Tag Archives: software

MIT’s first Music Hack Day–Where entrepreneurship, computer engineering, and music combine — Philip Cohen, MBA ’13

MIT is known for its excellence in computer engineering. It also has an outstanding, but lesser-known, music and arts program. On Veterans Day weekend, computer engineering and music will connect on the MIT campus, and the result could be important innovations in the way music is produced and enjoyed. Read More »

Yasheng Huang: Goldman Sachs’ 10,000 Women Initiative will help train the next generation of Chinese entrepreneurs

MIT Sloan Prof. Yasheng Huang

I am just back from an exciting weeklong trip to China to meet applicants for a new program MIT Sloan is helping develop at Yunnan University for women entrepreneurs. The program is part of Goldman Sachs’s 10,000 Women Initiative. Goldman’s initiative is a $100 million campaign designed to provide business and management education to promising female entrepreneurs in developing countries.

I met 15 candidates and found them each to be impressive – educated, articulate, and brimming with ideas. They have already experienced some success: some of them had at least 1 million yuan in revenue, which is about $150,000. Read More »

I Love Entrepreneurs But Not as My Science Teacher: “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance”

MIT Sloan Sr. Lecturer Bill Aulet

From Xconomy / Boston

It may be just a bumper sticker aphorism, but lately it’s got me thinking. Peter Thiel, early Facebook investor and Paypal cofounder, announced recently that he’s offering $100,000 to 24 young people to drop out of school and pursue an entrepreneurial idea in Silicon Valley. Thiel says the emphasis on having a degree has created “a bubble” in education, and he believes ideas can develop in a start-up environment much faster than on a university campus.

“We need more innovation,” he told the Financial Times recently. “There’s a tremendous cost to having the most talented people in society take on enormous debt, then take well-paying but dead-end jobs to service those loans for the next 15 to 20 years of their lives.”

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