Justin Jensen, MBA ’10

@SloanSportsConf – Behind the Scenes at #SSAC

The 4^th Annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference was wicked awesome! ;) The student-organized, perennially sold-out, non-profit conference showed up in 2010 with a new presenting sponsor, ESPN, and a group of speakers that resembled the united nations of sports business. The attendees, sponsors, and panelists deserve all the credit for the success.

Front page of ESPN NBA – Picture from ESPN.COM

Serving on the organizing team as the lead for the International Expansion panel and running the social media show for the conference were unforgettable. Especially introducing the panel in front of the 1000 person room! At least, as MIT Sloan Dean Schmittlein put it, “Next time you speak in front of 500 people, it will be no big deal!” The International Expansion panel focused on globalization challenges in sports. My favorite line was when Sunil Gulati, President USSF, half-seriously joked about NFL games airing at 2AM U.S. time to air live in India after Mark Waller, CMO NFL, commented on the coming shift of sports to BRIC economies. Social media coverage included a LinkedIn group, a Facebook page, and a Twitter following that was overwhelming, to say the least!

We started our Twitter stream slow, sporadically posting key conference details. In the weeks preceding the conference, the Twitter hashtag #ssac sprouted organically from an attendee.

@basketballgeek: In other pressing news, what shall our @SloanSportsConf hashtag be? How about #ssac ?

Utilizing a hashtag enables all of the conversation around a certain topic to be aggregated. You can use the Twitter search feature or the automatic filtering capability in applications like TweetDeck to watch the live stream of conversation that is tagged with the hashtag. Shortly after the hashtag emerged, we posted from @SloanSportsConf that #ssac was the official hashtag, and the conversation exploded.

Attendees tweeted about the conference and appended the #ssac hashtag, and the online sports world absorbed and compounded the information distribution by re-tweeting interesting information to their own followers. The onslaught of activity pushed #ssac to Twitter’s #1 trending topic in Boston. We may not have been able to accommodate the 400+ person waiting list for conference tickets, but the attendees certainly kept the world up to date via Twitter. 

Over 2400 Twitter mentions of the conference from over 630 unique users 

Gerry Hough, Sloan MBA ’11, organized the Social Media Marketing panel, which discussed how sports organizations utilize new media and the opportunities in the space. Before the panel, Doug Hwang, Sloan MBA ’11, and I projected a live twitter cloud of the conference hashtag, and the crowd reaction was great. The panelists and attendees loved it. One guy even tracked me down several hours later to find out the name of the tool, Visible Tweets. Thanks to @jarrodphipps and the MIT100K for sharing the site. It was a great start to the panel, which just touched on the possibilities for innovation in the space. I’m already excited for next year’s version of this panel. One of the best moments of this panel was summed up well by Jonah Keri:

@jonahkeri: Social media panel discusses @OGOchoCinco - Tweeted by attendee - then RT'd by @OGOchoCinco - #ssac is the most Meta conference ever

We are also collecting some valuable feedback from the #ssac stream and @SloanSportsConf will continue to be a useful communication tool for next year’s conference and beyond. One clear point from this conference was that the organizations in attendance are looking to utilize the data that social media is creating and are in need of innovative thinking in social media and data mining.

And it wasn’t all work; we also played the annual conference organizer basketball game. Jessica Gelman (overly) kindly compared me to Daryl Morey's famed Rockets aquisition, Shane Battier, before Morey refined the comparison to Teyshaun Prince, who is equally lanky :) And we were rewarded with a box at the Garden on Sunday, where the Celtics pulled off a come from behind win. Ironically they were in the same end of game situation that Avery Johnshon polled the SSAC crowd on. When up by 3 with 5 seconds left, would you foul? Every hand in the room went up. The Celtics? Not on Sunday night!

Organizer Basketball – Picture from @douglashwang 

SSAC Organizing Team – Picture from @jwmarcus

Thanks everyone for a great conference! 
@JustinMJensen

2010 #mitsloan Entrepreneurship & Innovation Silicon Valley Trek in Tweets

I recently joined my Entrepreneurship and Innovation classmates on a study trip to Silicon Valley. The trip exceeded all of our expectations, and I certainly recommend it (and the Sloan E&I Track) to any aspiring entrepreneur. I tweeted about my experience on the trek, so please read (from the bottom up) if you are interested in how things went!

