Justin Jensen, MBA ’10

CineSkates on Kickstarter

I finished developing my new product, CineSkates Camera Sliders. I launched a project on Kickstarter to get things underway. Watch the video, become a backer, and spread the word!

CineSkates Camera Sliders on Kickstarter - Become a Backer!

Cinetics™ is launching a professional-grade yet lightweight camera slider, CineSkates™, which allows filmmakers to capture stable, high-resolution video footage without lugging heavy gear. CineSkates combines cutting-edge skateboard technology with the flexible GorillaPod Focus™ Tripod, allowing the amateur or seasoned filmmaker to achieve fluid camera movement in space-constrained environments where traditional camera sliders, dollies and cranes are too cumbersome.

Putting Ideas in Motion @ MIT Sloan

My MBA is coming to a close. Looking back through my Sloan blog posts; I reflected on the evolution of my MBA studies. I started focusing on vehicles and clean energy, and shifted to photography and film. All the while, I have taken advantage of the resources of MIT beyond the business school and remained focused on entrepreneurship. And in the end, I have reached my goal... I'm starting a company.

In my final semester, I aligned all of my efforts at starting a new venture. I registered for a course in the MediaLab called Imaging Ventures, which gave me the structure to develop a new product. The product that I worked on enables filmmakers to move a video camera with fluid rolling motion. I was able to have the product, dubbed CineSkates^TM, rapid prototyped in the MIT student machine shop, and it is exciting to see the fully functional prototype working better than any competing product. Oh yeah... it is now patent pending!

To verify the market demand for the product, I worked with a team of my classmates in my Pricing course to create a survey and analyze the results. We were able to clarify the pricing structure for the initial product line, and we quickly realized that the likelihood that we would be able to generate enough revenue to justify production was remarkably high. 

Sloan Prof. Pat Bentley was kind enough to work with me in an independent study to help me strategically think through the creation of the new business. She helped me craft the vision for a company, which is to develop camera gear that combines the power to captivate with the luxury of portability. Prof. Bentley’s feedback was also critical to help me make sure I have been focusing on the most important elements of launching a new business.

The last class on my final course list was Entrepreneurial Finance, and it enabled me to understand the valuation of young companies and the ideal financing mechanisms to help them succeed… information that will undoubtedly be beneficial in the near future.

Last week I pitched my new company for the first time to my colleagues at the MediaLab, and the reaction was overwhelmingly encouraging. Now, I’m moving forward to launch the company… Cinetics^TM!

The last thing I would like to share is our funny video that we created for the Sloan Follies show last week. We filmed it during our Global Entrepreneurship Lab course in Vietnam and Cambodia. Hope you enjoy it...

It has been amazing having access to the resources of MIT while starting Cinetics^TM, and even better to have the support of the community. Thanks for reading about my journey at MIT Sloan!

- Justin

Stats Hall of Fame Film

One of the best things about MIT Sloan is getting to work with a diversely talented group of people. I've been studying cinematography and film production, and the Sports Conference provided a great opportunity to create a short film. So, I reached out to my classmates and was met with enthusiasm and eagerness to help... two great qualities of the Sloan community.

First, I talked with Tyler Spalding, 2^nd year MBA, because I had seen some of the great videos that he had worked on (Values at Sloan). Tyler jumped on board and did an incredible job conducting the interviews and pulling great lines out of the elite people that we filmed. He also had some brilliant video editing ideas.

Next, I was connected to Matt Lieber, 1^st year MBA, because of his experience as a radio producer at NPR. Within a few seconds of talking with Matt, he had the awesome idea of the “Stats Hall of Fame”. During filming, Tyler and I were amazed at how easily Matt could coerce anyone to be in our film. Also, the audio in the film is all Matt… and it is awesome!

