Magician in the class

Tonight class(Feb. 15) Speaker is Yet-Ming Chiang, founder of A123, what an interesting name for a company! He is a MIT graduate from undergraduate all the way to Ph.D. and is a faculty here. He and his VC Jeff shared with us about the journey of founding A123. Is that name quite fun? someone from Harvard approached them about creating a new name when their business gets serious. Now A123 is quite a leading company, glad that they still keep the same name.

What I took in:
-- this was not a easy journey. at the beginning, VC did not feel the click, until Yet convince them.
-- Yet brought in a lot of research experience. He has brought a lot of government grants and loan. no wonder, as a research professor, he constantly writes the proposal.
-- Yet explained the entrepreneur trends in last 20 years, shifting from industry to academic field.
-- 3 things to look: people, technology and market; among all three, people is the most important. (I really enjoy how he, a leading researcher, a hard core engineer mind, believes in people as sometimes engineer could get too hung-up with the technology and forget the people part.)
-- government fund is great for start up project
-- from VC point of view, 20 win, 60 ok and 20 failed among their money investment
-- always invest the best people in the field
-- always do du-diligence in business, not same in Technical.

The second half of class was completely surprise. Jason Randal came to present his specialty: magic. At the dinner table, Ken passed around the background about Jason, goodness, have I ever seen someone's experience range like this?? He did an amazing magic show. The whole time, I tried to link what he did with what I try to learn from the class. MIT courses have been constantly break my conventional thinking, so this time, I chose not to make my judgement too early, just observe. Jason mentioned that he just spoke at Harvard Business school this morning, trying to show students what innovation means in different industry. For a magician, he was asked to be creative, using company's new product in his show, within the limited time, he has to come up with a good idea. I like the show, since I sat at the first row, watching closely, I have no clue how he did the magic.

After class, I, along with other classmates shared the our wonders/confusion with instructor.

Here is his reply later, very interesting and totally challenge us to think differently.

"In reviewing your surveys, I noted a common theme in a few responses to the Jason Randal magic performance. While everybody enjoyed Jason and many of you wrote insightful parallels between his work and entrepreneurship, a few of you said you weren’t sure of the connection between his performance and the class subject matter. I have two thoughts:

1. That may be true for you. If you don’t see a meaningful connection, then we’ll chalk this up to an experiment that didn’t work. Not all of them work. I often operate in the same mode as the entrepreneurs we discussed: I try mixing together the ingredients I have in front of me and see what comes out. Jason was in town, I like him, I think there’s something useful there, I gave it a shot.

2. In thinking about how entrepreneurs create value in the world, it’s useful to think of value creation in one of two ways (there are, of course, more than two, so this is an oversimplification… but bear with me). You can change the world so that it is better, or you can change people’s perception so that they experience more value out of the world without you having to change the world. Which do magicians do? Is the latter mode mere trickery? For a fun analysis of this topic, check out a video segment from Rory Sutherland, vice Chairman of the advertising powerhouse Olgivy Group. This clip is from a talk he gave at TED, and is about four and a half minutes long. http://founders.mit.edu/files/rory.mov . I’ll be interested to hear your thoughts."