JustinMJensen ...and that was the E&I trek in tweets :) link Also heard from SalesForce.com, Marianne Wu @ MDV, Mark Gorenberg @ HW & #mitsloan Dean Schmittlein, Aileen Lee @ KPCB, & Josh Stein of DFJ link Neil Renninger talks about Amyris (received Gates Foundation Funding and is making malaria medication and bio fuel from sugar cane) link @saarsaar quote collection – “in a tornado, even turkeys can fly” in reference to bad companies in a good economy link @saarsaar quote collection – “continuous effort – not strength or intelligence – is the key to unlocking our potential” – Winston Churchill link @saarsaar quote collection – “we should all try to grow in the exercise of good judgment” link @saarsaar quote collection – “eagles don’t flock” link @saarsaar quote collection – “a ship in the harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are made for” link @saarsaar quote collection – “a good choice comes from good alternatives” link @saarsaar @ Charles River Ventures is into “super early investing” – I like it :) link Better Place looking to load balance the smart grid with EV batteries link Amit Nisenbaum says EVs are the future. It is only a matter of “when” link Got to visit Better Place! I read about MIT Sloan students visiting BP as a prospective student. Now we’re being interviewed :) link Planet Metrics doing cool work in life cycle analysis (energy/carbon required to deliver a product/service) link Of Course the MIT Alumni reception is at the Computer Science Museum :) link Tom Kelley at IDEO introduces us to the digital yurt – an experiment between privacy and openness link Blank says grades are inversely proportional to successful entrepreneurs – I need to tell my Mom ;) link Prof. Steve Blank talks about “4 Steps to the Epiphany” link Silver Spring is going to be huge. Interesting bundled approach to the smart grid link Dresselhuys says smart grid requires highly reliable, low latency, broad networks link Dresselhuys says there are opportunities in deregulated power markets (Texas!) link Dresselhuys says there will be 800k EVs in Cali by ’15 and PG&E can only handle 25k now link Dresselhuys says there is no silver bullet to energy problems. There is only silver buckshot! link Dresselhuys says the most cost effective power plant is the one you never build link Dresselhuys calls energy efficiency the “5th fuel” link Eric Dresselhuys @ Silver Spring Networks says the global smart grid market will be $100B in 2015 link Kinnier believes MIT is the center of the world for energy - I may have some friends in Houston that disagree ;) link Alex Kinnier speaks about Calera who extracts harmful emissions from coal stacks and uses them in cement link Alex Kinnier of Khosla Ventures is looking to capitalize on the fluctuating price on carbon link Heard from great speakers every day and split into groups of ~10 to visit 56 companies! Student organized logistics were incredibly smoooth! link Why is Gokul of Google AdSense fame an entrepreneur? Big companies (generally) suck :) link Klopp registered North Face logo and drove everything through it. Competitors produced products, while North Face created a brand link Klopp says 80% results come from 20% of actions, 80% of people don’t care about your problem 20% are glad you have them link Hap Klopp, founder of North Face, worked with Buckminster Fuller to revolutionize the tent market by introducing the geodesic tent link Gathered at Thomas Fogarty winery to hear Gokul Rajaram, @rich_wong, @fkerrest, Geoffrey & Erikka Arone, & Hap Klopp link Got to know nearly all of ~90 person class over the E&I trek link E&I Paintball rocked. Infinite “respawns” is the game to play! @lukebehnke and I killed/were killed infinitely link Tesla’s final assembly facility was next to our hotel… had to check it out first thing! link Impressions from 2010 #mitsloan Entrepreneurship & Innovation Silicon Valley Trek in Tweets... link

That was quick!

Tech Entrepreneurship, Data Models & Decisions, Finance, Communications, Accounting, Economics, Organizational Processes: done^7! The core is no more! It flew by, it was a lot of work, it was awesome, yada yada yada.

First off, I didn’t spend a million hours per week on class work. I had an awesome core team that did a great job of distributing group work, and I was able to spend plenty of time on things outside of my core classes. I made sure to have a solid grasp of all of the material, but I didn’t spend much time cramming for exams or lose any sleep over getting a perfect score on an assignment. This was quite a change from undergrad. That said, several activities kept me beyond busy. Let me get to some of the unique things that I did this semester.

I joined the organizing team of the MIT Clean Energy Prize (CEP). The CEP runs in parallel to the MIT 100K Business Plan Competition, but, you guessed it, it is focused on clean energy. The CEP will give away $500,000 to winning teams this year! As the co-lead of the transportation category, I have been working with the rest of the CEP organizing team to gather sponsors and student teams to participate.

