Thursday, April 27th
MIT’s Wong Auditorium
MIT’s Wong Auditorium
9:00 – 9:15 am
Welcome & Overview
Bill Aulet | Ethernet Inventors Professor of the Practice, MIT Sloan; Managing Director, Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship
Bill is changing the way entrepreneurship is understood, taught, and practiced around the world. He is an award-winning educator and author whose current work is built off the foundation of his 25-year successful business career, first at IBM, and then as a three-time serial entrepreneur. During this time, he directly raised over a hundred million dollars and, more importantly, created hundreds of millions of dollars of shareholder value through his companies.
Since 2009, Bill has been responsible for leading the development of entrepreneurship education across MIT at the Trust Center. His first book, “Disciplined Entrepreneurship,” was released in August 2013, has been translated into over 20 languages, and has been the content for three online edX courses, which have been taken by hundreds of thousands of people in 200 different countries. The accompanying follow on book, “Disciplined Entrepreneurship Workbook,” was released in April 2017.
On July 1, 2017, Bill was named a Professor of the Practice at MIT Sloan, the first at the school in the area of entrepreneurship since Alex d’Arbeloff received the designation in 2003. In 2019, Bill was awarded the Outstanding Contributions to Advancing Innovation and Entrepreneurship Award by the Deshpande Foundation. In 2021, Bill was recognized by the United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (USASBE) as the 2021 Entrepreneurship Educator of the Year.
9:15 – 10:00 am
Cybersecurity: What Are the Risks? What Should We Do? Will This Ever End?
Kirk Arnold | Independent Board Member and Advisor
Kirk Arnold is an experienced CEO, with a demonstrated history of leadership in the technology industry. Skilled in strategy, sales, customer relationship management, and operations, Kirk has a passion for delivering the value of transformative technologies to enterprises and consumers.
Currently, Kirk is actively engaged as an advisor, board member, and teacher. She is an Executive-in-Residence at General Catalyst Ventures, where she works with management teams to help scale and drive growth by providing mentorship, operational, and strategic support. In that capacity, she serves on the board of The Predictive Index, the leading provider of talent optimization software and solutions. In addition, she is an independent member of the board of Ingersoll Rand, a global electronics manufacturer, and serves on the board of Solstice, a provider of community solar technology and services. Kirk is on the board of trustees of the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council and the Commonwealth Institute. In addition, she is a Senior Lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management, and an advisor to the Center for MIT Entrepreneurship.
Kirk spent over 30 years as an executive in the technology industry, most recently as the CEO of Data Intensity, a cloud-based data, applications and analytics managed service provider. Prior to joining DI, she was COO of Avid, a technology provider in the media industry. Before Avid, Kirk was the CEO and President of Keane, Inc., then a publicly traded billion-dollar global services provider. She has held senior leadership roles at Computer Sciences Corp, Fidelity Investments and IBM. In addition, she was founder and CEO of NerveWire Inc.
Art Coviello | Managing Partner, SYN Ventures
Since stepping down from RSA in 2015, Art Coviello has been an active investor and advisor in the technology industry, guiding a number of startups as a private investor and in his roles as an advisor to SYN Ventures Security Fund, and as a senior advisor to Blackstone’s Tactical Opportunities Group.
From January 2001 Art served as President and CEO of RSA and following RSA’s acquisition by EMC (for $2.1B) as an Executive Vice President of EMC and head of its Security Division. He has been a central figure within the information security industry for more than 25 years. Under his leadership, he built RSA Conference into the most respected, vendor agnostic event in cybersecurity. He is frequently a featured presenter at conferences and forums around the world, and he has played key roles in several national cybersecurity initiatives.
Mr. Coviello serves on the Boards of Directors of Cybereason, Synchrony Financial (NYSE: SYF), Tenable (NASDAQ: TENB), Epiphany Technology Acquisition Corp. (NASDAQ: EPHY), Bugcrowd, and SecZetta (and formerly Cylance, sold to Blackberry; Verodin, sold to FireEye; and Mandiant).
10:00 – 10:15 am
MIT Technology Breakthrough: Analog Deep Learning
Murat Onen | CEO & Founder, Eva Technology Corp.
