Ted Chan, MBA '09

An E&I check-in, six months after graduation

A sign that my classmates are creating value...I'm buying their products!

In the past 2 months, I've bought photo albums from Pixable, hired Boston Finex Group to do our accounting and bought my nephews-in-law some great blocks from Tegu. These are all startups run by friends of mine from my MIT Sloan E&I class.

On our front, some exciting things have been happening.  Upward Mobility has had a great couple months.  We now have 33 iPhone apps and 15 Android apps on the market.  We just submitted our first Palm one the other day and we hope that will turn into a good platform (I'm higher on Palm that a lot of other people - I think their product is great, and they may soon be acquired by a big player who can get them the distribution they deserve).  We brought on a great senior editor/product manager to help us get to the next level.

It's certainly a different approach than my classmates, like Freddy Kerrest over at SaaSure, which I believe can be a billion dollar company, or the companies I mentioned above.  My co-founder and I gave away no equity (which we are very happy about) to build Upward Mobility and have now serviced all our outside debt.  I admire those guys for swinging for the fences and hope one day to join them. 

MIT #1 in Clean Energy Entrepreneurship

Stopped over at the E-Center for a Young Entrepreneurs Breakfast Club.  Bill Aulet was there raving about the E&I Trek this year (90 students, that's more than 1/4 of the MBA class!).

He also pointed out that MIT was rated as the top school for Clean Energy Entrepreneurship.