Also, I joined the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference organizing team. We have been working to put together an incredible group of panelists. It has been great getting this conference organized with some fun people from the Sloan Entertainment, Media, and Sports Club. I’ve also enjoyed assembling my panel, ‘International Trade’, with the conference co-chairs, Jessica Gelberg and Daryl Morey (How cool that I get to work with the GM of my hometown Houston Rockets!). Also with the EMS Club, I attended the New York Sports Trek. This was an awesome opportunity to see some of the premier US sports league’s corporate operations. We visited the NBA, NFL, NHL, and Nascar, and each gave us great perspectives on careers in the sports industry.

Sloan EMS Club members at the NFL League Office

At the beginning of the semester I heard that one of my classmates was assembling a team to work on a marketing project for the Chevy Volt, so I had to jump on that as well! We worked with GM’s Director of Marketing for the Chevy Volt, Director of Global Marketing, and others to develop an integrated marketing campaign that included recommendations for promotional ideas for the Volt. Unfortunately, I am not able to go into more detail, but we did deliver a successful presentation to Gm executives to conclude a great project. Also, a member of GM’s Corporate Strategy group took us to the Boston Auto Show and let us get a sneak peak of the new cars before the public!

Sounds like a lot of work looking back, but I had time to relax. I was able to explore Boston when family and friends came in town, and I could regularly be found playing basketball at the athletic center. I also made sure to watch my Texas Longhorns play football every Saturday, and win every time! 13-0! I’ll be pulling for them hard in the National Championship!

So what’s next? We have no classes for the month of January. This is what MIT calls Independent Activities Period. I will be heading to Silicon Valley at the beginning of January with the rest of my Entrepreneurship & Innovation peers, then heading back to Boston for an externship with an early-stage, automotive energy storage company, FastCAP Systems.

Oh yeah, what better way to end the core than to help shave my classmate’s head! Dave auctioned off his beard (and hair and eyebrows!) during our charity auction to benefit the Polaris Project.

Technology on the Trash Can

I’m sitting on a park bench in the middle of campus eating a burrito with a few classmates when a guy next to us starts spinning around frantically with a mysterious device in his hand. I roll my eyes and quip, “Only at MIT.” We eat our lunch, and as I toss my garbage into a trash can that is doubling as a table for the fascinating gizmo. My curiosity prevails, “What is that??”

Photo courtesy of Nadeem Mazen

They explain that the device is a stationary wind energy generator, an alternative to a wind turbine. It extracts energy from a tensioned belt that is oscillated by the wind. This small-scale version lights an array of LEDs as wind air passes through it. One gentleman comments how revolutionary the device is despite the fact that it doesn’t revolve. Who says engineers aren’t funny? :) I’m amazed at how cool it is, and how friendly the engineers by the trash can have been. Then Amy, who is affiliated with the MIT D-Lab, comments that we should make a regular event to share technologies with the MIT community and call it “Technology on the Trash Can”. Funny stuff :) Amy and her colleagues go on to tell us that the technology is being commercialized by Humdinger and that the young man with them is William Kamkwamba, who I was already planning to hear speak that evening. Now I get why there are photographers and videographers surrounding us!

Photo courtesy of Nadeem Mazen

Faced with famine in Malawi, William taught himself physics and built a windmill from junkyard parts. He was then able to provide power and irrigation to the town, and provided essential nourishment to his family and neighbors. Since building the windmill, William published a book titled “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind”, was invited to speak at TED, and was recently interviewed on the Daily Show by John Stewart:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
William Kamkwamba
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

William and co-author Bryan Mealer presented that evening to an overcrowded classroom of MIT students eager to hear William’s story. William shared his experience and his future goals and inspired the room. During Q&A, I asked William what he thought about the new wind technology that had been introduced to him earlier in the day. His initial reply filled the room with laughter, “It was COOL!” Next, Amy stepped in and used the opportunity to present William with a gift from the MIT D-Lab. She gave him the Windbelt device!

It turns out that Amy is Amy Smith, the incredibly accomplished inventor and MIT lecturer. Amy is the recipient of several prestigious awards, is also a TED speaker, and is the founder of D-Lab (Design for Developing Countries). Getting to meet William and Amy was amazing. Only at MIT!

Life@MIT

The MIT Sloan MBA class of ’11 is halfway through the first semester, the core. After getting through the first pair of midterms last week, I made a quick weekend trip to Dallas, TX to catch the annual Red River Rivalry football game between my alma mater, UT, and OU (Oklahoma). Texas won; hook ‘em! Next up, we have a week to prepare for the second wave of exams and attend a set of seminars. These seminars are part of SIP (Sloan Innovation Period), and they give students the opportunity to escape their semester course load and learn about innovative research from faculty across the school. My flight back to Boston provides an opportunity to share a bit of my experience to date.

