotchkis’ company, EmberShield Technologies, aimed to sell something that would protect homes from wildfires by attacking embers carried by the wind.