Murat Onen is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) Department at MIT, focusing on nanoelectronics, ionics, and superconductivity.
His specific focus is developing nanosecond protonic programmable resistors for use in analog deep learning. He has founded Eva Technology Corp. to manufacture and sell circuit board and machinery equipment.
10:15 – 10:30 am
Break
10:30 – 11:15 am
The Future of Work: Do We Need Offices? The Most Interesting Corporate Experiments in a Post-Covid World
Roy Hirshland | Vice Chairman, Savills
Roy Hirshland is Vice Chairman, member of Savills North American Executive Management Board, and Chair of the Innovation Team. As regional leader in the Boston market, Roy specializes in providing strategic real estate counsel to companies and CEOs around the world. He is committed to helping business leaders think strategically about their company vision and brand, and plan for how their culture and mission can be successfully reflected in their workplace.
Roy joined Savills in 2021 following the company’s partnership with T3 Advisors — the leading real estate workplace solutions advisor to life sciences and technology companies — where he was co-founder and CEO. He brings over 33 years of real estate experience and has managed projects and transactions representing over 10 million SF of real estate across the globe. He built T3 with the confidence and partnership of leading, advisors and CEOs and investors to serve the holistic real estate needs of companies in the life sciences, technology, and innovation economy in general.
Jenny Larios Berlin | Entrepreneur in Residence, Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship
Jenny was the co-founder and Chief Operations Officer for Optimus Ride, an MIT spinout, whose mission was to deploy inside of geofenced communities safe, sustainable, and equitable autonomous mobility solutions through shared and electric vehicle fleets.
Before getting acquired by Magna, a global innovator in mobility technology, Optimus Ride deployed operations in California, Massachusetts, Washington, DC, Virginia, and New York, growing business operations to over 200 employees and fundraising over $75M in venture capital. It was featured in multiple news outlets, including the New York Times.
Jenny also partnered with others in the MIT community to co-found and advise limeSHIFT, another MIT spinout. limeSHIFT is a socially-driven creative agency, working at the intersection of business, community, and art. Taking a bootstrapped approach, it quickly realized revenue by partnering with organizations like Life is Good, Yale School of Management, and YouTube to implement socially engaged art.
Prior to her entrepreneurial endeavors, Jenny was entrenched in the car sharing technology industry, leading operations teams at Zipcar, Flexcar, and Hertz. At Zipcar, she scaled their university campus program and, as National Member Services Manager, was responsible for all service operations in all Zipcar cities worldwide.
She earned her bachelor’s at the University of Maryland, College Park, and two master’s – an MBA from MIT Sloan and a master’s in City Planning from the MIT School of Architecture and Planning.
11:15 am – 12:00 pm
How Generative AI Can Be Applied … And Change Everything
Paul English | serial entrepreneur, investor, activist, and disruptor
Paul English is a Boston-based entrepreneur and activist.
Paul is a co-founder of Boston Venture Studio, Deets, Kayak, Moonbeam, Reki, Xiangqi.com, middle, FunContact, Lola, GetHuman, Boston Light and Intermute. You can learn more about Paul through his founder stories and startup advice. He is an active angel investor, focused on seed-stage consumer software.
Paul is a non-profit co-founder of Embrace Boston, Summits Education, Winter Walk and the Bipolar Social Club.
Bill Aulet | Ethernet Inventors Professor of the Practice, MIT Sloan; Managing Director, Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship
(see full bio above)
12:00 – 1:00 pm
Networking Lunch
1:00 – 1:30 pm
MIT Startup Breakthrough: Shield AI
Ryan Tseng | CEO & Co-Founder, Shield AI
Ryan Tseng is the co-founder and CEO of Shield AI. Under his leadership, Shield AI – whose mission is to protect service members and civilians with intelligent systems – has grown to include over 500 teammates, raised over half-a-billion dollars, become the fourth multi-billion-dollar defense technology company, and established itself as the leader in AI pilots.
