Entrepreneurship

Bio

Sherwin Greenblatt’s personal and professional life epitomizes some of MIT’s founding principles of learning, practicing and sharing. As Director of the MIT Venture Mentoring Service, Greenblatt focuses on bridging the gap between academia, learned principles and the business world, matching prospective entrepreneurs with volunteer mentors who can boost the probability of a start-up’s success. As Bose’s first employee and eventually its President, Greenblatt forged the way for the company to rise as a pioneer of innovation, shaping the company’s enduring principles: turning maverick ideas to technology, developing practical products, commercializing them and improving people’s lives.

Interview

Forum Link: Tell me about the MIT venture mentoring service. what is its role, the idea behind it?

Sherwin Greenblatt: Venture Mentoring service was founded to assist the members of the MIT community with commercialization of ideas. We provide mentoring and advising services to help them get their company started. The idea behind it is not to just focus on the venture, but to focus on building entrepreneurship and showing MITers how to interact with the business world and how to become entrepreneurs. The emphasis is more on the professional education of entrepreneurs.

Forum Link: Can you describe the process you follow?

Sherwin Greenblatt: When people come to us with a business idea, we first talk to them and determine how far along they are along in their thinking. We determine whether they have some formulas on paper or a product concept. Do they know where they are going to sell it. Do they have any idea about the economics. We also determine how far they are personally developed. How much do they know about business. Once we do an assessment, then we match them with mentors who have similar interests and experience. Our mentoring process is a consultative one. We start wherever the idea is and take it through conceptual thinking, product thinking, product planning, etc. Then, we might help with marketing and financing. The process lasts until the company is launched and executing the idea.

Forum Link: At Bose you witnessed a company going from a startup to a world-class brand with 10,000 employees. what are some of the key lessons that stand out in your mind from that experience?

Sherwin Greenblatt: It is hard to pick just a few key ideas, but one thing is the willingness to stick to it, no matter what. There are some pretty dark days. It is important to stay with it and believe that one will find solutions to insurmountable problems. The lesson is that the solutions are there, you just have to find them, no matter how difficult it may seem. I guess what I have learned is to weigh the needs of the present with what you have to do for the long term. Not just
working for your immediate problem, but also looking ahead.

Forum Link: You helped to start Bose with a clear mission. how important was it to
have that, and how did you decide on what was it that you wanted to
do?

Sherwin Greenblatt: Nothing is ever clear when you are in the trenches, but we always thought that it was very important to have a framework and a structure, that you could call a mission. Dr. Bose and I kept asking why have a company? What is it that we want? If it was about just taking the technology and making a product out of it, that certainly would not have been very appealing to me. The idea that there was something bigger here, that there was a process and that there was a mission to fulfill, that is what gave us the inspiration, that let us keep going and building. In that sense the idea of a mission is very important. And it’s got to be an overriding mission, not something that you can accomplish in two or three months.

Forum Link: That mission was to work with technology and innovation to make people’s lives better. it sounds almost idealistic, but you actually credit that for making the company successful.

Sherwin Greenblatt: Yes. While it might have been idealistic and ambitious, it was also very realistic. We were engineers working at the cutting edge of technology, but also sensitive to what could make people’s lives better. We could see how some technologies could be made into products that we ourselves would like to have. And part of the delight of having those products for ourselves was the delight of sharing them with others.

Forum Link: We hear a lot about the user centered design these days. is that what you were doing?

Sherwin Greenblatt: I like to think that the reason we were successful is because we operated at an intersection. One side of it was the user centred design, the other side was the technology push: the idea that there were technologies here that could do fantastic things. So what we would look for is not what people wanted, but what people would want if they only knew they could have it. We call this latent needs, as opposed to explicit needs. A lot of what I hear people talk about are explicit needs, and I believe that you are missing the whole dimension, if that is the only thing you focus on. There is an element of the dream involved in it. If you can dream of something, never mind whether it’s practical, you can make the technology make it happen. Then, you match that with how the user might want to use it and what the user considerations are. I think that’s where the really big successes of Bose have come from. When you do something like that you don’t just provide a better product, you create whole new product categories. That to me is an enormous opportunity.

