A hundred hours at the MIT Innovation and Entrepreneurship Bootcamp

Sree Bhargav
Sep 3, 2018 · 6 min read

Incredible things are bound to happen when you bring together 120 innovative minds with the sole purpose of collaborating to solve problems. By the end of the camp we had 24 brilliant solutions to some real and pressing issues. Among these was helping NGO’s raise funds, giving every member of the audience in large halls instant and easy access to a microphone, and lifting poor families in Brazil out of poverty by giving the children access to quality higher education, and thus quality jobs (which was what my team was working on).

The schedule for the Bootcamp

Disciplined Entrepreneurship

Disciplined Entrepreneurship is the underlying base on which the Bootcamp is built. It is a book written by MIT professor Bill Aulet that takes you through the process of starting up in ‘24 steps’. Essentially, it’s a framework that gives structure to the muddled process of entrepreneurship and is highly user centric. It takes tools and frameworks from different fields — like the Persona from design and DMU from marketing — and tells us how the the output from these tools in say step X feeds into and influences all the steps ahead.

The 24 steps of the Disciplined Entrepreneurship process

Iteration especially is an important element. Entrepreneurship is NOT a linear process. I found myself frequently updating, and even scrapping outputs from previous steps of the process because somewhere further along I obtained some new information or came across a better way to do something.

The goal of the MIT Bootcamp is to teach people how to innovate using these tools. It is as much about innovation as it is about entrepreneurship.

40 Hours

About 40 or so hours of our 100 hour work week was dedicated to talks and lectures. What we learnt in the lectures, we later applied to our projects. Our mentors were professors and alumni from MIT and previous MIT Bootcamps. They are all people who’ve had a successful startup experience. They’ve built financially viable solutions to problems that create impact at scale.

We had talks on Team Building and Team Dynamics, Product Testing, Unit Economics, Pitching, Fund Raising and more. We also had Prof. Bill Aulet personally take us through the process of disciplined entrepreneurship.

There were a few topics that greatly impacted me and changed the way I approach some things and might be of some interest to you as well:

Conflict in teams - Teams that do not have conflict will not be able to achieve their best. Conflict is a natural part of the creative process. People are opposing my idea, not me. Not being too attached to my ideas helped me empathise with others’ point of view. I tried to take what they said as feedback and improve on it.

Decision Making Unit - Everyone who influences the economic buyer of our product including the buyer comprises the DMU.

BrewBarrel is a company that has put the concept of DMU to good use. It sells kits that let you brew beer at home. Their product wasn’t unique and there were good alternatives available on the market. Initially, it was targeting men who hosted house parties and went on trips. However, sales weren’t doing too good. In their search for a solution, they realised that women generally find it difficult to buy satisfactory gifts for their partners. As a result they started marketing it to women as the perfect gift and sales immediately shot up. In effect, though the end users remained the same, in this case men, the women became the economic buyers .

Window of Opportunity and Trigger - As the name suggests WoO is a period of time when someone is more likely to buy your product. A trigger is what sets the sales process off.

For BrewBarrel, holiday seasons like Christmas was the perfect time to put out advertisements telling women to gift the kits. Other examples are change in management in a company, end of the fiscal year, marriage, first job etc. As for triggers, think limited time offers, or the all too familiar ‘only 2 seats left’ trick.

Fundraising - Choose the partner, not the firm. While the reputation of the firm does matter, your interaction will mostly be with the partners. It is important that they truly believe in what you do and have the required expertise to guide you on your journey.

60 Hours

I learnt as much from my fellow bootcampers as I did from the professors. Given that they were from 40 different countries and at least as many different professions, there was a wealth of knowledge, experience and perspective. Talking to so many different people from cultures and backgrounds, distinct from my own, gave me massive international exposure and helped mould my worldview.

A majority of the time at the camp was spent on solving a problem of our choosing in teams of five.

My first lesson when working with my team was the importance of clear communication.

My team consisted of members from Brazil, Estonia and Argentina, where English is not the native language. It was crucial that what we said got across to each other, which certainly did not happen when we started out. People generally nod along even if they didn’t pick up what you were saying which that draws them out of the conversation and makes them feel less involved. I made sure to ask people if I was clear enough and to repeat what they said if I couldn’t catch it.

Like in any meaningful entrepreneurial experience, we frequently faced roadblocks.

We realised we didn’t understand certain concepts well enough. We were struggling to even identify what problem it was exactly that we were trying to solve. Halfway through, one of our members fell ill. What’s more, our financial model was telling us that we’d be cash-flow negative for five years straight (which is not something investors are very fond of). However, we kept at it. We did more research and asked our mentors for help when necessary. We bounced ideas back and forth until we were sick of it, and then we did some more. Somehow, we managed to put together our pitch deck before demo day where we had to pitch to investors.

I overslept on demo day. When I reached the venue my team was on stage, and on the wall, the title slide of our presentation. We were already a member down due to an illness so I was relieved I made it on time. Amidst the applause for my eleventh-hour entry, I took a few seconds to appreciate how my numerous college experiences of waking up five minutes before class and making it in time helped me. I also made a mental note to work more on my discipline. We pitched and made it to the finals, though we didn’t win there. That didn’t bother us though. Our goal as a team was to learn, and we were glad to have crossed it off our list by the end of the camp.

The Great4Me team at the finals

A successful Bootcamp?

Like with most things in life, what the MIT Entrepreneurship and Innovation Bootcamp gives you, is a function of what you put into it. The fact that you team up with 4 random people to develop a solution to a real problem with just 3-4 hours of sleep a day for 5 days is in itself a transformational experience, but the lessons learnt there must be applied time and again for them to sink deep.

What does it mean to have a successful bootcamp? For some it’s meeting and connecting with professionals from all over the world. For others it’s about how much they’ve learnt. Yet others might think it’s winning on the day of the pitch. For me, my bootcamp will have been successful when I’ve applied what I’ve learnt to make a difference. Until then, I’m still in this.

If you’re interested in knowing more about the bootcamp or what I was working on, feel free to reach out to me. Also, I’m eager to discuss any feedback that you’re willing to give.
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Sree Bhargav

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Changing the way people think about product consumption and ownership via a Peer to Peer rental marketplace | Travel, Games & Music | IIT Guwahati

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