Shield AI aspires to become a defining technology company of this generation, known for commitment to values and immense contributions to national security and global stability. Prior to Shield AI, Ryan was the founder, CEO, and CTO of a technology company, WiPower, that was acquired by Qualcomm. At both WiPower and Qualcomm, he helped pioneer wireless charging technology. He holds more than 20 patents and his technical works have been cited more than 2,000 times. He is a graduate of MIT and the University of Florida.
1:30 – 2:30 pm
AI: Where Are We Now? Where Do We Go From Here? The Opportunities and The Danger
Christine Ortiz | Morris Cohen Professor of Materials Science & Engineering at MIT
Christine Ortiz is a higher education leader, professor, engineer, former dean, entrepreneur, corporate board director, and nonprofit trustee. As the Morris Cohen Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT, she is an internationally recognized academic with expertise in nanotechnology, biotechnology, and biomaterials. She has given invited talks in over 40 countries, has over 200 scholarly publications and more than 8800 citations, and supervised the research projects of more than 100 students from 10 different academic disciplines.
Dr. Ortiz has served on over 50 scientific advisory boards and expert panels collectively overseeing in excess of $200M in research funds. Ortiz served as Dean for Graduate Education at MIT between 2010-2016 where she supported more than 7,000 graduate students from 100+ countries enrolled in 45 graduate degree programs in 5 academic schools. In 2016, she founded and serves as Chair of the Board of Station1, a startup non-profit higher education institution based in Massachusetts that has developed a new model of frontier learning and research — socially-directed science and technology.
Alfred Spector | Visiting Scholar, MIT Electrical Engineering & Computer Science Department
Alfred Spector is presently a Visiting Scholar at MIT. For five years ending in mid-2020, he was Chief Technology Officer and Head of Engineering at Two Sigma, a firm dedicated to using information to optimize diverse economic challenges. Prior to joining Two Sigma, Dr. Spector spent nearly eight years as Vice President of Research and Special Initiatives at Google, where his teams delivered a range of successful technologies including machine learning, speech recognition, and translation.
Prior to Google, Spector held various senior-level positions at IBM, including Vice President of Strategy and Technology (or CTO) for IBM Software, and Vice President of Services and Software research across the company. He previously founded and served as CEO of Transarc Corporation, a pioneer in distributed transaction processing and wide-area file systems, and he was on the computer science faculty atCarnegie Mellon University.
He is a Fellow of both the Association for Computing Machinery and the IEEE. He is an active member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, where he serves on the Council. Dr. Spector won the 2001 IEEE Kanai Award for Distributed Computing and the 2016 ACM Software Systems Award, the latter for his work on the Andrew File System (AFS).
George Whitfield | Entrepreneur in Residence, Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship
George is a serial entrepreneur with three degrees from MIT: BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and an MEng and PhD in Materials Science and Engineering. As an Entrepreneur in Residence at the Trust Center, George is excited to help build future generations of entrepreneurs, drawing upon his experiences in innovation-driven entrepreneurship, engineering, and student life.
George’s interdisciplinary career spans computational aspects of e-commerce, FinTech, robotics, transportation, renewable energy, and nanotechnology. Today, George is the Co-Founder and CEO of FindOurView, which is extracting insights from consumer reviews and conversations to help companies do product research, using AI and machine learning. George envisions building on this work to drive mutual understanding across society.
Prior to FindOurView, George was Director of Simulation at Nucleus Scientific, where he joined as an early employee and helped grow the company by 10x in size over the course of seven years, working on electric vehicles. While in the PhD program at MIT, George co-founded and was CEO of SunPoint, a solar tracking company that won the MIT Making and Designing Materials Engineering Competition and the Renewables Track of the MIT Clean Energy Prize. George also co-founded Socially Conscious Software to build mobile apps in the early days of the iPhone app store.
George was a co-instructor at MEFTI, the MIT Entrepreneurship and FinTech Integrator held at the MIT Hong Kong Innovation Node. He served as a co-instructor, advisor, and mentor at Station1 Socially Directed Science and Technology. George was also a guest lecturer in MIT’s Mechanical Engineering Department on numerical simulation.