That was the team… an experienced short film maker, a senior radio producer, and a photographer turned cinematographer. I asked Matt and Tyler to write about the experience to share their perspectives…

Matt Lieber:

I did this project for two reasons: I wanted to learn something, and I wanted to make something. I was a radio producer before coming to Sloan (yeah, I know), and I miss telling stories. The Sports Analytics Conference allowed us to do that in a really fun setting. For instance, trying to convince Mark Cuban or Bill Simmons to stoop to the level of student produced web video was an amusing challenge. It wasn't the kind of experience I expected to have at business school, but Sloan sneaks up on you that way sometimes: one day you're studying managerial accounting, the next day you're ordering around an NBA owner. 

As for what I learned, I'd never really produced video before, so Justin taught me a lot. Somehow he's able to use a still camera to capture incredibly rich, cinematic footage. I think of him as an engineer who sidelines as Orson Welles. I've already applied some of what Justin taught me.  For instance, I started shooting footage of my 5 month old kid. He's generally easier to cajole than Mark Cuban, and more even tempered.  

Tyler Spalding:

I showed up to the Sports Conference with innocent plans of helping Justin and Matt film a promotional video. I have produced a variety of short, humorous, internet meme videos while at MIT Sloan, and I figured I would be helping with some creative picture and audio content. But, your Sloan classmates will often surprise you with their ingenuity, and I learned that Matt had already crafted the perfect “script” for the day – with me as a host sponsoring the fictitious Sports Statistics Hall of Fame. Realizing that this was indeed a perfect opportunity to create some buzz for the Conference in a unique and fun way, I was completely on board. We proceeded to interview many famous panelists and attendees, which was an absolute blast. I mean, who is going to pass up the chance to have a quick “back and forth” with ESPN’s Michael Wilbon?

So that's that. Another memorable experience at MIT Sloan. We hope you enjoyed our film. Let us know in the comments if you have any feedback.

@SloanSportsConf – Social Media & The Stats Hall of Fame

About this time last year, I wrote about my experience leading the social media efforts for the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. I took on a similar role plus some more for the 2011 conference, which took place last weekend. 

The conference kicked off with a Malcolm Gladwell moderated panel that discussed developing the modern athlete and began with research from Gladwell’s book Outliers on how it takes 10,000 hours of practice to reach world-class status in sports and other cognitively complex activities. The conference quickly began to spill groundbreaking research, including Tobias Moskowitz’s presentation that declared that home field advantage is a result of fan’s influence on referees. There was tons of information to be pushed out in real time, and social media was a great tool to do it.

2010 was our first organized effort at integrating social media into the conference. Thousands of people posted to our conference Twitter hashtag, #ssac, and thousands followed our Twitter and Facebook accounts.  One highlight was our hashtag becoming a “trending topic” in Boston. 

For 2011, first year MBAs Mike Shafrir and Mike Chen joined the social media team and we coordinated an even more thorough approach including visualizations and displays showing and encouraging Twitter activity. The result… a flood of activity during the conference. We were one of the Top 10 trending topics in the world… even ahead of Charlie Sheen and #winning! It was rewarding to see an article published by BostInnovation titled “Why MIT’s Dorkapalooza Was the #10 Trending Topic on Twitter”. I guess we’ve come to embrace the conference’s Dorkapalooza nickname :) It will be exciting to see how the 1^st years take the conference even further next year, especially with social media under Mike Shafrir’s direction.

In addition to Social Media, I also took on the role of directing photography and video efforts. I coordinated with our event photographer, with the ESPN film crews, and spent the majority of the time filming for a short video with a couple of other Sloan MBAs, Matt Lieber and Tyler Spaulding. Matt brought his NPR experience and did an amazing job directing people and Tyler did an awesome job interviewing the conference elite, including Mark Cuban (Owner, Dallas Mavericks), Michael Wilbon (ESPN Analyst), Apolo Ohno (Olympic Speed Skater), Dell Harris (Former NBA Head Coach), Mike Leach (Former Texas Tech Football Coach), and of course conference co-chairs Jessica Gelman (VP, New England Patriots) and Daryl Morey (GM, Houston Rockets). So stay tuned, and I’ll post our video on the Sports Stats Hall of Fame as soon as we finish editing!

