September 1st marked the start of a new school year for many and it also was a very important day for the MIT Entrepreneurship Center. After a period of great accomplishments and transformation in the 2009-2010 academic year it was clear that to continue making progress we needed more resources to supplement our core team Pat Fuligni, Audrey Dobek-Bell, Communications Liaison Justin Adelson, and the Senior Program Manager Jose Pacheco, representing long time members of the MIT family and the E-Center. So, last spring we embarked on a search to find the right new member of the team who could provide the much needed assistance, add to the team’s skills portfolio, while also fully embracing the spirit and values that have made the center so successful in the past.

The search took us far and wide (coast to coast in fact) to find the right person, and it was well worth the effort. We are proud to announce the addition of Elliot Cohen as Program Manager. He is an experienced entrepreneur who co-founded Pyreus Corporation in Seattle in 2008 and worked to develop a plan, launch the company, gain customers and raise money. Previously, Elliot had worked as a Program Manager at Microsoft for two years learning the nuances of delivering market ready software for large markets. But it gets better. Before this he was a Concert Manager while he was going to UC Berkeley where he earned an honors degree and other accolades in a dual major of Computer Science and Cognitive Science in 2005. His research in the areas of Knowledge-Based Systems, Human Machine Interface, and User Interfaces won him recognition, including a grant from Google to develop an open source Machine Learning toolbox. He is an extensive world traveler who has not only a keen intellect but also a personal style that allows him to communicate effectively with all kinds of people.

Elliot’s role at the E-Center will be to supplement existing staff in expanding its ability to even more effectively serve its mission in promoting entrepreneurship at all five schools here at MIT and also connecting to the external community. This will allow the center to continue enhancing the connections between these two important constituencies. Senior Program Manager Jose Pacheco and the staff, who have a deep understanding of MIT, will now have dramatically increased bandwidth in outreach across the MIT campus as well as externally using the new digital communications strategy leveraging social media. We at the center will also add a very valuable new perspective embedded in our staff – that of a West Coast and very recent software entrepreneur. As we vigorously espouse the benefits of heterogeneous teams for entrepreneurial ventures and the value of “hybrid vigor” so it only seems sensible that we follow our own advice – and that is exactly what we are doing. It is going to a very exciting year.

In all the many things Elliot “the renaissance man” has done, one thing might foreshadow his ability to excel at the MIT E-Center. In 2005-2006 he was doing research on how the brain works in extreme environments and their test environment was Mt. Everest (this is true!). Well Elliot, we are glad you got that experience so you can optimize how the brain works in extreme environments because you are now working in the Mt. Everest of entrepreneurial environments here at MIT. Please join me in welcoming Elliot to the MIT E-Center.

Bill Aulet
Managing Director