2:30 – 3:15 pm
An Update on the Evolving Nature of Sales
Jim Baum | Independent Board Member and Advisor
Jim Baum brings over 25 years of experience growing and managing cutting-edge technology businesses. As an operating executive, his career includes building highly successful organizations, bringing businesses to scale, IPOs, and a multi-billion-dollar exit. Jim is passionate about entrepreneurship and helping to build successful enterprises around exciting market opportunities. Jim currently serves on a range corporate boards from innovative startups, to fast growth pre-IPO companies, to publicly traded companies. He is a Trustee at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) and co-chair of WPI’s initiative in innovation and entrepreneurship as well as a lecturer in entrepreneurship at MIT’s Sloan School.
Jim previously served as President and CEO of data warehousing and analytics company Netezza. Throughout his tenure at Netezza, Jim brought his passion for building great teams that deliver disruptive technology solutions to market. In 2007, Jim worked to take Netezza public, ultimately driving the nearly $2B acquisition of Netezza by IBM in 2010 — a transaction dubbed “the most disruptive acquisition of 2010” by Information Week.
Jim also led Endeca’s early rise from tiny startup to the leading provider of innovative information access and delivery software solutions to the Global 2000. Endeca was acquired by Oracle in late 2011. Prior to Endeca and Netezza, he served at PTC as an Executive Vice President and General Manager. Over the course of his 11-year tenure, he had the opportunity to manage roles across nearly every facet of that organization, helping the company grow from $11M to $1B in revenue.
Paul Cheek | Executive Director, Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship
Paul Cheek is a serial tech entrepreneur, entrepreneurship educator, and software engineer. He is the Executive Director and an Entrepreneur in Residence at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, a Senior Lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the MIT Sloan School of Management, and the Co-Founder and CTO of Oceanworks.
Paul was MIT’s first Hacker in Residence and has since taught, mentored, and advised thousands of entrepreneurs around the world. Each year Paul teaches hundreds of undergraduate, graduate, and PhD students in the “New Enterprises” course, which is believed to be the oldest entrepreneurship course in the country, and has also taught the advanced entrepreneurship course, “Building an Entrepreneurial Venture: Advanced Tools and Techniques.” From working closely with so many students, Paul identified a gap in the entrepreneurship curriculum, designed experimental entrepreneurship education content, and now leads a new advanced course he developed to help student entrepreneurs build their businesses called “Venture Creation Tactics”.
Outside of classes, Paul spends time coaching and mentoring entrepreneurs in a variety of programs including the MIT delta v startup accelerator, MIT fuse accelerator, Sandbox Innovation Fund, as well as other workshops and hackathons. One of which was the MIT COVID-19 Challenge, a series of global hackathons that Paul co-founded, which served over 8,500 participants around the world. To scale the impact that he and the Trust Center have within the five schools across the Institute, Paul built the digital entrepreneurship platform, Orbit, which serves over 15,000 users annually.
Paul is also the Co-Founder and CTO of Oceanworks, a for-profit company with a mission to end plastic pollution. At Oceanworks, he has developed a platform and traceability system to provide corporations with a trusted source for a variety of quality recycled ocean plastic materials at competitive prices. In the past two years, Oceanworks has diverted thousands of tonnes of plastic from the ocean, served hundreds of corporate customers in over 30 countries, and enabled the launch of a variety of high-profile sustainable products such as Clorox ocean plastic trash bags, Sperry ocean plastic boat shoes, and YKK ocean plastic zippers.
In 2021, Paul was recognized by Forbes 30 Under 30, the definitive list of young people changing the world, and for his leadership at Oceanworks, Forbes named Paul one of ten standouts who hold the future of cleantech in their hands.
Emmanuelle Skala | SVP of Strategic Operations & Hardware / Customer Success, Toast
Emmanuelle Skala is the SVP of Customer Success at Toast. Prior to joining Toast, she served as the VP of Sales & Customer Success at DigitalOcean. As a self-proclaimed “off the chart extrovert,” it comes to no surprise that Emmanuelle Skala has always loved being in front of a crowd, engaging with customers and building teams.