Images of Global Entrepreneurship

The Patagonia Mountains, Atacama Desert, Sài Gòn, Cambodia, and the great state of Texas. That is what I’ve been up to over the last two months. After marrying my beautiful wife right after the finish of the fall semester, we set off to South America, and soon after we touched ground back in Texas, I was off to South East Asia with three of my classmates. And my camera was running full bore the whole time.

Click the photo to see South America album

Our trip to South East Asia was part of an MIT Sloan course called Global Entrepreneurship Lab (G-Lab), and I can not recommend it enough. It is easily my favorite and by far my most memorable MBA course. Student teams spend the fall semester working remotely with an international entrepreneur, then travel to work on site with them for the month of January. Key to our teams success was forming a team that we knew would work well together, and picking a company that we were all interested in. There are far more applicant companies than student teams, so students are able to choose carefully.

Our team was based out of Sài Gòn (Ho Chi Minh City), Vietnam, and we worked with a wood blind manufacturer, Vinawood. We were tasked with finding a lucrative way for the company to utilize its substantial wood waste. After performing financial and feasibility analysis we narrowed the solution to a biomass fueled power and steam co-generation plant. We analyzed case studies of similar operations and spoke to experts, which enabled us to recommend ideal technologies and connect the company with potential suppliers, contractors, and full service energy companies.

Click image to see poster presented to MIT community

Of course we made every effort to see as much of Sài Gòn as possible, and to travel on the weekends. (We didn’t sleep much.) And my teammates were encouraging of my non-stop filming. I took a huge amount of photos and even more video. I’ve sorted through all the photos, and I'm about to undertake the video editing process. So this semester, in addition to a full course load (including an Imaging Ventures class that I am very excited about), I will be hard at work learning film production. Hopefully I’ll have something worth sharing soon.

Click the photo to see South East Asia album

 

Moving Along

As I wrote about in my last entry, I made a pretty dramatic swing from clean energy start-ups to digital photography over the summer. A big thanks to all my classmates for all the encouragement. Ya’ll are awesome. I’ve been at the grindstone figuring out what to do with my interests, and I’m just going to continue letting things fall into place. 

Flickr has been a huge inspiration as well. The feedback I receive from the Flickr community on my photos has enabled me to be much more critical of my work and to appreciate quality images. Also, I think that Flickr’s ability to measure “interestingness” adds to that feedback. I decided to study interestingness and talk with some experts, which resulted in this article for MIT Entrepreneurship Review…

In other efforts, I’ve been taking in the great ideas of my classmates and Professor Ramesh Raskar in my Computational Camera course. They are working on some incredible stuff that is going to add more dimensions to images and enable smarter, smaller cameras. I’m excited to see their work in tomorrow’s cameras. 

At this point, I have a good grip on still photography, and I’m ready to push my Canon 5D Mark II’s video limits… which are not small. I’m in the process of building a video rig, and I’m hoping to get some good footage in the coming months.

Soon enough I’ll be blazing through Chile and Argentina with my new wife followed by Vietnam with my G-Lab team. Hopefully, my next post can share the film that ensues.

Finding Focus

A successful entrepreneur offered me the advice to focus on whatever is the most interesting to me. She explained how there are few people that are good in all disciplines and many that are outstanding in their specific area. It made perfect sense, and it was exactly what I needed to hear. An MBA is an extremely general degree and it is hard to make yourself focus, especially at MIT. 

There is vast choice in the Sloan curriculum. Sloan allows you to take 80% electives and to choose them from an enormous set. On top of the Course 15 (MIT lingo for “Management”) courses, Sloan students can take classes across MIT and other Boston area universities. And that’s just the half of it. The rest of our time is split between clubs, conferences, recruiting, etc.

In my first year, I over-committed. I worked for clean tech companies, organized the sports conference, competed in business plan competitions… the list goes on. My advice for future MBAs; try not to do a hundred things a little bit, do a few things the best you can. Do what you need to do to refine your skills and interests, but leave time to reflect and choose your path going forward. 

