Let’s Change the World!
Many who join early stage tech startups do so because they have a strong interest in changing the world. While it’s not universal, some founders succeed at such massive levels that it can fundamentally alter the way we shop, dine, travel, work, and socialize with friends and families. Over the last twenty years, companies that were once startups have become integral parts of our day, and have forever changed the way we live.
Management Leadership for Tomorrow (MLT) has a long and established history of collaborating with leading corporations to diversify their industries so that they better represent their customer base and our country’s population. MLT’s focus on startups as another incredibly powerful path to having broad impact— particularly science and engineering-based startups—is relatively new.
Startups cannot succeed in a vacuum. Founders need a broad range of hard and soft skills, and they require the right connections and social capital. MLT is proud to be contributing on both counts.
Our timing, frankly, is not completely of our own making. Many MLT Rising Leaders, the alumni of our programs, are now entering what, classically, has been the most opportune time in their careers to found or join a startup. We have a critical mass of alumni who now have experience, skills, and insights into problems that need solving. They also have resources. Many have accumulated substantial wealth but perhaps more importantly, they have the networks and social capital that are critically important for helping fledgling startups succeed.
Rapidly changing science and technology — so many MLT Rising Leaders are recognizing — are important factors in any industry and will often fundamentally affect products, services, and business. Many changes in the startup industry will come quickly, as we have seen with cloud-based IT services. Others, like quantum computing, will take longer. But change is inevitable. Startups offer a way to lead this change, and not just react to it.
Startups cannot succeed in a vacuum. Founders need a broad range of hard and soft skills, and they require the right connections and social capital. MLT is proud to be contributing on both counts.
Tanya Menendez, MLT alum and co-founder and CEO of Snowball Wealth, a fintech startup that helps students find the most efficient way to pay off their loans, speaks at MLT’s 15th Anniversary Gala.
With the generous support of the National Science Foundation, MLT has laid the foundation for an ongoing engagement in community building around science and technology startups. We’ve built an online platform, MLTx, where personal experiences, insights, and best practices can be shared. MLT’s Rising Leaders will be able to engage with other alumni to find insights, skills and advice on their startups. We have learned from the country’s expansive, vibrant startup communities that the most successful ventures are characterized not just by brilliant scientific and engineering leaders, but by teams composed of the experts across a range of key skills. Sales, Marketing, Finance, and Operations skills are necessary to move a startup out of the idea phase, and to get it launched. The MLT community has those skills in abundance.
Integrating the talents and abilities MLT Rising Leaders have long demonstrated with the emerging focus on science and technology startup ventures is an important development as we seek to change the world.
Damian Saccocio is VP for Technology and Analytics and is a long-time adjunct Professor at Georgetown McDonough School of Business, where he teaches Technology Strategy.