Forum Link: At Bose, early on you pioneered the use of design as a strategic tool to differentiate your products. was this strategy deliberate?

Sherwin Greenblatt: That was a thought that Dr. Bose had in the late sixties and early seventies. What he used to say was that while we made products that sounded good, people first formed their opinions with their eyes and only secondly with their ears. So if the first opinion wasn’t good, you never got a chance at the second one. That was based on his observation of what people did in stores. The idea of using the visual cues, in terms of attracting people and also suggesting what the product did was important to our success.

“It is the challenge that matters and the success of it leads to the challenge the next time around.”

Forum Link: You called “not knowing much about business” “a phenomenal advan-tage” in starting Bose. is it because you had to approach every business problem as engineers?

Sherwin Greenblatt: We did not understand the conventional wisdom. There were two things. First of all we did not know what people thought could or couldn’t be done. So, we would do things that if we had known more about business we would have had to say were impossible. Second, not knowing how people solved these problems conventionally, we would come up with solutions that were different and some of them were very innovative and provided useful insights that the conventional solutions would not have done.

Forum Link: Not often does one hear someone extolling the virtues of having an engineering background as a credential for starting a business.

Sherwin Greenblatt: We have succeeded by operating at a point that is a little different from both where the engineers operate and where marketers operate. We think of ourselves as operating at the intersection between those two. And typically when disciplines intersect, that is where great things happen.

Forum Link: You once said that “in any company that develops in the technology field, there are points in development when you wonder whether there will be a tomorrow”. how do you prepare to deal with those moments?

Sherwin Greenblatt: I always talk about persistence, the need to set a goal and to stick to it. The advice I give to most engineers who want to start a company is that, even if you have a very good plan, in real life it will take twice as long to achieve and cost twice as much. If you cannot afford to stick with it that way, then perhaps you are not going to succeed. But if you know that, why don’t you just prepare for it.

Forum Link: What is your definition of entrepreneurship?

Sherwin Greenblatt: The essence of it is starting with nothing and creating something and sharing it with many people.

Forum Link: Would you add profitability to that?

Sherwin Greenblatt: Profitability might not be the right word, because profit by itself might not be the end goal. I think of success as achieving a goal you are shooting for. To me profit is not a goal of business. It is an intermediate marker. It is the bigger goals that you need to focus on and shoot for. At Bose we would take all of our profits and reinvest them in coming up with more innovations and products and growing our markets.

Forum Link: What was the business model at Bose then? Sherwin Greenblatt: What we asked our business units, when we were starting one, was to take an idea that we thought was worth investing in and develop the concept, the product and the market and to create a business that first stops drawing on the company, a business that can support itself and eventually give something back to the company, so others can go through the same process again. That is our cycle in business. With the contributions that each business unit makes, we can start other business units with other technologies.

Forum Link: Why does entrepreneurship matter?

Sherwin Greenblatt: To me it is the key to making people’s lives better. If something is going to be better, it has to be different. And if something is to be different, then something has to drive it. All of the things we enjoy today, that we didn’t have a hundred, even fifty years ago; they all came, because entrepreneurs made them come to be.

Forum Link: At MIT Enterprise Forum we talk about the entrepreneurial ecosystem. entrepreneurs, on the whole, are a very sharing group of people. why is that and why is it important?

Sherwin Greenblatt: Entrepreneurship is a passion. When you have a passion, you practice it as hard as you can and you want to share it with everyone else, so that they can practice it and enjoy it as well. It is absolutely a passion with many of our mentors. Sure they want to make their own lives better, so they practice entrepreneurship to build wealth, but there is more to it than that. It is the fun of doing it, the fun of putting things together that are complex operations and undertakings and then seeing other people enjoy them and have them be financially successful. It just gets in your blood.

Forum Link: So it is rising up to the challenge that makes it all worthwhile.

Sherwin Greenblatt: Yes. It is the challenge that matters and the success of it leads to the challenge the next time around.

Leave a Comment