Photo: Introduction to book by late MIT Prof. Harold Edgerton

I have been quite unfocused, but I recently made the realization that my only consistent and growing passion over the last several years has been in photography. So, I shifted my focus to photography. ;) A photographer isn’t exactly the classic entrepreneur that we learn about at MIT, but it isn’t all that different. I’ve been learning the business of images, interviewing photographers, and studying next generation camera technologies. And while I’ve shifted toward an uncertain and risky direction, I’m thrilled to see where it takes me. And, I've come to terms with risk by understanding that people are most likely to be the “most best” at what they do if they are doing what you love. On a related note, my friend and Sloanie-on-hiatus, Nabil Laudji, is working to uncover interesting stories of risk and planning to create a film, which will be outstanding. Check out his blog at mbastoryteller.com.

To give a more direct look into what it is like studying here, below is a breakdown of what I have narrowed my work to this semester.

Courses:

Computational Photography at MIT MediaLab taught by Ramesh Raskar
Learning new camera technologies. For example: a camera that enables a photo’s focus point to be adjusted after you take the picture.

Linked Data Ventures at MIT Course 6 (Computer Science) taught by Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the World Wide Web)

Global Entrepreneurship Lab (G-Lab) at MIT Sloan
A perennial Sloan favorite. In January, I’ll travel to Vietnam with my team to work on a project to reduce waste for a wood product manufacturer.

System Dynamics at MIT Sloan taught by Nelson Repenning and John Sterman (leader in the field)
This class teaches methodical ways to evaluate business and other complex systems and evaluate how they behave over time.

Activities:

MIT Entrepreneurship Review - Continuing to write for MITER and integrating some photographic work
MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference - Heading up social media again for the conference
U4 Basketball Tournament - Organizing the Sloan team for Georgetown’s annual MBA tournament

Finally, thanks for tolerating my blog posts. I appreciate the emails and your patience in waiting for my responses. If you have questions or suggestions for things for me to write about, drop me a note at jj1 <at> mit <dot> edu. Also, please do me a favor and throw in some feedback on my blog if you write. Best of luck in your endeavors and applications, and just say you read my blog if you want a little boost to your admission chances. Just kidding… that will more likely hurt. :)

Summer at the Clean Energy Incubator

My summer was a little different than that of my classmates. My goal was to set up shop in Austin and network around the entrepreneurial community, and that I did.

I was lucky to get an internship at the Austin Technology Incubator working in their Clean Energy Incubator (CEI), which was great. Mitch Jacobson, the CEI Co-Director, lined me up with some great projects and introduced me to some helpful people. Also, Randall Crowder, the Director of the Central Texas Angel Network (CTAN), was amazingly helpful at connecting me within the community. And, I was able to set aside some time to explore start-up ideas and other personal interests.

I spent some time working for a promising lithium-ion battery start-up called ActaCell that was brewed from the research of UT Austin’s accomplished Arumugam Manthiram, Ph.D. My work at ActaCell involved analyzing the cathode and anode chemistries that currently exist or are being developed across the li-ion industry. There are tons of players vying for that optimal balance of high power and energy with low volume and mass, and it was interesting to see which chemistries were leading the charge! ;)

Another project that I worked on was based at another Austin incubator, Tech Ranch Austin. I developed an outline for a web-based contest, called the Pecan Commons, that will bring together homeowners and clean energy entrepreneurs to provide a community for sharing solutions and allow each group to benefit from the other. Now they are moving forward to build the website and get the contest rolling. 

Beyond those projects and working with prospective companies for the incubator, I was able to meet with several knowledgeable entrepreneurs and investors. One meeting even ended with a joyride in a Tesla Roadster! It was especially great to meet some members of the MIT community in Austin, and even better to see the continued willingness to advise and connect with a current student.

As for the time exploring my own interests, that has been incredible. I’ve explored start-up ideas across the spectrum, and spent a lot of time working on photography and researching online photo sharing. I even registered for a fall course called Computational Photography at the MIT MediaLab. Here are a few of my images that are rated highly by Flickr’s mysterious “interestingness” algorithm:

All in all, it has been an outstanding summer. I accomplished what I set out to do, and I’m excited to get back to learning and exploring new ventures at MIT!