As an applicant, I remember questioning what made MIT different. Why did I want to come here so badly? I may not be the norm, but I knew I wanted to come hear long before I new much about the place. I’m an engineer and an entrepreneur, so the fit was natural, but I still wanted to get some more perspective on the program. That’s when I started reaching out to Sloan students and graduates. I was immediately impressed by their responsiveness, and it is what encouraged me to write this blog. So here is a little bit of insight that I can share about applying to and being a student at MIT and the Sloan School of Management.

As you likely know, applying to business school is an arduous process. However, understanding the programs you are applying to is unquestionably beneficial to your application and in choosing the best school to match your goals. My advice here is to reach out to people and ask questions; ask anything. Ask things that you wouldn’t ask admissions. Students and alumni are eager to talk to you, and I doubt this is unique to MIT. Also, use your application to tell admissions what you learned from your conversations.

Here are a few of my observations. MIT is unique. Helpful, eh? ;) The culture here is obviously collaborative and innovative; the examples there are endless. Here’s one: I recommend that you check out OpenCourseWare, where you can find openly available materials for all of MIT’s courses. Less known may be the functional, flexible, and even comical aspects of MIT.

Several of the buildings across campus are renowned architectural marvels. There are several parts of campus that are so untraditional that tourists stop me to ask where MIT is. “Um, which part? This is MIT.” There are several parts of campus that are characteristic of a university as well. For example, the iconic MIT Dome with “MASSACHVSETTS INSTITVTE OF TECHNOLOGY” declared across the front. But even the traditional buildings have an MIT touch. They are connected by a series of underground tunnels, and a single “infinite” corridor unifies the main buildings at surface level. You won’t find a neat series of traditional red brick buildings around here. Furthermore, each MIT building is numbered. Building 3 is home to mechanical engineering and E62 is the new Sloan building that we will occupy beginning next fall. And the schools (“courses”) that occupy these numbered buildings are numbered themselves. Sloan is efficiently referred to as Course 15, or 15. And the individual courses are themselves… you guessed it… numbered. This might seem normal, but here people refer to courses by their number. Maybe you’ll take 15.360 in E62.

Another interesting aspect of the MIT culture is the infamous tradition of “hacks”. Students routinely organize elaborate schemes that often result in awe. These stunts are pranks that generally break some rules to pull off an impressive feat of creative fun. Just imagine walking to class and seeing a fire truck on top of the Dome on the anniversary of 9/11!

Image Courtesy of http://hacks.mit.edu/

The Institute generally turns a blind eye to the carefully conducted productions. Another laughable tradition is hidden in the class rings, the Brass Rat and the Grad Rat. The class ring is redesigned each year, but several features remain annually. One example is the acronym IHTFP, which is included in each design. IHTFP is defined differently depending on the audience, but I’ll give it to you straight: “I Hate This F’ing Place!” Jokes aside, I haven’t found one person that doesn’t love what they are doing here.

There were a couple of more specific areas that really drew me to MIT. I’m interested in clean energy, and I want to pursue an entrepreneurial career path. Lucky for me MIT happens to be no slouch in either of those areas, and I continue to find new resources in each. I am helping to organize the Clean Energy Prize, I’m getting involved in the Electric Vehicle Team, I’m working on a project with GM on marketing the launch of the Volt, and the Sloan entrepreneurial curriculum is overwhelming.

Finally, a few words on the curriculum at Sloan. Our first semester includes every mandatory class that we need to graduate with an MBA degree. Then we are free to choose the rest of our courses from the sea of available electives. My understanding is that the number of elective opportunities at Sloan is higher than any other leading business school. There is even an option to register for MIT courses outside of Sloan or to cross-register with one of the countless other Boston-area universities. For example, next semester I could take courses at Sloan, a mechanical engineering course at MIT, and a business law course at Harvard Law School. Also, once you are enrolled at Sloan the doors open. There is no application process for the Entrepreneurship & Innovation track or the Finance track. You simply need to declare your intention to pursue the track. As a Sloan MBA student, you are eligible to enroll in any MIT course that you have met the prerequisites for.

So far, it has been great. You can make your schedule as busy as you want, but everyone ends up far busier than they intended. There is just too much opportunity to leave anything on the table. We’re only here for two years, and we want to make them count.