Before DigitalOcean, Emmanuelle joined Influitive as the VP of Sales in March of 2014, helping scale the business 10x and quickly became a leader amongst her peers in SaaS – having been asked to speak at many industry events. Before Influitive, Emmanuelle served as the Vice President of Global Channel Sales at Sophos, and was globally responsible for Channel Strategy, Programs, Operations and Enablement. While at Sophos, Skala won the CRN Channel Chief award for both 2012 and 2013, and was also the recipient of CRN’s Top 100 Women in the Channel in the year 2013.
Skala was also the first hired salesperson at two B2B software start-ups: Endeca and Vertica and was fortunate to see both through rapid growth and successful acquisitions by Oracle and HP respectively.
3:15 – 4:15 pm
The State of Corporate Entrepreneurship
Yu-Ting Kuo | Professor of Computer Science; Startup Board Member; former Corporate VP, Tech & Research, Microsoft
Yu-Ting Kuo is an adjunct faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and National Tsing Hua University, where he teaches corporate entrepreneurship, leadership, machine learning, and AI ethics. He also gives invited lectures on mergers & acquisitions, strategy, and innovation at the Oxford Saïd Business School, the Chicago Booth School of Business, the Columbia Business School, and the Imperial College Business School. Kuo advises multiple software startups in computer vision, machine learning, FinTech, and Wellness.
In addition, he is an advisor at the MIT delta v accelerator and an entrepreneurship expert at the Oxford Saïd Business School. Kuo is also a member of the Executive Board at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Kuo is a former corporate vice president at Microsoft with over 25 years of experience in software innovation and strategic planning. While at Microsoft, Kuo founded and oversaw Microsoft’s Azure AI Cognitive Services and Computer Vision Groups, leading a global organization of AI research labs, engineering, and product teams. He also led Microsoft’s acquisition of a London-based mobile AI keyboard company, SwiftKey, and served as its post-acquisition general manager. Kuo started his career as a strategy consultant at McKinsey & Company.
Susan Neal | Entrepreneur in Residence, Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship
Susan is an entrepreneur and senior executive with over 20 years of experience in eCommerce/digital, marketing, technology, and product development. In the role of CEO/co-founder, she led the launch, growth, and sale of ATACAMA, a revolutionary 3D microfluidics technology company with product applications in the apparel, healthcare, and CPG industries.
Prior to that, she held positions with increasing responsibility in two publicly-traded companies. As the EVP of Marketing, eCommerce, and Information Technology at Tailored Brands, a $2.5+ billion specialty retailer of men’s apparel (includes the Men’s Wearhouse, Jos A Banks, and Moores), Susan was responsible for strategy and the rapid revenue growth of its eCommerce operations and digital transformation. Before Tailored Brands, she was at Gymboree, a US-based children’s apparel manufacturer and retailer, where she held a variety of senior level positions overseeing eCommerce and Digital Marketing, International, and Business Development. Susan grew Gymboree’s eCommerce business from inception to $150 million in revenue.
An experienced leader, strategic thinker, and driver of digital growth and transformation, Susan holds an MBA from INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France and a BA in Economics from Harvard University. She has served on multiple boards, including Shop.org, the online retailing division of the U.S. National Retail Federation.
Seth Pack | Chief Innovation Officer at Michelin Mobility Intelligence
Seth Pack is a Chief Innovation Officer for Michelin, providing business, technology, and innovation strategy and leadership, with the responsibility to create new data-oriented businesses, products and services across the globe with the goal of providing better mobility for all.
His concentrations in the role include identifying and conceptualizing new products and businesses and their respective business models, forecasting technology trends, the identification of investment and M&A prospects, and enabling internal startups through incubation and acceleration.
Prior to his current position, he served as the Enterprise Architect for Mobility, Director of End-User Services and Devices, and Chief Technology Offficer, and championed the vision of Any Time, Any Where, Any Device connectivity within the enterprise.
4:15 – 4:30 pm
Wrap Up & Take Aways
Bill Aulet | Ethernet Inventors Professor of the Practice, MIT Sloan; Managing Director, Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship
(see full bio above)
4:30 – 6:00 pm
Showcase and Closing Networking Reception
featuring MIT spinout companies including:
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