Summer of Start-up

This weekend the Sloan class of 2010 graduates. And, the class of 2011 has dispersed across the globe for the summer. The MBA job outlook seems to be improved from years past, as I have yet to talk to a single ’11 that doesn’t have a summer internship. Most interns are in Boston, NYC, or the SF bay area and their roles cover the spectrum. McKinsey is the leading employer, with many other consulting, banking and tech companies hiring Sloan interns. Then there is the entrepreneurial crew. There are several ‘11s that are starting companies, and about 10% of graduates are starting-up! As for myself, I wasn’t quite ready to dive into starting a company, but I knew that I wanted to start-up in Austin, TX when the time is right. So I decided the best way was to get on the ground in the Austin entrepreneurial scene.

4th of July in Austin - Photo ©Trey Ratcliff 

Why Austin?  Well besides Austin being Kiplinger’s Best City for the Next Decade, being one of Fast Company’s Fast Cities for 2010, challenging Silicon Valley for Forbes’ Most Innovative City in America, being the Music Capital of the World, and being the future host of the Formula One US Grand Prix, it's a great place to start a company. A forward thinking population, a strong economy, and favorable tax laws make Austin a hidden entrepreneurial hotbed. But, diving into the Austin start-up scene can be a bit overwhelming: map of Austin entrepreneurship scene. So, where to begin?

Initially, I wanted to team up with a start-up and work with them for my b-school summer, but I’m fairly particular about what company I want to work for. Given my narrow focus, I wasn’t able to find a start-up that was a perfect fit. Next I considered working for a VC, so that I could benefit from the large volume of deal flow and see many start-up business plans. From my perspective, this wasn’t going to be hands on enough with the entrepreneurs. Given that I wanted to see a variety of companies and to have the opportunity to work directly with the entrepreneurs, the natural fit was with a start-up incubator. Incubators, or accelerators, host a select group of start-ups and provide office space, services, and mentoring to the companies. The start-ups also benefit by collaborating with each other and the increased access to funding that most incubators provide. A recent Wall Street Journal article explains the expansion of business incubator programs. Also, Inc Magazine published a cool infographic on incubators around the US.

Tomorrow, I will start my first day at the Austin Technology Incubator. I arranged a flexible schedule so that I can explore other opportunities in the Austin start-up scene, and, hopefully, get started on my own start-up. I’m excited to get started. Have a great summer!

Lucky Learning

At Sloan, I have focused on an entrepreneurial education. I’ve been able to work with start-ups, build business plans, and help organize a business plan contest. Simultaneously, I’ve been able to study interesting business ideas. Having freedom to explore different areas and access to the resources to truly understand them has been incredible. 

Most recently, I was talking to a friend about vehicle start-up ideas and was reminded of the work going on at the MIT MediaLab’s Smart Cities Group. I started looking into their work a bit more and was intrigued by the Mobility-on-Demand (MoD) concept that they were working on. MoD is essentially a fleet of vehicles dispersed throughout a city that users can rent for one-way trips. Short-term car rental has been successfully commercialized by Zipcar, but only for round-trip rentals. So I set up a meeting to discuss the concept of balancing one-way vehicle fleets with Dimitris Papanikolaou at the MediaLab. A few days after throwing the idea around, I was sitting down with the expert on the subject. Cool :)

Next, I had an assignment for a course called New Enterprises that required me to take an entrepreneur to dinner. Who did I invite? Zipcar founder and Sloan alum Robin Chase, obviously. Robin and I talked about her past and present ventures and current opportunities in transportation innovation. The next week, Ford Chairman and Sloan alum Bill Ford was walking the halls of Sloan. So... I had to ask him about opportunities that are opening as a result of wireless integration into vehicles.

It was great to be able to pick the brains of all of these experts, and I wanted to do something with what I had learned. Fortunately, some of my classmates had recently started the MIT Entrepreneurship Review (MITER). MITER is a perfect example of the initiative that Sloan students take to make their vision happen. One of MITER's co-founders, Rob Lemos, asked me to submit a piece to MITER, and it sounded like a perfect idea. It was great working with the MITER team to get the article on-line. So check it out! :) Robin told me that luck is when preparation meets opportunity. MIT is a lucky place.