[MUSIC PLAYING]
Friends of MIT 15390x, today we have a very special guest
for you.
In my mind, this person epitomizes
the whole idea of a hybrid innovation--
going from one industry to another,
and taking lessons from one industry to another.
This entrepreneur entracted over $100 billion
in investment money for his startups,
and generated 100s of millions of dollars in market value,
as well.
This person now coaches entrepreneurship
at MIT and beyond.
And over the last 20 years of his entrepreneurial activity,
he's accumulated so much scar tissue,
that if you take all the scar tissue
you can shoot three musicals of Scary Movie.
This person never skips his mandatory weekly basketball
sessions.
You may have guessed by now, this afternoon none other
than Mr. William Aulet.
Thought you were getting somebody impressive,
but it's just me.
This is a question that we get all the time on Twitter
and the discussions in the discussion forums.
If it is a business-to-business market,
does the end-user profile need to be of a company or a person?
So it sounds like it's definitely a person.
It is definitely a person.
You should have the person, the person's job
title within the company, and then the name of the company.
And that's very, very important, because when people say,
I'm selling to Nike, well, who within Nike are you selling to?
Because that doesn't really help you.
At the end of the day, it's a person who's going to buy it.
People buy.
And so you have to know who that person is.
I think a great example of this is data centers.
Google doesn't buy the water purification systems
for the data center.
It actually goes to a facilities manager or a contractor
under the facilities manager.
So you need to understand that facilities manager
or the person at the contractor who's
going to make that decision to buy it.
So it goes back to understanding the people involved, not
this more general, amorphous organization called a company.
A lot of our students haven't had the interactions
with companies to know how to penetrate a company
and know who to talk to there.
And to a lot of them, it would some daunting
to even approach, how do I even figure out who at Nike
do I talk to?
Do you have some specific advice--
this is how you can engage with the company
and understand who inside that company you could engage with?
When I took my first entrepreneurship class,
this was the single thing I remember
the most is, how do I go out and just
start talking to customers and kind of being an investigator
to figure out who's the right person?
And it's hard.
There's rejection involved with it.
But you've got to pick up the phone.
You've got to go out there.
You've got to engage with the customers and ask the questions
and then ask them to help you find somebody else.
And the number one reason people do
things is because they're asked.
At the end of the day, you have to ask
people, who is it that would make the decision on this?
In a nice way.
But there's no easy way to do that.
You've got to get out there, you've
got to talk to customers, you've got
to kind of work your way around.
There is today some research you can do.
And you can get onto forums.
And you can ask other people online.
I've seen terrific results from that in courses we've had.
They find a group that has a specific interest.
One was doing a beacon that could
help you, in case of an earthquake or natural disaster,
to find your children.
And so they actually found a forum out on the internet.
And they started asking questions.
And in that way, they found a lot of customers.
But you can't do it just by internally studying it yourself
and talking to your team.
You have to go out and engage with customers,
be it face to face, or be it through forums on the internet,
and then follow up on it.
One of the advice given to us by Vanessa Green
on how to engage with big companies,
she would go and find articles by people in those companies
and then read those articles and write thoughtful emails that
went to the heart of those articles.
And that would serve as a basis for conversation.
Yeah, there's nothing better than to open
a conversation, an email or a conversation
at a trade show or a phone call, with "I read your article,
and I was very impressed by what you said" and had
some specific facts to show that you read it,
because that's very flattering to the other person.
And now, all of a sudden, they're going to listen to you.
But a blind survey is not going to get you very good results.
Well, I think the most important thing to remember--
and you said it in the very beginning-- yeah,
you will get rejected a lot.
But as long as you feel like you're winning three to two,
you're doing fine.
Well, the other thing I say, because I coach basketball,
is, if Erdin, you're on my team
and you make all 15 shots in the first half and the buzzer
goes off at halftime, you'd better run to the locker room,
because I'm going to be running next to you, screaming at you,
why didn't you shoot more?
Because you've got to shoot until you
miss if you're going to be a great basketball player.
If you want to be innovative, you've
got to push it until something goes wrong.
Otherwise, you're really not pushing it far enough.
So rejection is part of the process.
And that's part of the whole thing
we talked about last time, about getting
all those planets aligned.
Fantastic.
Well, the next question from students
is about market segmentation.
And I hear it very often.
Most entrepreneurs don't operate in a vacuum.
They have a particular idea for what they want to do.
They have a sense of some problem
that they want to solve.
And they ask, why do I even need to do market segmentation?
Well, I already know what to do.
Yeah.
This happens all the time.
I have an idea.
Teachers should be able to use an iPad to correct papers.
And I say, that's great.
That's great.
Let's talk through that.
Which teachers?
Well, any teacher.
No, no, no, no.
Is it a middle school teacher, an elementary school teacher,
a high school teacher, a college teacher?
Is it a teacher who teaches science or history?
So almost any problem, we can segment the market further.
And that's very, very important.
And I think that part of segmentation
is to look at all the different people who could potentially
use your solution.
And then we're going to choose the one that we want.
The one that you often start out with-- in my companies,
if I just chose quickly without looking
at all the different possibilities,
I would have chosen sub-optimally.
So I think it's good to look at all the different ones,
even if you think you know, and then
allow other people to contribute to an analysis.
And then you can choose a well-defined target customer.