If you have any specific questions for me, you can find my contact info here: http://justinjensen.net/

A Day in the Life of MIT

Yesterday, I participated in A Day in the Life, a campus wide photography project.

"On September 24, 2009, hundreds of people from the MIT community documented a single day in photographs. ADITL.mit.edu is a collective photo blog of sorts, and is the repository for these photographs."

You can browse my photos from A Day in the Life here or by clicking the photo above.

Entrepreneurship@MIT

The entrepreneurial opportunity played an important role in my decision to attend MIT Sloan, so I thought I would share my experiences thus far. The entrepreneurial wisdom and aspiration of MIT are off the charts.

The experienced visiting entrepreneurs and faculty are eager to share their observations, and the MIT and MIT Sloan students are excited to take on new endeavors. Those of us who opted to enroll in the Entrepreneurship & Innovation (E&I) track are taking a class on technological entrepreneurship. This course is designed to provide a 360° view of the MIT entrepreneurial ecosystem, which it does in part by bringing in successful entrepreneurs and VCs to give weekly seminars.

Through E&I and other club events, I have been able to hear some amazing speakers, including Aaron Patzer (founder of Mint.com, which was acquired last week by Inuit), Carl Stjernfeldt (General Partner at Castile Ventures), and Desh Deshpande. Desh is an immensely successful serial entrepreneur. He is the founder of Cascade Communications (acquired in 1997 for $3.7B), and he is the Chairman of A123Systems, the leading lithium ion battery company (who’s IPO is Thursday). Desh was incredibly humble and called his own career a series of accidents. Sure, Desh. Horrible, horrible accidents!

Desh shared some insightful observations, many of which were shared with other speakers. He said that, in entrepreneurship, everything boils down to knowing what is possible. What is possible? It starts with an innovative, scalable idea. Interestingly, he said that innovation is often a result of naivety. Regardless of the idea, entrepreneurship is about making things happen, and having the gut feeling to jump without knowing. Once you jump, the best way to succeed is to work with good people, and it is critical to be able to find and recognize people with potential. Startups often get stuck because the entrepreneur is passionate about one area; this limitation can be avoided by building a well-balanced team. Finally, he advised that success is less about making good decisions than about admitting bad ones and cutting losses quickly.

Some (including Ed Roberts – Founder of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center) say to get experience in an early-stage, high-growth company before undertaking your own venture, and some (including Hagos Mehreteab - Sloan MBA ’06 and founder of yOOnew.com) say to just go for it now. Really, you know when the time is right. If you have the idea, the team, and you are ready to go all out; then the time is now. On the VC side, Stjernfeldt and others said that, while VC is excellent experience, joining a VC firm after business school is not generally a good path to a partner position. Odds are much better for successful entrepreneurs that join the firm later on.

MIT is an exciting place to gain some perspective on entrepreneurship and a likely place to catch the entrepreneurial virus.

Getting Situated

I’ve been in Cambridge for three weeks now, but, while the Sloan MBA experience is in full swing, classes still haven’t begun!

It began with a rafting trip to Maine. ~80 members of the class of ’11 set off on a weekend trip. The trip was a blast, and it provided a great opportunity to get to know some of our new classmates.

Then we began an optional ‘pre-term’ week the next morning after returning. People benefited different amounts from the material depending on their past experience, but, again, we were able to continue meeting our classmates. And, without fail, students and significant others gather each night at various bars and restaurants. We even find time for some athletics. The Sloan basketball group is looking pretty good :)

Orientation took place this week and provided the first congregation of our class in its entirety. Our orientation began at the Marriott ballroom, where several members of the MIT community, including Susan Hockfield, MIT President, and David Schmittlein, MIT Sloan Dean, welcomed us. We then learned our (much anticipated) ~60 person cohorts (oceans in Sloan speak) and 6-7 person core teams. Our first semester “core” courses are set. We share the same schedule with our entire ocean, and will undertake each group project with our core team. I happened to draw the perfect combination of the Pacific Ocean and the Pelican Team! ;)

The rest of orientation week included some great interactive discussions with various members of Sloan. One of my favorites was with Sloan Professor Simon Johnson, former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund and co-founder of http://baselinescenario.com. We also spent a day off campus to undertake some team building activities with our newly formed core teams. It was a great time and began to prove my initial inclination of the Pacific Pelicans’ excellence!

 

Image courtesy of Flickr user John's Images

The real work begins next week with the onset of classes, but I look forward to getting started with courses and all of the other activities that will coincide. “Drinking from the firehose of MIT” has already begun, but its about to come at full force.